Guidance Skill for Claude
> Authoritative guidance for building Claude Code skills, agents, and plugins, vendored into this repository. Use when you need the rules or best practices for a skill, agent, hook, or plugin — designing, reviewing, hardening, or checking one against the guidance. Does not run an interview to build a new skill or agent from scratch — use skill-builder or agent-builder. Does not write feature code, review application code, or build non-plugin features.
Install
one command, takes just this skill from the repositorynpx skills add https://github.com/testdouble/han --skill guidanceThe instruction itself
as written by the authorServe the relevant guidance for what the user is building. Do not read every
guidance document — that defeats the purpose. Find the one or two that apply,
read them, and apply them.
The guidance documents live in this skill's own references/ directory. Use
this map to choose, then read only the specific file(s) you need:
- Deciding whether something should be a skill, agent, or hook →
${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/plugin-entity-taxonomy.md.
- Authoring or hardening a skill (descriptions, frontmatter, progressive
disclosure, allowed-tools, scripts, composition, testing, troubleshooting) →
the files under ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/skill-building-guidance/.
- Authoring an agent (domain focus, self-containment, model selection,
multi-agent economics, graceful degradation) → the files under
${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/agent-building-guidelines/.
- Plugin or marketplace configuration files (plugin.json, marketplace.json,
monitors.json, themes.json) → the files under
${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/claude-marketplace-and-plugin-configuration/.
- Versioning, README structure, local development, the iterative development
process, and specialization-versus-model-tier reasoning → the top-level
files in ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/.
- Copyable starter files →
${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/templates/.
Steps:
- Identify what the user is building or asking about.
- List the relevant subdirectory under
${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/to
see the available documents, using the map above.
- Read only the document(s) that directly apply.
- Apply the guidance to the user's situation. Cite the document you used so
the user can read it in full if they want.
Other skills for the same job
different authors, same section of the catalogue
Create new skills, modify and improve existing skills, and measure skill performance. Use when users want to create a skill from scratch, edit, or optimize an existing skill, run evals to test a skill, benchmark skill performance with variance analysis, or optimize a skill's description for better triggering accuracy.
Guide for creating effective skills. This skill should be used when users want to create a new skill (or update an existing skill) that extends Claude's capabilities with specialized knowledge, workflows, or tool integrations.
Guide for creating effective skills. This skill should be used when users want to create a new skill (or update an existing skill) that extends Claude's capabilities with specialized knowledge, workflows, or tool integrations.
Replace with description of the skill and when Claude should use it.
Use when facing 2+ independent tasks that can be worked on without shared state or sequential dependencies
This skill should be used when the user wants to "create a skill", "add a skill to plugin", "write a new skill", "improve skill description", "organize skill content", or needs guidance on skill structure, progressive disclosure, or skill development best practices for Claude Code plugins.
Helps users discover and install agent skills when they ask questions like "how do I do X", "find a skill for X", "is there a skill that can...", or express interest in extending capabilities. This skill should be used when the user is looking for functionality that might exist as an installable skill.
Use when creating new skills, editing existing skills, or verifying skills work before deployment
How to use it
Take testdouble/han-guidance from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal
use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.
The agent identifies a skill by the name field in its header. Two skills with the
same name cannot sit side by side — one of them will be ignored.