Context engineering
Deliberately curating what the agent sees and when — the single biggest lever on output quality.
Installation
$ npx skills add addyosmani/agent-skillsThe CLI's unit is the repository, so this installs everything in addyosmani/agent-skills, not context-engineering alone. It writes into whichever agent directories it finds — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, Zed.
Summary
Deliberately curating what the agent sees and when — the single biggest lever on output quality.
- Reach for it when output quality is sliding: hallucinated APIs, ignored conventions, patterns from the wrong part of the repo.
- Spans Plan & specify and Working with skills, so it is usually worth loading for the whole piece of work rather than at one moment in it.
- Stack-agnostic — nothing in it assumes a particular language or framework.
- Published by Addy Osmani. Well regarded, but not the vendor of the thing it covers.
- Installing pulls the whole addyosmani/agent-skills repository: this catalogue lists 19 other entries from it, and the repo may hold more.
Where it sits in delivery
Plan & specifyTurning an intention into something an agent can execute without inventing the requirements as it goes.Everything in Plan →
Working with skillsFinding skills, writing your own, and keeping a skill library from turning into a junk drawer.Everything in Meta →
The skill itself
The full text lives with its publisher and changes when they change it. Read it there rather than here — a mirrored copy of somebody else's procedure goes stale silently, and this page would have no way of telling you.
Related
More in Plan & specify
- Define goalShapes intent into a measurable objective with explicit evidence and bounded scope, rather than a description of activity.
openai/skills - Ask questions if underspecifiedMakes the agent stop and ask instead of filling a gap in the requirements with a plausible guess.
trailofbits/skills - BrainstormingPulls a vague idea apart into options and trade-offs before anything is committed to a plan.
obra/superpowers - Using superpowersThe index for the rest of the library — which skill applies when, so the others actually get invoked.
obra/superpowers - Writing plansThe plan format the rest of the superpowers library executes against — ordered, checkable steps rather than prose.
obra/superpowers - Writing skillsWhat separates a skill that changes behaviour from one that is ignored — mostly the description field.
obra/superpowers