Create Agent SOP

Meta-skill for generating SOP skills that autonomous agents can execute without human intervention.

When to Use

• Creating workflow skills (e.g., feature-development-loop, weekly-review)
• Procedural skills with clear start/end states
• Skills requiring deterministic, repeatable execution

Process

1. Gather Requirements

Ask user for:

• Workflow name (hyphen-case, e.g., feature-development-loop)
• Trigger phrases (when should this SOP activate?)
• Steps (what are the major phases?)
• Success criteria (how do we know it's done?)

2. Initialize Skill

pnpm exec tsx .claude/skills/create-agent-sop/scripts/init_sop_skill.ts <name> --path .claude/skills

3. Write SKILL.md

Follow the template in references/sop-template.md. Key sections:

---
name: <skill-name>
description: <what + when to use>
---

# <Skill Name>

## Prerequisites
[Tools, permissions, state requirements]

## Input Schema
[Typed parameters with defaults]

## Procedure
[Numbered steps with @command tags]

## Success Criteria
[Verification checks]

## Error Recovery
[Fallback paths]

4. Add Tools (Optional)

Before adding scripts, evaluate if the functionality should be a CLI tool instead:

| Consider CLI Tool When | Use Script When | |------------------------|-----------------| | Multiple clients could use it | Skill-specific logic only | | Reusable across skills | Simple validation/checks | | Complex logic worth maintaining | Glue code between tools | | Would simplify the script significantly | One-off operations |

CLI tools go in packages/cli/ and are invoked via sp or tool-specific commands. Skills can then call these tools, keeping scripts minimal.

Scripts go in scripts/ for skill-specific operations:

scripts/validate.sh      # Prerequisite checks
scripts/check-state.ts   # Skill-specific state validation

5. Validate

Run the validation script to check against the 10 SOP characteristics:

pnpm exec tsx .claude/skills/create-agent-sop/scripts/validate_sop_skill.ts <skill-path>

Output shows pass/fail for each characteristic. See references/sop-characteristics.md for details.

6. Package

Create a distributable .skill file:

pnpm exec tsx .claude/skills/create-agent-sop/scripts/package_sop_skill.ts <skill-path> [output-dir]

Validates first, then creates <skill-name>.skill (zip format).

References

• references/sop-characteristics.md - The 10 characteristics explained
• references/sop-template.md - SKILL.md template for SOPs