I turned my experience into 9 agent skills. Here's how to build your own.

Every time I finished a piece of work with an AI coding agent, I noticed I was typing the same thing again: the same context, the same steps, the same mistakes I wanted it to avoid. So I stopped repeating myself and turned that experience into skills.

An agent skill is a small folder that teaches a coding agent how to do one thing, and it loads only when it's relevant. The whole thing hangs on one file, SKILL.md, and mostly on one line inside it.

The description is the whole game

A skill has frontmatter with a name and a description. That description is what decides whether the skill ever loads. Write a vague one and the skill just sits there and never fires. Pack it with the phrases people actually say, plus a clear when-to-use and when-not, and it shows up at exactly the right moment.

The rest is unglamorous, and it matters

Keep the main SKILL.md short, and push detail into reference files that load on demand, so the agent only reads what it needs. Verify every fact against the real docs before you write it, because a skill that teaches a wrong API is a confident liability. And separate the stable principles from the version-specific syntax that rots: principles age well, exact method signatures do not.

The 9 I published

They're all open-source in one repo, most of them pulled from real work:

• skill-authoring: the meta one, how to write, verify, and publish a skill.
• laravel-filament and livewire: version-aware, routing to a per-version reference file.
• filament-plugin-development: building and publishing Filament plugins.
• laravel-mysql-to-postgres: the gotchas when you move a project from MySQL to Postgres.
• laravel-mixpost: self-hosting and operating Mixpost.
• geo-llm-optimization: getting found inside AI answers, not just on Google.
• laravel-architecture-review and laravel-upgrade: design-level review, and major Laravel upgrades one hop at a time.

Build your own in four steps

1. Create a folder with a SKILL.md, and give it a name and a real description (triggers, plus when-to-use and when-not).
2. Keep the body short, and move the deep detail into reference files next to it.
3. Verify each claim against the official source.
4. Push it to a public GitHub repo, and it gets indexed on its own.

Then install any of them with one command:

npx skills add majdghithan/agent-skills --skill skill-authoring

The meta part: I wrote a skill for writing skills, and it encodes everything above. A little silly, but the next one genuinely goes faster because of it.

Repo: github.com/majdghithan/agent-skills