What does this skill do, and when should you use it?
skill-creator is a meta-skill bundled with Open Cowork that guides users—or the AI itself—through creating new Skills: modular packages that extend an agent with specialized knowledge, workflows, and tools. It teaches the standard skill anatomy (SKILL.md plus optional scripts/references/assets directories), core principles like conciseness and appropriate degrees of freedom, and progressive disclosure for context management. The process runs from understanding concrete usage examples through initialization, editing, and validation-based packaging into a distributable .skill file. It performs no business tasks itself; its job is turning your domain knowledge into a reusable skill.
- Interviews you with concrete examples to define the skill's functionality and trigger scenarios
- Analyzes examples to plan reusable scripts/, references/, and assets/ resources
- Runs scripts/init_skill.py to scaffold a skill with frontmatter template and example directories
- Guides writing of SKILL.md and resources using conciseness and freedom-level guidelines
- Runs scripts/package_skill.py to validate and package the skill into a .skill file
- Supports an iterate loop based on real usage after testing
- A developer who wants to encode internal database schemas or API docs into a team-shared query skill
- An operations person who repeatedly asks for slide decks and wants templates stored as assets in a dedicated skill
- An engineer with repetitive scripting tasks (e.g., PDF rotation) who wants scripts/ files instead of rewriting code each time
- An Open Cowork user building custom office-automation skills for their sandboxed workspace
- Users without any Agent Skills-compatible client—the artifacts and process are built around the SKILL.md ecosystem
- Casual users who just want one-off task completion and don't need reusable, packaged workflows
How do you install this skill?
- Shell / CLI
- Local filesystem
Python (for init_skill.py / package_skill.py)
Pre-installed with the Open Cowork desktop app under .claude/skills/, or copy the skill folder from the repo into any Agent Skills-compatible environment:
git clone https://github.com/OpenCoworkAI/open-cowork.git
cp -r open-cowork/.claude/skills/skill-creator <your-skills-directory>/How do you use this skill?
Once installed, send your agent any of these to trigger it:
- Create a skill for handling company expense reports—ask me first what features it should support
- I keep asking you to rotate PDFs; wrap that repeated operation into a custom skill with a script
- Build a query skill for my database schema and put the table structures in a references directory
- Package my skill folder into a .skill file and validate that it meets the requirements
When you express the intent to create or update a skill, the AI follows the six-step flow in SKILL.md: understand examples → plan resources → initialize → edit → package → iterate. The key commands are:
scripts/init_skill.py <skill-name> --path <output-directory>
scripts/package_skill.py <path/to/skill-folder> [output-dir]The packaging script validates YAML frontmatter, naming conventions, and file organization first; it only produces the .skill zip archive if validation passes.
What are this skill's strengths and limitations?
- Complete, actionable six-step process from requirements discovery to packaged distribution
- Ships with init and package scripts including pre-package validation, reducing errors
- Progressive-disclosure and conciseness principles directly improve the context efficiency of skills you build
- MIT-licensed and free with the open-source repository
- Companion scripts require Python, which you must have available
- Aimed at skill authors rather than end business users, so there is a learning curve
- No test-suite evidence for the bundled scripts is documented in SKILL.md; quality depends on upstream maintenance
How does this skill compare with similar options?
Side by side with related skills; every score comes from the same FSRS standard.
| Skill | FS score | Stars | Last updated | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Skill Creator this page | 70 · Strongly recommended | ★ 2.2k | 12d ago | MIT |
| Create New Skills (Meta-Skill) | 62 · Recommended | ★ 1.5k | 8mo ago | — |
| DeepTutor Skill Creator | 57 · Use with care | ★ 41k | 17d ago | Apache-2.0 |
| Skill Creator | 48 · Use with care | ★ 3.1k | 8mo ago | MIT |
| Agent Skill Blueprint | 40 · Not recommended | ★ 18k | 13d ago | MIT |
The source positions it as one of Open Cowork's five built-in skills (alongside pptx, docx, pdf, and xlsx) and the FAQ names it as the official tool for custom skill creation; no third-party alternatives are mentioned.
How did FollowSkills review this skill?
A bundled copy of Anthropic's official 'how to create a skill' guide — pure methodology content (conciseness principle, progressive disclosure), no execution risk.
Open a dimension to read why it scored that way
Evidence confidence：Low — Mostly static review, author material or a limited demo; useful for discovery, not high-risk decisions.
This review was completed under FSRS 1.0. Dimension scores are not converted; it is queued for re-review under FSRS 2.0.
See the full review method →