🪐 Skillpacks

Drop-in skill packs for Claude Code, Codex, and any coding agent — organized by discipline, beginner to expert.

Install a pack, your agent gets better at the job. Copy-paste ready. Tested. Not a link farm.

The problem

Coding agents are powerful and wildly inconsistent. The same model writes a surgical 3-line fix one minute and refactors your whole file unprompted the next — and it's even shakier in a specialized domain like GIS, where it'll cheerfully run a spatial join across mismatched coordinate systems. The fix isn't a smarter model — it's better instructions. Expert practitioners quietly accumulate a private stash of rules that reliably steer the agent.

Skillpacks is that stash — made public, tested, and one command away. It's organized by discipline, each with a beginner → expert path, so you install exactly the expertise your work needs.

🌱 New to all this? Start here (60 seconds)

Never used a "skill" or a CLAUDE.md before? You're exactly who the beginner skills are for.

What's a skill? A small SKILL.md file with instructions your agent loads automatically. Its description tells the agent when to use it. It lives in your project's .claude/skills/ folder.
What's a CLAUDE.md? A plain-text file where you write standing rules for the agent ("always do X"). Every skill here also works as a CLAUDE.md rule — just paste it in.

# Add your first skill — one command, nothing to install
npx skillpacks-cli add explain-as-you-go

That drops the skill into .claude/skills/ and your agent picks it up automatically. Want to see what you're getting first? Every skill is a plain file you can also copy by hand — see How to use a skill.

📚 The catalog

Organized by discipline, each beginner → expert. Install a whole discipline (add gis), one level (add engineering beginner), or a single skill (add crs-discipline).

🛠️ engineering — make any agent a better software engineer

Install the whole pack: npx skillpacks-cli add engineering

Skill	Level	Fixes
explain-as-you-go	beginner	Agent hands you code you don't understand — start here if you're learning
ask-dont-assume	beginner	Agent silently picks one reading of an ambiguous request
plan-then-build	beginner	Agent dives into a big task and builds the wrong approach
read-before-edit	beginner	Agent edits code it never read and breaks a hidden caller
surgical-edits	beginner	Agent changes code you didn't ask it to touch
verify-before-done	beginner	Agent says "Fixed! ✅" without actually checking
check-the-docs	intermediate	Agent invents plausible-but-fake API calls from memory
test-first	intermediate	Agent "fixes" a bug with no test and it quietly comes back
commit-hygiene	intermediate	Agent dumps unrelated edits into one vague "update" commit
keep-it-simple	intermediate	Agent builds a configurable framework when you asked for a function
refactor-safely	expert	A "harmless cleanup" silently changes behavior and breaks prod
security-pass	expert	Agent ships injection, a leaked secret, or a missing auth check
spec-driven-development	expert	Agent codes a big feature first, hits the design wall, rewrites

🗺️ gis — spatial work, written by an actual GIS professional

Install the whole pack: npx skillpacks-cli add gis

Skill	Level	Fixes
crs-discipline	beginner	Spatial ops on mismatched/undefined coordinate systems — the #1 GIS bug
validate-geometry	beginner	Self-intersecting polygons that silently corrupt joins, dissolves, areas
spatial-join-sanity	intermediate	Joins that silently multiply or drop rows, or use the wrong predicate
postgis-query-patterns	intermediate	Spatial SQL that's silently wrong (SRID) or slow (no index)
ogr2ogr-recipes	intermediate	Guessed GDAL flags that drop the CRS, truncate fields, or skip features
arcpy-safe-edits	expert	Bare cursors that deadlock or corrupt versioned enterprise (SDE) data
arcpy-vs-arcgis-api	expert	Picking the wrong Esri Python library and finding out after a rewrite
raster-at-scale	expert	OOM crashes and wrong resampling on multi-GB rasters

More disciplines and skills landing soon — data engineering next. Suggest one →

How to use a skill

The easy way — the CLI (nothing to install, runs via npx):

npx skillpacks-cli list                       # browse everything
npx skillpacks-cli add crs-discipline         # one skill by name
npx skillpacks-cli add gis                     # a whole discipline
npx skillpacks-cli add engineering beginner    # one level of a discipline

Skills land in ./.claude/skills/, which Claude Code loads automatically.

By hand (if you'd rather copy the file yourself):

mkdir -p .claude/skills/<name>
cp skills/<discipline>/<level>/<name>/SKILL.md .claude/skills/<name>/

As a CLAUDE.md rule (always on): open the skill's SKILL.md, copy the rules, paste them into your project's CLAUDE.md.

Why trust these?

Every skill ships with:

✅ A one-sentence problem it solves
✅ A before/after showing the exact behavior change
✅ A trigger description tuned so the agent invokes it at the right moment — and stays out of the way otherwise
✅ Pairs-well-with links so skills compose into a workflow

Contributing

Got a rule or skill that reliably makes your agent better — in any discipline? That's the whole point — open a PR. Issues labeled good-first-issue are a friendly place to start, even if you're new to GitHub.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Use these anywhere, commercially or not.

Skillpacks

README