ai-agent-skills

🤖 AI Agent Skills

Production-grade AI agent skills for real-world applications — and everyday use

Inspired by addyosmani/agent-skills and forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills

🌐 View the Interactive Skills Browser →

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🎯 What is this?

AI agents are only as good as the instructions they follow. AI Agent Skills is a curated, battle-tested library of skill files — structured markdown prompts — that transform AI coding agents (Claude, Gemini, Cursor, Copilot, etc.) into disciplined, production-ready engineers.

Unlike generic prompts, these skills encode actual workflows with steps, checkpoints, verification gates, and anti-pattern guards — the same discipline senior engineers bring to every production deployment.

THINK → PLAN → BUILD → TEST → REVIEW → HARDEN → SHIP
  ↓        ↓      ↓       ↓       ↓        ↓        ↓
Clarify  Break  Write  Verify  Quality  Security  Deploy
Goals    Down   Code   Output  Gates    Gates     Live

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🏆 Why This Repo Goes Beyond the Rest

Feature	This Repo	agent-skills	karpathy-skills
Production + Everyday use	✅	Production only	General
Multi-agent orchestration	✅	❌	❌
AI safety & hallucination guards	✅	❌	Partial
RAG / Memory skills	✅	❌	❌
Prompt injection defense	✅	❌	❌
GitHub Pages search UI	✅	❌	❌
30+ curated skills	✅	20 skills	4 principles
Everyday productivity skills	✅	❌	❌

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⚡ Quick Start

Step 1 — Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/DevelopersGlobal/ai-agent-skills.git

Step 2 — Pick a skill and copy it into your agent

Claude / Cursor / Copilot / any agent: Copy the contents of any SKILL.md file into your agent's system prompt, instructions file, or context window.

For Claude Code — add to your project's CLAUDE.md:

cat skills/think-before-coding/SKILL.md >> CLAUDE.md

For Cursor — copy into .cursor/rules/:

cp skills/security-hardening/SKILL.md .cursor/rules/security-hardening.mdc

For Gemini CLI — add to your project's GEMINI.md:

cat skills/goal-driven-execution/SKILL.md >> GEMINI.md

One-liner (any skill, any agent):

# View raw skill content, then paste into your agent
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DevelopersGlobal/ai-agent-skills/main/skills/production-deployment/SKILL.md

Browse and copy skills visually → developersglobal.github.io/ai-agent-skills

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📚 All Skills

🧠 Think — Before You Code

Skill	Description
think-before-coding	Surface assumptions, manage confusion, prevent hallucination
goal-driven-execution	Transform tasks into verifiable goals with success criteria
idea-to-spec	Convert vague ideas into concrete, testable specifications

📐 Plan — Break It Down

Skill	Description
task-decomposition	Break features into atomic, independently verifiable tasks
context-loading	Load minimum necessary context; avoid token bloat
multi-agent-orchestration	Design and coordinate multi-agent pipelines

🏗️ Build — Write Production Code

Skill	Description
incremental-coding	Build in verifiable increments; never big-bang rewrites
simplicity-first	Minimum code that solves the problem — nothing speculative
surgical-changes	Touch only what you must; leave the rest untouched
api-design	Design stable, versioned, self-documenting APIs
frontend-engineering	Accessible, performant, responsive UI patterns
rag-and-memory	Retrieval-Augmented Generation and agent memory patterns

✅ Test — Prove It Works

Skill	Description
test-driven-development	Red-green-refactor with meaningful coverage
debugging-methodology	Systematic root cause analysis; never guess-and-check
integration-testing	Test real system boundaries, not mocks of mocks
ai-output-validation	Validate, parse, and sanitize AI-generated outputs
agent-qa-run-review	Review agent-qa evidence and memidex memory provenance before explaining a QA verdict

🔍 Review — Quality Gates

Skill	Description
code-review	Structured review checklist; correctness over style
performance-optimization	Measure first, optimize second; no premature optimization
refactoring	Safe, behavior-preserving transformation with tests
documentation	Document decisions, not just implementations

🔒 Harden — Security & Reliability

Skill	Description
security-hardening	OWASP Top 10, secrets management, least privilege
prompt-injection-defense	Guard AI agents against prompt injection attacks
hallucination-prevention	Detect and mitigate LLM hallucinations in pipelines
error-handling	Graceful degradation and meaningful error messages
observability	Structured logging, tracing, and alerting for AI systems

🚀 Ship — Deploy with Confidence

Skill	Description
production-deployment	Zero-downtime deploys with rollback plans
ci-cd-pipelines	Automated quality gates from commit to production
git-workflow	Trunk-based development, atomic commits, clean history

🌟 Everyday — Productivity Skills

Skill	Description
code-explanation	Get clear, layered explanations of unfamiliar code
meeting-notes-to-tasks	Convert meeting notes into structured action items
research-and-summarize	Distill complex topics into actionable summaries

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🏛️ Skill Anatomy

Every skill follows the same battle-tested structure:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ SKILL.md                                            │
│                                                     │
│  ┌─ Frontmatter ────────────────────────────────┐  │
│  │  name:        kebab-case-name                │  │
│  │  description: One-line trigger description   │  │
│  │  applies-to:  [claude, gemini, cursor, ...]  │  │
│  │  category:    think|plan|build|test|...      │  │
│  └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘  │
│                                                     │
│  Overview      → What this skill accomplishes       │
│  When to Use   → Exact triggering conditions        │
│  Process       → Numbered, verifiable steps         │
│  Rationalizations → Common excuses + rebuttals      │
│  Red Flags     → Warning signs the skill is needed  │
│  Verification  → Non-negotiable evidence required   │
│  References    → Supporting checklists/docs         │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

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🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions! The best skills are:

• Specific — Actionable steps, not vague principles
• Verifiable — Clear exit criteria with evidence
• Battle-tested — Based on real production experience
• Minimal — Only what the agent needs; no bloat

See CONTRIBUTING.md and docs/skill-anatomy.md.

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🌐 GitHub Pages

The full skills library is browsable at developersglobal.github.io/ai-agent-skills with:

• 🔍 Full-text search across all skills
• 🏷️ Filter by category and agent type
• 📋 One-click copy for any skill
• 📱 Mobile-friendly responsive design

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📊 Inspiration & Credits

This project builds on and extends the ideas from:

• addyosmani/agent-skills — Production engineering skills for AI agents
• forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills — Karpathy's observations on LLM coding pitfalls
• DevelopersGlobal — Community-driven developer tools

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📄 License

MIT — Use these skills in your projects, teams, and tools. Attribution appreciated but not required.

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⭐ Star this repo to help developers everywhere build better AI agents ⭐

Made with ❤️ by DevelopersGlobal