This file provides guidance to Claude Code (claude.ai/code) when working with code in this repository.
Agent Skills for Context Engineering — an open collection of 13 Agent Skills teaching context engineering principles for production AI agent systems. Skills are platform-agnostic (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, any Open Plugins-conformant tool).
Context engineering is the discipline of curating everything that enters a model's context window (system prompts, tool definitions, retrieved documents, message history, tool outputs) to maximize signal within limited attention budget.
skills/— 13 skill directories, each containing aSKILL.mdwith YAML frontmatter (name,description) and optionalreferences/andscripts/subdirectoriesexamples/— 5 complete demonstration projects (digital-brain-skill, llm-as-judge-skills, book-sft-pipeline, x-to-book-system, interleaved-thinking)docs/— Research materials and reference documentationresearcher/— Research output examplestemplate/SKILL.md— Canonical skill template (use when creating new skills)SKILL.md(root) — Collection-level metadata and skill map.claude-plugin/marketplace.json— Claude Code marketplace manifest (5 bundled plugins).plugin/plugin.json— Open Plugins format manifest (v2.0.0)
No top-level build system. Individual example projects have their own tooling:
cd examples/llm-as-judge-skills
npm install
npm run build # tsc
npm test # vitest (19 tests)
npm run lint # eslint
npm run format # prettier
npm run typecheck # tsc --noEmit
cd examples/interleaved-thinking
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest # pytest + pytest-asyncio
ruff check . # linting (100 char line length)
cd examples/digital-brain-skill
npm run setup
npm run weekly-review
npm run content-ideas
npm run stale-contacts
When creating or editing skills:
- SKILL.md must stay under 500 lines — move detailed content to
references/directory - YAML frontmatter is required — must include
nameanddescriptionfields - Folder naming: lowercase with hyphens (e.g.,
context-fundamentals) - Write in third person — descriptions are injected into system prompts; inconsistent POV causes discovery issues
- Platform-agnostic — no vendor-locked examples or platform-specific tool names without abstraction
- Token-conscious — challenge each paragraph: "Does Claude really need this?" Assume advanced audience
- Include a Gotchas section — experience-derived failure modes are the highest-signal content in any skill
- Update root README.md when adding new skills
- Update marketplace/plugin manifests when adding skills (
.claude-plugin/marketplace.json,.plugin/plugin.json)
All 13 skills are distributed as a single plugin (context-engineering) in the marketplace manifest. This avoids cache duplication — Claude Code caches each plugin's source directory separately, so multiple plugins pointing to source: "./" would each cache a full copy of the repo.
Progressive disclosure pattern: only skill names/descriptions load at startup; full content loads on activation.
- Context quality over quantity — attention scarcity and lost-in-middle phenomenon mean more context is not always better
- Sub-agents isolate context — they exist to manage attention budget, not simulate org roles
- Skills reference each other — use plain text skill names (not links) in Integration sections to avoid cross-directory reference issues
- Examples use Python pseudocode — conceptual demonstrations that work across environments, not production-ready implementations