Agent Skills for AI Coding
Reusable skill and rule files that change how coding agents behave, with install instructions and honest limits.
Agent Skills are small instruction bundles that a coding agent loads on demand: a CLAUDE.md, a SKILL.md, or a small plugin that encodes a specific way of working. They are cheap to adopt and easy to revert, but they differ a lot in quality and in licensing. Every guide below links to the upstream repository, shows the install step, and states what the skill actually changes about model output.
Guides and deep dives
Andrej Karpathy's Skills: The Four Principles Behind the Viral CLAUDE.md
The Karpathy Skills repository is a single CLAUDE.md that encodes four engineering principles for coding agents. Here is what each principle does and how to install it.
Taste Skill for Claude Code: Install, Art Direction and Browser Checks
Taste Skill is an MIT-licensed skill collection that gives coding agents art direction, reference images and a browser check so they stop producing generic output.
Claude Code Reverse Engineering Skills: Ghidra, APK Analysis and Safe Setup
A roundup of Claude Code skills for reverse engineering binaries, decompiled APKs and web applications, with installation steps and clear legal boundaries.
Frequently asked questions
What are Agent Skills for AI coding?
An Agent Skill is a reusable set of instructions an AI coding agent can load for a specific job, usually a CLAUDE.md file or a SKILL.md folder. The Karpathy Skills project encodes four engineering principles, and Taste Skill encodes design and art-direction rules for frontend work.
How do I install a skill into Claude Code?
For a CLAUDE.md-based skill, copy the file into your project root or into ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md so it applies to every session. For a SKILL.md folder, copy the skill directory into .claude/skills/ in your project or ~/.claude/skills/ for user scope.
Do these skills work with Cursor and Codex?
The instruction format is portable even when the loader is not. A CLAUDE.md file can be adapted into an AGENTS.md file for Codex or a rules file for Cursor, which is what the skills-directory projects do for cross-editor installs.
Are third-party skills safe to install?
A skill is instructions that an agent will follow, so read the file before you copy it, check the repository license, and pin a commit version if you rely on it in production.