Agent Skill
Writing For Agents skill
writing-for-agentsMatt Pocock Skillsskills/productivity/writing-for-agents/SKILL.md
Writing documents for agents. Use when creating or editing skills, or modifying AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md.
always on
28 tokname + description
once used
2,315 tokSKILL.md body
bundled files
23 KB
installs
456kskills.sh
Install the Writing For Agents skill
Skills CLI (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and others)
npx skills add https://github.com/mattpocock/skills --skill writing-for-agents
Claude Code, by hand (all projects)
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mattpocock/skills.git /tmp/skills mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills cp -R /tmp/skills/skills/productivity/writing-for-agents ~/.claude/skills/writing-for-agents
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.
| When | What loads | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Every session | Name and description | 28 tok |
| When the agent uses it | The SKILL.md instructions | 2,315 tok |
| Only if opened | 2 bundled files (3 KB) | varies |
Until it is used, writing-for-agents costs about 49× less than the median MCP server we measured (1,362 tokens on every turn). Installing all 38 skills from mattpocock/skills would load 1,290 tokens of descriptions. Skills vs MCP study
Checks
Our checks found nothing to flag: it follows the Agent Skills specification's naming and size guidelines and doesn't pipe downloads into a shell.
Checked 2026-10-22 · method
What's inside
The headings of its SKILL.md. Read the full file on GitHub.
- Context pointers
- The two loads
- Information hierarchy
- Steps and completion criteria
- When to split
- Leading words
- Pruning
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