skill-authoring

Ignite UI for React — Skill Authoring

Quick-reference for writing a SKILL.md that agents can discover and load reliably.

Location

Internal, contributor-facing skills: .agents/skills/<name>/SKILL.md
Public skills that ship with the igniteui-react package: skills/<name>/SKILL.md
The folder name must match the name field.

Frontmatter

Field	Rules
`license`	Required. Must specify the license under which the skill is released. Default is MIT.
`name`	Required. Max 64 characters. Lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens only. No XML tags. No reserved words (`anthropic`, `claude`). Public skills use the `igniteui-react-` prefix; internal skills use a plain kebab-case name.
`description`	Required. Non-empty. Max 1,024 characters. No XML tags.

Write the description in the third person: say what the skill covers, then add both markers:

WHEN TO USE: the tasks or triggers that should load the skill.
WHEN NOT TO USE: nearby tasks it does not cover, naming the skill to use instead.

Agents see only name and description until they load the skill, so the description decides whether it is ever used.

Optional keys: user-invocable, argument-hint, compatibility, disable-model-invocation, metadata.

Token Budget

Keep the SKILL.md body under 500 lines.
If it grows past that, use progressive disclosure: keep the overview and core rules in SKILL.md and move detail into references/<topic>.md files.
Link each reference file directly from SKILL.md (one level deep) and say when to read it, so agents load it only when needed.

Public Skills

The release pipeline copies skills/ into the published igniteui-react package, and users copy single skill folders into their own agent directories. So for skills under skills/:

Keep relative links inside skills/: to the skill's own references/ files or to a sibling skill as ../<name>/SKILL.md. Link anything else in this repository by its absolute GitHub URL.
Treat renaming a public skill or moving its files as a breaking change for users who installed it, and say so in CHANGELOG.md.
Record every user-visible change to a public skill under ## Unreleased in CHANGELOG.md.

Checklist

Frontmatter passes the rules above.
The description includes WHEN TO USE: and WHEN NOT TO USE:.
The body is under 500 lines, and every reference file is linked from SKILL.md.
The skill is listed in the Skills table of its README: .agents/skills/README.md for internal skills, skills/README.md and the AI-Assisted Development table of the root README.md for public skills. Internal skills are also listed in the Workflow section of .agents/context/project.md.
Public skills only: every relative link resolves inside skills/, and CHANGELOG.md has an entry.