One plugin.json turns a shelf of skills into something you can switch off as a group
When I sorted my skills by what work they belong to, the set I open almost daily turned out to be 5 percent of the total. Here is how I dropped a .claude-plugin/plugin.json into each group so I could switch a whole shelf off, plus the two loading rules I tripped over on the way.
I counted 42 skills on my shelf, and four of them were just a note saying they had moved
Claude Code v2.1.261 added /skill-doctor. Before running it I counted my own skill shelf from the files, found four tombstones, and learned that the obvious awk one-liner for spotting duplicate plugin names quietly reports skills that are not duplicates at all.
Designing Skills That Stabilize Output: Template Fixing and Decision Guides in Claude Code
A practical design guide for stabilizing wobbly Claude Code skill output: stating when to use it, decision-guide tables, fixing quality with references templates, and traceability rules, with code from real operations.
The Second Half of My SKILL.md Wasn't Being Read: Keeping It Under 200 Lines
Sparked by an observation that Codex CLI stops reading SKILL.md at around 220 lines, a look at how long an agent actually reads, and how to keep SKILL.md under 200 lines by offloading detail into references.