Skill Craft

skill-craft

Skills the AI actually follows.

You write a skill. The AI ignores half of it — reads SKILL.md, skips PROCEDURE.md, hits a checkpoint and breezes past it. The skill says "check all edge cases" and the AI says "checked" without checking. This is the failure mode skill-craft engineers against.

A Claude Code plugin for designing skills that work as written. Five layers of structural enforcement — un-fakeable artifacts, forcing functions, blocking gates — so the AI's behavior matches what the skill says, not what it pattern-completes.

skill-craft is the meta-discipline. The Anneal framework is built using its mechanisms; framework instances (Clippy, DANEEL) inherit those mechanisms downstream.

The five layers

1. Plugin structure — directory layout, manifest, auto-discovery
2. Protocol conventions — un-fakeable artifacts, forcing functions, blocking gates
3. Skill architecture — file roles, progressive disclosure, dependency graph
4. Skill evolution — the observations-cycle and amendment discipline
5. Skill reflexivity — noticing during use that guidance itself needs updating

Layers 3-5 are where skills succeed or fail over time.

Companion: plugin-dev

skill-craft covers methodology — what to build and how to structure it. The official plugin-dev plugin (install: claude plugin install plugin-dev@claude-plugins-official) covers mechanics — frontmatter format, hooks syntax, agent definitions. Use both when building a plugin.

Installation

claude plugin marketplace add Gunther-Schulz/skill-craft
claude plugin install skill-craft@skill-craft-marketplace

Run /reload-plugins in Claude Code to activate.

Triggers

• "create a skill" / "design a plugin" / "write a protocol"
• "review a skill" / "improve a skill"
• Discussions about skill architecture

Files

File	Role	Loaded
SKILL.md	Entry point, trigger conditions, dependency graph	At activation
PROCEDURE.md	The skill design method (five layers)	At activation
references/anti-patterns.md	Common skill design mistakes — symptoms + fixes	At activation
references/review-checklist.md	Full skill review checklist with blocking logic	On demand
references/plugin-engineering.md	Plugin packaging: marketplace, hooks, installation	On demand
references/writing-by-skill-type.md	Type-specific authoring (judgment, workflow, domain-knowledge, tooling)	On demand
dev-notes/OBSERVATIONS.md	Improvement journal — maintainer-side, outside plugin payload	Never

License

MIT