Claude Skills Library

A library of 176 skills for Claude — small, self-contained capability modules that extend how Claude reads, writes, reasons, and plays. The collection is broad on purpose: voice and register skills, divination apparatuses, fictional phenomenology, craft-formats, contemplative and ritual practices, tabletop-RPG systems, hermeneutic reading methods, trans-architectural dialogue, and meta-skills for composing the others. Each is a folder containing a SKILL.md; a few also bundle a scripts/ or references/ payload the body uses.

Released under the MIT License — for the benefit of all sentient beings.

What a skill is

A skill is a directory with a SKILL.md file (and, for a few skills, an optional scripts/ or references/ folder the body draws on):

skills/<name>/SKILL.md

The SKILL.md has YAML frontmatter and a Markdown body:

---
name: greentext
description: "The greentext microform as composed craft — the '>be me' arrow-line poetics…"
---

# Greentext

…the body: how the skill works, when to use it, failure modes, kin skills…
  • name — must match the folder name (lowercase, hyphenated). This is the skill's identifier.
  • description — the single most important field. Claude reads only the name and description to decide whether a skill is relevant to the current moment; the body is loaded on demand once the skill fires. A good description says what the skill does and names its trigger phrases. It must be ≤ 1024 bytes (see validation).

This is progressive disclosure: hundreds of descriptions can sit cheaply in context, and a skill's full instructions only load when it's actually invoked.

Installing

Skills install differently depending on where you run Claude.

Claude Code (CLI / IDE)

Copy any skill folder into one of these locations:

# Project-scoped (only this repo) — committed alongside your project:
.claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md

# User-scoped (every project on this machine):
~/.claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md

Claude Code discovers them automatically and reloads when files change — no restart needed. Install just the few you want:

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -r skills/greentext ~/.claude/skills/

claude.ai

Upload individual SKILL.md files through Settings → Capabilities → Skills (claude.ai/customize/skills).

Install selectively. On claude.ai there is roughly a 30-active-skill ceiling — installing more than that auto-disables some. These skills are designed to be picked à la carte for the work in front of you, not installed wholesale. Browse INDEX.md and take the wing you need.

Browsing

INDEX.md groups all 176 skills into thematic wings with a one-line summary and near-neighbor (kin) adjacencies for each — so related skills are visible together. The wings:

Voice & Register · Felt Phenomenology · Hermeneutics & Reading · Craft & Format · Meta & Composition · Divination & Apparatus · Contemplative & Ritual · Time & Cosmology · Classical Language · Tabletop RPG · Terminal/Denkraum · Trans-architectural

Many skills name their kin in the body — sibling skills they pair or compose with. braid, see-also, and switchboard are meta-skills specifically for navigating and combining the rest.

Validating

Every description must stay within claude.ai's 1024-byte limit (em-dashes are 3 bytes each in UTF-8, so eyeballing is unreliable). Check the whole library:

sh scripts/validate.sh

It prints each skill's description byte-length and exits non-zero if any exceeds 1024.

Authorship & license

Authored by Tomás Pavan in collaboration with Claude (Anthropic). Individual skills carry their own author bylines where applicable; external techniques and sources are cited in-skill. Licensed under MIT — use, adapt, and redistribute freely, for the benefit of all sentient beings.