Reference

The reference appendices: installable skills, format cheat sheets, directive patterns with empirical evidence, and a diagnostic guide for when something’s wrong. Read straight through, or land here from a search.

Pages in this section

  • Front matter cheat sheet — what each tool’s context file expects at the top. CLAUDE.md, SKILL.md, sub-agents, Cursor rules, Aider, Continue.dev, Copilot, Windsurf, AGENTS.md — fields, locations, load behavior, copy-pasteable snippets.
  • Directives that work — phrasings that reliably change model behavior, with the papers behind each. The 12 patterns worth using in CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md / SKILL.md, with explicit notes on which ones backfire on reasoning models.
  • Failure modes — diagnostic guide. The 14 documented ways context resources go wrong, what each one looks like in practice, the empirical evidence, a quick test that confirms it, and the standard fix.

Installable skills

These are raw SKILL.md files following the Agent Skills open standard — originally developed by Anthropic and supported by 30+ agent tools including Claude Code, Cursor, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, and Gemini CLI. Point your agent at them or pull them into your repo.

Install one

Skills live at one of two paths:

# Per-project (committed to the repo, available to everyone on the team)
.claude/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md

# Per-user (available across every project on your machine)
~/.claude/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md

Pull xp-programming-workflow into the current repo:

mkdir -p .claude/skills/xp-programming-workflow
curl -fsSL https://incontext.info/skills/xp-programming-workflow/SKILL.md \
  -o .claude/skills/xp-programming-workflow/SKILL.md

Start a new Claude Code session in that repo and the skill is loaded. Invoke directly:

/xp-programming-workflow implement the points-on-lesson-completion story

Or describe the task — the skill’s description field tells the agent when to apply it on its own.

Available

Skill What it does Install
xp-programming-workflow Runs one XP loop: story → failing test → minimal impl → refactor → atomic commit → reset. Defends against the dumb zone by design. curl -fsSL https://incontext.info/skills/xp-programming-workflow/SKILL.md

Explainers for each skill live under Skills. The XP workflow has its own page for the Beck source and the AI-team adaptation.

Verify a skill is loaded

In any Claude Code session:

/skills

You’ll see the skill listed by name with its description. If it’s not there, check the path and the YAML frontmatter — both name and description should be present.

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