Skills | Josh Finnie

These are the agent skills I use day to day, packaged so you can use them too. Each one is a SKILL.md file that works in Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or any agent that reads skills. The source lives at github.com/joshfinnie/skills, and every skill follows theAgent Skills specification.

Install

Add every skill as a Claude Code plugin:

/plugin marketplace add joshfinnie/skills
/plugin install joshfinnie-skills@joshfinnie-skills
/reload-plugins

Claude Code prefixes plugin skills with the plugin name, so you'd run /joshfinnie-skills:humanize.

Or install a single skill into any agent with the skills CLI:

npx skills add joshfinnie/skills --skill <name>

You can also copy any skill folder from the repo into ~/.claude/skills/ by hand.

The skills

handoff

For when you're running two agent sessions, like one in the API and one in the frontend. Writes a self-contained brief of what changed, the exact contract, and what the other side needs to do, saves it to /tmp, and copies it to your clipboard so you can paste it into the other session.

npx skills add joshfinnie/skills --skill handoff

humanize

Strips AI writing patterns from prose: mechanical transitions, buzzwords, hedging, hype words, forced structure, and flat sentence rhythm, which it measures with a bundled script. Use it while drafting, or point it at text you already have for an audit or a rewrite.

npx skills add joshfinnie/skills --skill humanize

mermaid-gen

Turns an existing codebase into Mermaid diagrams: an architecture overview built from the real import graph, entry points, and deploy config, plus an ER diagram when the project has a schema or migrations. Writes a Markdown file that renders on GitHub and lints it before finishing.

npx skills add joshfinnie/skills --skill mermaid-gen

skill-writing

Writes, reviews, and tests agent skills that follow the Agent Skills specification: descriptions that actually trigger, the right split between SKILL.md and supporting files, a dependency-free validator, and a with-and-without comparison before you publish.

npx skills add joshfinnie/skills --skill skill-writing

staff-review

A thorough review of a branch the way a principal engineer would do it: line by line through the diff, then out into everything the diff touches, like callers, frontends reading a renamed field, queries using a dropped column, and migrations that re-run on deploy. On the default branch it reviews the whole codebase instead.

npx skills add joshfinnie/skills --skill staff-review