I was recently asked to run a workshop on AI Skills in May for a collection of folks with varying ranges of experience with the topic. Through that workshop buildout, I honed in on the concept of Skill Patterns.
What are they?
Drop-in techniques for grounding, critique, decision-making, and output shaping — proven approaches you can leverage in a Skill.
What I’ve discovered is that Skill creation innately latches on to these techniques organically (which is nice), but if you feed the concept of patterns to your Skill creation processes, the quality of the Skill can be enhanced.
Where’d they come from?
I landed on the collection of 38 patterns by analyzing all of the official Claude Code plugins’ Skills, their recommended plugins’ Skills, my own Skills, a handful of the most popular Skills on skills.sh, and a bunch of other Skills that I use quite frequently.
Some quick examples
Here are 3 examples. As of the writing of this, there are 38 patterns.
Adversarial pushback
Pits a challenger persona or parallel agent against the work to expose weaknesses before it ships.
What it adds
- Argues the strongest case against the proposal, with reasoning
- Surfaces assumptions that wouldn’t survive scrutiny
- Forces defense of choices instead of quiet acceptance
- Can run blind — the challenger sees only the artifact, not your reasoning, removing the pull to agree
Anti-sycophancy
Bans hedging and hollow agreement — the agent commits to a position, names the weakest point plainly, and pushes past the first polished answer.
What it adds
- Cuts filler agreement (‘great question’, ‘that could work’)
- Commits to a recommendation and says what would change it
- Names the weakest part of the work plainly instead of smoothing it over
Specialist fan-out
Splits a review or analysis across several agents running in parallel, each with a different lens, then merges their complementary findings into one synthesis.
What it adds
- Runs several specialists at once — each owning a distinct aspect — instead of one generalist pass
- Dispatches only the lenses the work actually calls for
- Merges and de-duplicates complementary findings into one ranked result — coverage, not a vote
Trying it out
Definitely check out the Skill Patterns site for some info, as well as installation instructions for the Skill Patterns Skill.
npx skills add borkweb/skill-patterns