Agent Skills

Five skills for prompts, writing, and teaching.

The repository contains five skills. Each solves a different problem and works with agents that support the Agent Skills format.

Install

Browse the collection and choose where to install it:

npx skills@latest add owainlewis/agent-skills

Install one skill directly:

npx skills@latest add owainlewis/agent-skills --skill teach

Add --global to install for your user account instead of the current project. The CLI supports Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, and other clients that implement Agent Skills.

Update installed skills with:

npx skills@latest update

The skills

Skill	Job	Use it for
deslop	Remove AI writing patterns while preserving meaning and voice.	Replies, emails, documentation, articles, lessons, scripts, and business writing.
teach	Explain how something works or teach the reader how to do it.	Course lessons, technical articles, video scripts, workshops, newsletters, and standalone guides.
clarify	Turn a rough request into a prompt a fresh agent can execute.	Voice dumps, vague plans, incomplete tasks, and prompts that need scope or success criteria.
compress	Shorten information or instructions without losing meaning or requirements.	Prompts, specifications, plans, skills, notes, and brain dumps that cost too many tokens.
explain-visually	Build a responsive HTML page with clear writing and diagrams.	Architectures, flows, changes, comparisons, state transitions, and technical concepts.

Invoke a skill using your agent's normal syntax, such as $teach in Codex or /teach in Claude Code.

Example prompts

Use $deslop to edit this article without losing my dry tone.

Use $teach to turn these notes into a course lesson on how tool calling works.

Use $clarify to turn this voice dump into a prompt for a coding agent.

Use $compress to cut this specification to the smallest version that preserves every requirement.

Use $explain-visually to show how this request moves through the system.

How they fit together

Use clarify to write the prompt. Use teach to create the tutorial. Use explain-visually when it needs diagrams. Use deslop to remove AI writing patterns. Use compress to shorten instructions without losing requirements.

You can use one skill alone or combine them. A typical tutorial workflow is clarify -> teach -> deslop. Add explain-visually when the tutorial needs a diagram.

Design principles

• One skill, one recurring job.
• Plain descriptions that make triggering predictable.
• Instructions that preserve facts, constraints, and user intent.
• Portable Markdown with no required service or framework.
• Examples only when they define behaviour or expose an edge case.
• Automated checks for frontmatter, metadata, links, and repository drift.

Development

Each skill lives in skills/<name>/SKILL.md and follows the Agent Skills specification. Codex UI metadata lives beside it in skills/<name>/agents/openai.yaml.

Run the local checks before committing:

make validate

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the quality bar and contribution workflow.

Software delivery skills such as spec, plan, implement, and task-to-pr live in owainlewis/blueprint.

Credits

deslop is adapted from Lauren Tan's Unslop.

teach is informed by Lauren Tan's Teach, rewritten here for tutorial, course, article, video, and workshop production.

License

MIT