Validate a skill
Catch the frontmatter and naming mistakes that make ~1 in 5 public skills fail to load.
Roughly one in five public skills fails basic structural validation — which is why they
silently never load. skill-author ships a dependency-free checker so you never ship one
of them.
Run the checker
Point validate.py at any skill folder:
python3 validate.py path/to/skillIt's stdlib-only — no packages to install, no network calls — so it audits clean and runs anywhere Python does.
What it checks
- Frontmatter — required fields present, valid YAML, no missing
name/description. - Naming — lowercase-hyphenated, no spaces, no reserved words.
- Body size — flags instruction bodies past the recommended token budget so the skill stays loadable and fast.
- Structure — the folder layout the spec expects.
Why stdlib-only matters
A validator that pulls third-party packages is itself an audit liability. Ours is a single Python file with no dependencies and no network access — you can read the whole thing before you run it.
Use it in CI
Run it on every skill in a repo as a pre-publish gate — the same discipline behind our "100% spec-valid" claim. This is exactly the gate the maintained line runs, plus security scanning and evals.