Anthropic's official skill authoring best practices Apply Anthropic's official skill authoring best practices to your skill. Good Skills are concise, well-structured, and tested with real usage. This guide provides practical authoring decisions to help you write Skills that Claude can discover and use effectively. Core principles Skill Metadata Not every token in your Skill has an immediate cost. At startup, only the metadata (name and description) from all Skills is pre-loaded. Claude reads SKILL.md only when the Skill becomes relevant, and reads additional files only as needed. However, bei…