What is the Router Pattern in Claude Skills?

The Router Pattern is an architectural approach where the main SKILL.md acts as a central hub that routes the agent to specific files in workflows/, references/, or templates/ directories based on the user's intent.

When should I invoke the developing-skills skill?

You should invoke it proactively before writing or changing any SKILL.md file, or whenever you need to audit an existing skill for performance and structure.

Why is the YAML description so important for skills?

The name and description in the YAML frontmatter are the primary way agents discover and decide to use a skill. If these are poorly written, the skill will not be triggered when needed.

What is the primary purpose of the developing-skills plugin?

It serves as a meta-tool to guide the creation, review, and maintenance of other Claude Code skills, ensuring they follow standardized patterns and are easily discoverable by the agent.

Claude Skill Architect

Name: Claude Skill Architect
Author: mikekelly

bymikekelly

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Developer Tools

Provides a comprehensive framework for creating, auditing, and optimizing modular Claude Code skills using the router pattern.

About

The developing-skills plugin is an essential meta-skill for anyone building capabilities for Claude Code. It enforces industry-best practices for skill architecture, including the use of pure XML structures, progressive disclosure, and the router pattern to ensure high discoverability and token efficiency. By providing standardized workflows for creating, auditing, and updating SKILL.md files, it helps developers build modular, filesystem-based capabilities that Claude can reliably invoke and execute.

Key Features

Skill Auditing: Analyzes existing skills against performance and architectural best practices.
9 GitHub stars
YAML Optimization: Ensures skill metadata is optimized for maximum agent discovery and usage.
Context Efficiency: Enforces the 'Challenge Every Token' principle to keep SKILL.md files under 500 lines.
Guided Skill Creation: Step-by-step workflows for building task-execution or domain-expertise skills.
Router Pattern Implementation: Facilitates modular organization of workflows, references, templates, and scripts.

Use Cases

Developing a new specialized skill to automate complex repository-specific workflows.
Auditing a shared skill repository to ensure compliance with XML formatting and naming conventions.
Refactoring a monolithic prompt into a modular, router-based Claude Skill directory.

About

Key Features

Skill Auditing: Analyzes existing skills against performance and architectural best practices.
9 GitHub stars
YAML Optimization: Ensures skill metadata is optimized for maximum agent discovery and usage.
Context Efficiency: Enforces the 'Challenge Every Token' principle to keep SKILL.md files under 500 lines.
Guided Skill Creation: Step-by-step workflows for building task-execution or domain-expertise skills.
Router Pattern Implementation: Facilitates modular organization of workflows, references, templates, and scripts.

Use Cases

Developing a new specialized skill to automate complex repository-specific workflows.
Auditing a shared skill repository to ensure compliance with XML formatting and naming conventions.
Refactoring a monolithic prompt into a modular, router-based Claude Skill directory.