developing-skills

Developing Skills

Background

Read wp-labs-superpowers:writing-skills first — it covers skill TDD, frontmatter spec, description writing, SDO, and the full creation checklist. This guide covers plugin-specific mechanics only.

Visibility

Location	Frontmatter	Result
skills/<name>/SKILL.md	(none) or user-invocable: true	Listed, invocable by user
skills/<name>/SKILL.md	user-invocable: false	Hidden from user; Claude auto-loads it
skills/<name>/references/*.md	(no frontmatter)	Internal reference; never auto-loaded

Non-skill reference material (heavy API docs, guides like this one) belongs in references/ inside a skill directory, or in a top-level guides/ directory.

Testing After Editing

edit SKILL.md → sync-cache → invoke skill in Claude → verify behavior

No Claude restart needed. sync-cache (in scripts/) syncs the active cache entry; without it, your edits are invisible to the running session.

Naming

• Directory name = kebab-case = name: field in frontmatter
• Letters, numbers, hyphens only — no parentheses or special characters
• Plugin prefix added automatically: wp-labs-standards:my-skill

Scripts in Skills

Prefer scripts over prose for deterministic behavior. Every script under scripts/ should have a paired test-<script> file. See scripts/sync-cache and scripts/test-sync-cache for the pattern.

Use a hook + setup mode when you want to skip the LLM entirely for a command. See developing-plugins skill for the hook+setup pattern.