skills-from-the-artificer

A collection of Claude Code skills, distributed as drop-in directories. Each top-level folder is a self-contained skill — install it with the skills CLI, or copy it into ~/.claude/skills/ and restart Claude Code.

Skills

Not a skill

Distinct from gsd-core-hooks/, which is a packaged skill documenting one
project's suite. claude-guards/ is cross-project policy.

Commands

commands/ holds workflow directives as Claude Code slash commands —
/feature-builder, /bug-fixer, /triage-review, /review-open-prs. These replace the former
directives/ folder: same procedures, now invocable rather than pasted, with frontmatter declaring
the tools each may touch.

cp commands/*.md ~/.claude/commands/

They are written against one project's toolchain (its test runner, label vocabulary, and controlling
files) and are a starting shape rather than a drop-in — see commands/README.md
for what to adapt. Three of them depend on artifact-gates/ for enforcement;
without that hook their artifact contracts are just prose. gsd-core-hooks/ ships
the fuller suite these commands were originally run against — test-verdict gating, no-local-test,
Memtrace-first — as a reference for what "machine-enforced" looked like in the source project.

Laws of software (24 reference skills)

A pack of software-engineering laws, each loaded as an on-demand reference skill. Every law is its own top-level directory:

choose-boring-technology/ ·
conways-law/ ·
cunninghams-law/ ·
doerrs-law/ ·
fitts-law/ ·
galls-law/ ·
goodharts-law/ ·
greenspuns-tenth-rule/ ·
hofstadters-law/ ·
hyrums-law/ ·
kerckhoffs-principle/ ·
kernighans-law/ ·
knuths-optimization-principle/ ·
lady-lovelaces-objection/ ·
leaky-abstractions/ ·
linuss-law/ ·
moores-law/ ·
norvigs-law/ ·
parkinsons-law/ ·
peter-principle/ ·
postels-law/ ·
shirky-principle/ ·
wirths-law/ ·
zawinskis-law/

Install (recommended: the skills CLI)

The skills CLI discovers each top-level skill and installs it for you. Add -g to install globally (user-level, into ~/.claude/skills/) instead of into the current project.

# install everything
npx skills add The-Artificer-of-Ciphers-LLC/skills-from-the-artificer --all -g

# or choose interactively
npx skills add The-Artificer-of-Ciphers-LLC/skills-from-the-artificer -g

# or install specific skills
npx skills add The-Artificer-of-Ciphers-LLC/skills-from-the-artificer -g --skill conways-law,rubber-duck

Install (manual)

Each skill is also a cp -r away:

# pick the ones you want
cp -r rubber-duck ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r test-first-bugfix ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r conways-law ~/.claude/skills/

# or grab every law at once
cp -r *-law *-principle *-rule *-objection *-technology *-abstractions ~/.claude/skills/

Restart Claude Code. The skill discovery scan runs at session start.

Install (skills that ship agents too)

cost-tier-routing/ is unusual — it includes companion subagents that have to land in ~/.claude/agents/, not ~/.claude/skills/. Its README.md documents the two-step install. The skill alone is inert without the agents because the model: pin lives in the agent files.

cd cost-tier-routing
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/cost-tier-routing ~/.claude/agents
cp SKILL.md ~/.claude/skills/cost-tier-routing/
cp agents/*.md ~/.claude/agents/

Install (skills that ship hooks too)

cost-routing/, artifact-gates/, and gsd-core-hooks/ include hooks that must land in
~/.claude/hooks/ and be registered under PreToolUse/PostToolUse in settings.json. Each
has a README.md with the exact snippet.

An unregistered hook — or one registered with a path your Claude Code version does not expand —
fails open silently, and that looks exactly like a hook that is working and has nothing to
complain about. artifact-gates/ ships test/gate-test.sh so you can prove the engine works before
trusting it; confirm the wiring separately by triggering a gate on purpose.

How skills work

A skill is a directory containing a SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter — name and description — followed by the prose Claude Code reads when the skill triggers. The description is the trigger surface: Claude scans loaded skill descriptions against the current task and invokes a skill via the Skill tool when the description matches. Skills can ship supporting files (eval suites, reference scripts, sub-skills) alongside SKILL.md.

See the Claude Code skills docs for the canonical reference.

Evals

Some skills include an evals/evals.json file with prompts and expected behaviors. These are consumed by the skill-creator workflow to benchmark whether a skill triggers correctly and produces the expected routing decisions. The format is intentionally minimal:

{
  "skill_name": "<name>",
  "evals": [
    {
      "id": 0,
      "prompt": "<user prompt that should trigger the skill>",
      "expected_output": "<what Claude should do, prose>",
      "files": []
    }
  ]
}

Contributing a skill

1. Create a top-level directory named after the skill (kebab-case).
2. Drop in a SKILL.md with the frontmatter name: and description: fields, followed by the body Claude should read.
3. Optionally add evals/evals.json with trigger prompts and expected behaviors.
4. Optionally add a per-skill README.md documenting anything unusual about the install (e.g. companion agents).
5. PR.

License

Skills in this repo are MIT-licensed unless a skill's own directory says otherwise.