🪐 Skillpacks

A beginner-to-expert curriculum of drop-in skills for Claude Code, Codex, and any coding agent.

Install a skill, your agent gets better. Climb the levels, you get better. Copy-paste ready. Tested. Not a link farm.

The problem

Coding agents are powerful and wildly inconsistent. The same model writes a surgical 3-line fix one minute and refactors your whole file unprompted the next. The fix isn't a smarter model — it's better instructions. Expert users quietly accumulate a private stash of rules and skills that reliably steer the agent.

Skillpacks is that stash — made public, tested, leveled, and one copy-paste away. And because it's organized beginner → expert, it doubles as a way to learn how to drive a coding agent well.

🌱 New to all this? Start here (60 seconds)

Never used a "skill" or a CLAUDE.md before? You're exactly who the Beginner pack is for.

• What's a skill? A small SKILL.md file with instructions your agent loads automatically. Its description tells the agent when to use it. You drop it in your project's .claude/skills/ folder — that's it.
• What's a CLAUDE.md? A plain-text file in your project where you write standing rules for the agent ("always do X"). Every skill here also works as a CLAUDE.md rule — just paste it in.
• How do I use one? Pick a skill below → copy its SKILL.md into .claude/skills/<name>/ → done. Your agent now follows it.

# Add your first skill — one command, nothing to install
npx skillpacks-cli add explain-as-you-go

That drops the skill into .claude/skills/ and your agent picks it up automatically. Want to see what you're getting first? Every skill is a plain file you can also copy by hand — see How to use a skill.

📚 The catalog

Climb from the bottom. Get comfortable with a level, then level up.

🟢 Beginner — learn to steer the agent

| Skill | Fixes | |-------|-------| | explain-as-you-go | Agent hands you code you don't understand — start here if you're learning | | plan-then-build | Agent dives in on a vague request and builds the wrong thing | | surgical-edits | Agent changes code you didn't ask it to touch | | verify-before-done | Agent says "Fixed! ✅" without actually checking |

🟡 Intermediate — raise the quality bar

| Skill | Fixes | |-------|-------| | check-the-docs | Agent invents plausible-but-fake API calls from memory | | test-first | Agent "fixes" a bug with no test and it quietly comes back |

🔴 Expert — advanced workflows

| Skill | Fixes | |-------|-------| | refactor-safely | A "harmless cleanup" silently changes behavior and breaks prod |

More expert skills landing soon: spec-driven development, security passes, subagent patterns. Suggest one →

How to use a skill

The easy way — the CLI (nothing to install, runs via npx):

npx skillpacks-cli list                  # browse everything
npx skillpacks-cli add surgical-edits    # add one skill
npx skillpacks-cli add beginner          # add a whole level pack

Skills land in ./.claude/skills/, which Claude Code loads automatically.

By hand (if you'd rather copy the file yourself):

mkdir -p .claude/skills/<name>
cp skills/<level>/<name>/SKILL.md .claude/skills/<name>/

As a CLAUDE.md rule (always on): open the skill's SKILL.md, copy the rules, paste them into your project's CLAUDE.md.

Why trust these?

Every skill ships with:

• ✅ A one-sentence problem it solves
• ✅ A before/after showing the exact behavior change
• ✅ A trigger description tuned so the agent invokes it at the right moment — and stays out of the way otherwise
• ✅ Pairs-well-with links so skills compose into a workflow

Contributing

Got a rule or skill that reliably makes your agent better? That's the whole point — open a PR. Issues labeled good-first-issue are a friendly place to start, even if you're new to GitHub.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Use these anywhere, commercially or not.