Ai config authoring
Skill grimoire-rs/grimoire/catalog/skills/ai-config-authoring
Package manager for AI-agent config. grim installs, updates, and publishes skills, rules, agents, MCP servers, and bundles into Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, Codex, Gemini, Zed, Amp, Kiro, Junie, and opencode — pinned by digest in a lockfile. Storage is any OCI registry; there is no service to run.
npx -y skills add grimoire-rs/grimoire --skill ai-config-authoringAssembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.
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Craft effective AI agent configuration — skills, rules, agents, and instructions — for any AI coding client. Use when writing or reviewing a SKILL.md, rule file, or agent definition; when deciding between a skill, rule, hook, or always-on instruction; when a config file grows past its context budget; or when a skill description fails to trigger.
The file declares its own license as Apache-2.0. That is the author’s claim about this one file, and it is not the same thing as the license GitHub reports for the repository, which is listed with the other numbers below.
SKILL.md
6.1 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it
AI Config Authoring
Core Principle: Context Is a Budget
Every always-loaded line competes with the user's actual task for model attention, and attention degrades as volume grows — bloated config makes agents ignore the instructions that matter. Pay the always-on price only for content needed every session; defer everything else behind on-demand loading (progressive disclosure). For each line, apply the deletion test: would removing it cause mistakes? If not, cut it.
Budget Table
| Artifact | Budget | Cost is paid |
|---|---|---|
| Always-on instruction file | < 200 lines | Every session, every turn |
| Glob-scoped rule | < 200 lines each | Only while matching files are in play |
| Skill metadata (name + description) | ~100 tokens per skill | Every session, all skills |
| Skill body (SKILL.md) | < 500 lines / < 5k tokens | Only when the skill triggers |
| Skill bundled files | Effectively unlimited | Only when read or executed |
| Subagent | Isolated window | Separate budget; only its summary returns |
| Hook | Zero context | Never — scripts run outside the context |
The Artifact-Type Landscape
The first matching row picks the type. Full comparison — vendor support, failure modes, migration paths — in references/choosing-types.md.
| The content is... | Use |
|---|---|
| Mechanical, must happen 100% of the time, no judgment | Hook |
| Identity, commands, conventions relevant to every task | Always-on instruction file |
| A standard that applies while editing certain files | Glob-scoped rule |
| An occasional procedure or piece of domain knowledge | Skill |
| A side-effectful workflow to run only on explicit request | Manual-only skill |
| Context-heavy research, parallel work, separate privileges | Subagent |
| Something that must port across clients | Skill — the only type every client hosts |
| Logic a machine can run rather than prose to read | Hook, or a script inside a skill |
Root-as-Index Pattern
A root file is a table of contents, not a textbook: state the principle,
compress the comparison, route to depth one level down. This file is the
worked example — it stays inside the budgets it teaches, and every detail
lives in references/, loaded only when a row below matches your task.
Routing Table
| Read... | ...when |
|---|---|
| references/choosing-types.md | Picking an artifact type, or migrating content between types |
| references/skill-design.md | Writing or restructuring a SKILL.md and its bundled files |
| references/rule-design.md | Writing always-on instructions or glob-scoped rules |
| references/agent-design.md | Defining a subagent or designing delegation between agents |
| references/descriptions.md | A skill or agent fails to trigger, or before finalizing any description |
| references/guardrails.md | You want a copy-pastable always-on enforcement card |
| references/checklist.md | Reviewing a config package before publishing or installing it |
| references/updating.md | Maintaining this guide itself — re-research protocol and search terms |
Distributing Config
Config worth sharing across repositories belongs in a package manager,
not copy-paste — versioning, provenance, and an update path matter as
much for config as for code. This skill itself is distributed as an OCI
artifact via grim. To package and publish your artifact with
grim — frontmatter schemas, validation, vendor metadata — read the
companion skill grim-authoring at
../grim-authoring/SKILL.md; both ship
together in the grim-essentials bundle. If that file is missing,
install it by identifier:
grim add ghcr.io/grimoire-rs/skills/grim-authoring:0 # installs by default
# fresh project (no grimoire.toml yet): run `grim init` first
Further Reading
- Agent Skills specification — the cross-vendor SKILL.md standard: frontmatter constraints, directory semantics, size guidance.
- Skill authoring best practices — Anthropic's authoring guidance: descriptions, disclosure patterns, eval-first workflow, anti-patterns.
- Effective context engineering for AI agents — the theory behind every budget above: attention as a finite resource, just-in-time loading.
- Per-client documentation — skills install into ten clients as of 2026
(Claude Code, OpenCode, Copilot, Codex,
Cursor, Kiro, Junie, Gemini CLI,
Zed, Amp), but rules and agents each reach only about
half of them; every
references/file carries the per-client links for the type it covers.