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Agent Skill

Agents Best Practices skill

agents-best-practicesDenisSergeevitch/agents-best-practicesSKILL.md

Use this skill when designing, generating an MVP blueprint for, auditing, troubleshooting, refactoring, or explaining an agentic harness for any domain. Covers provider-neutral agent architecture for OpenAI, Anthropic, and OpenAI-compatible APIs: agent loops, tool design, record provenance, interactive presentation, user-memory lifecycles, environment-adaptive tools, speculative tool execution, late-bound capabilities, permissions, system prompts, planning, goals, always-on agents and durable runtime, adaptive agent teams, context compaction, memory, skills, MCP/external connectors, public-board communications, realtime voice agents, hardware agents and board deployment, self-refining recursive harnesses, programmable context, continual refinement, observability, evals, prompt caching, agent-legible environments, feedback loops, and safety.

2.4kMIT

always on

164 tokname + description

once used

6,119 tokSKILL.md body

bundled files

27697 KB

repo stars

2.4kGitHub

Install the Agents Best Practices skill

Skills CLI (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and others)

npx skills add https://github.com/DenisSergeevitch/agents-best-practices --skill agents-best-practices

Claude Code, by hand (all projects)

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/DenisSergeevitch/agents-best-practices.git /tmp/agents-best-practices
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -R /tmp/agents-best-practices ~/.claude/skills/agents-best-practices

For one project only, copy the folder into .claude/skills/ in that project instead. The agent picks it up when a task matches its description.

What it costs your context

Agent Skills load in three steps. Tokens counted with the o200k tokenizer; your model's count will differ a little.

WhenWhat loadsCost
Every sessionName and description164 tok
When the agent uses itThe SKILL.md instructions6,119 tok
Only if opened27 bundled files (697 KB)varies

Until it is used, agents-best-practices costs about 8.3× less than the median MCP server we measured (1,363 tokens on every turn). Skills vs MCP study

Checks

  • The instructions are over 5,000 tokens, the Agent Skills specification's guideline for SKILL.md.

Checked 2026-10-22 · method

What's inside

The headings of its SKILL.md. Read the full file on GitHub.

  • Agents Best Practices
  • Freshness and self-update
  • Core stance
  • When to activate this skill
  • How to use this skill
  • MVP Builder Mode
  • Troubleshooting Mode
  • Hardware and Board Deployment Mode
  • Environment-Adaptive Tool Mode
  • Realtime Voice Agent Mode
  • Always-on Agent and Durable Runtime Mode
  • Advanced Recursive and Continual Harness Mode
  • Adaptive Agent Team Mode
  • Experimental Speculative Tool Execution Mode
  • Reference map
  • Default answer structure when advising a user
  • Non-negotiable principles
  • Common output template
  • Gotchas
  • Source links for further reading