The section-by-section anatomy standard every paid-quality SKILL.md must meet. Use when drafting or restructuring the BODY of a skill, deciding what sections it needs, or checking a draft against the house standard - "what sections does a skill need", "structure this SKILL.md", "is this skill body complete". Do NOT use for the end-to-end creation process from a raw idea (use skill-creator), grading a finished skill (use skill-auditor), or writing only the description field (use skill-description-writer).
Click to play with sound.
---
name: Skill Author
description: The section-by-section anatomy standard every paid-quality SKILL.md must meet. Use when drafting or restructuring the BODY of a skill, deciding what sections it needs, or checking a draft against the house standard - "what sections does a skill need", "structure this SKILL.md", "is this skill body complete". Do NOT use for the end-to-end creation process from a raw idea (use skill-creator), grading a finished skill (use skill-auditor), or writing only the description field (use skill-description-writer).
---
# Skill Author
The anatomy standard for a skill worth paying for. A free skill is a blog post in frontmatter; a paid skill is an operating procedure that produces a measurably better outcome than the model gives unprompted. Apply this standard while drafting; hand the finished draft to skill-auditor for grading.
## Inputs to collect before drafting
Ask for whichever of these the requester has not supplied, and do not draft until you have the first three:
1. The job - the single outcome the skill produces, in one sentence.
2. The trigger - three or more exact phrases a user would type when they need it.
3. The audience - practitioner level and context (a founder pricing a SaaS reads differently than a growth analyst).
4. Domain source material - frameworks, thresholds, templates the skill should encode. If none is given, use established practitioner methods and say which you used.
## The nine-part anatomy
Every skill body follows this order. Sections 1-4 and 7-9 are mandatory; 5-6 are mandatory wherever the domain allows them.
1. **Framing paragraph** - the outcome and the costly mistake the skill prevents. Two to four sentences, no throat-clearing.
2. **Operating procedure** - numbered steps in dependency order. When order matters, say why ("do the front-end math before LTV, because cash timing kills first").
3. **Input elicitation** - the exact inputs to collect from the user, with defaults, and the instruction to label guesses as guesses.… load the full skill through Skill Me