Zorost Agent Skills: Catalog

Reusable, harness-agnostic agent skills for AI engineering work, authored by Zorost Intelligence and shipped with AI Engineering Lab.
A skill is procedural memory you can hand to an AI coding agent: one SKILL.md file that turns a senior engineer's workflow into steps the agent follows every time. This catalog is Zorost's own set, written from the practice behind the 24-week program, tested against the ZoroLogistics case study, and designed to be read by humans as easily as by agents.

What a skill is (and is not)

	Skill (this catalog)	Prompt	Tool / MCP server
Form	A `SKILL.md` file of instructions	One message	Running software
Loaded	On demand, when the task matches	Once	Always available
Teaches the agent	How to do a class of task	What to do once	What it can call
Fails safely	Steps + verification gates	n/a	Type errors

A skill is not software. It installs nothing, calls nothing by itself, and never replaces a test, an eval, or a human gate. It sequences those things so the agent cannot skip them when you are not watching.

The Zorost skill standard (how every skill here is written)

Every skill in this catalog follows the same anatomy, in the same order:

SKILL.md
├── frontmatter     name · description · version · author · license · tags
│ The description is the picker hint, agents choose skills by it.
├── 1 · Purpose      One sentence. What the skill makes true.
├── 2 · When to use  Trigger conditions. When NOT to use it is listed too.
├── 3 · Inputs       What the agent must collect before step 1.
├── 4 · Procedure    Numbered steps. One action per step. Verbs first.
├── 5 · Anti-rationalization  The excuses agents give, and the answers.
├── 6 · Red flags    Observable signs the work is going wrong.
├── 7 · Verify       Evidence that must exist before the skill exits.
└── 8 · ZoroLogistics example   The skill applied to the program's case study.

The writing rules are adapted from ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, the controlled language aviation uses so a tired mechanic cannot misread a step. Zorost applies the same discipline to agent instructions (see OneRead, our STE type-checker):

One action per sentence. If a sentence has two verbs, it is two steps.
Imperative verb first. "Run the eval.", never "You should run the eval."
Warnings before the step they protect, never after.
Numbers over adjectives. "Stop after 3 failed attempts", never "retry a bit".
No vague verbs. Replace handle, manage, deal with with the actual action.
Name the evidence. Every skill ends with what must exist, a file, a score, a passing test, not with "make sure it works".
The agent must be able to fail honestly. Every procedure has an explicit STOP condition and says what to report when it fires.

Installing the skills

Skills are plain Markdown. Any harness that reads instruction files can use them.

bash

# Skills CLI (installs into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, OpenCode, and more)
npx skills add zorost/ai-engineering-lab --path reference/skills/agent-skills

# Or browse first
npx skills add zorost/ai-engineering-lab --path reference/skills/agent-skills --list

Manual install, copy the skill folders you want into your harness's skills directory:

Harness	Where skills live
Claude Code	`~/.claude/skills/` or `<repo>/.claude/skills/`
Cursor	`.cursor/skills/` (rules for short policies only)
OpenCode	referenced from `AGENTS.md` / `opencode.json`
Hermes-class agents	`~/.hermes/skills/<category>/`
Any other agent	paste the `SKILL.md` body into the system/rules file

Pick skills by description match, the same way the agent does: read the one-line description in the catalog below, open only the skill that matches your task.

The catalog

Define: decide what "done" means before building

Skill	One-line description	Program week
spec-first-ai-feature	Write the one-page spec, user, golden set, metric, gate, before any AI code.	W13
eval-first-development	Build the golden set and the scorer before touching the prompt or model.	W6, W11

Build: construct the AI component

Skill	One-line description	Program week
prompt-suite-versioning	Treat a prompt as a versioned artifact with a score; change one variable at a time.	W6
context-budget-audit	Audit the seven claimants on the context window and set a working ceiling.	W6
rag-pipeline-checkup	Verify a RAG pipeline end-to-end: chunks, embeddings, retrieval, rerank, citations.	W7
local-model-fit	Compute the VRAM budget and pick a model + quantization before downloading anything.	W8 to 9
fine-tune-readiness	Decide whether fine-tuning is justified, and gate the dataset before training.	W10
agent-loop-safety	Wrap an agent loop with step limits, cost caps, human gates, and a trace.	W14
mcp-server-craft	Design MCP tools that are narrow, typed, idempotent, and documented.	W16

Verify: prove it works

Skill	One-line description	Program week
error-analysis-50	Read 50 real failures, cluster them, fix the largest class, extend the golden set.	W11
ai-output-review	Review AI-generated code or text: spec diff, verifier run, secret scan, smell list.	W12 to 13

Ship & operate: run it in production

Skill	One-line description	Program week
agent-ops-handoff	Move an agent from laptop to operated: tracing, cost dashboard, alerts, rollback.	W17
cloud-deploy-gate	The pre-deploy gate for Foundry / Vertex / Bedrock: evals, budget, guardrails, owner.	W18 to 20

Skill	One-line description	Program week
using-zorost-skills	How to pick, run, and amend skills from this catalog. Start here.	all

How these skills relate to the ecosystem

The SKILL.md format is an emerging open convention (see agentskills.io) used across Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode, Hermes-class agents, and community packs. Good public collections to study after this one:

addyosmani/agent-skills, the software-lifecycle pack (spec → plan → build → verify → review → ship) that popularized anti-rationalization tables.
emilkowalski/skills, domain-expertise skills (design, animation) showing how taste gets encoded.
ComposioHQ/awesome-claude-skills a community index of skill packs.
Orchestra-Research/AI-Research-SKILLs research-workflow skills.
kepano/obsidian-skills, vault and note-management skills.
Romanescu11/hermes-skill-factory generating Hermes-format skills from specifications.
nextlevelbuilder/ui-ux-pro-max-skill a UI/UX review skill.

What makes this catalog different: these skills are AI-engineering skills, not general software skills, they encode the program's core doctrines (evals first, one variable at a time, the seven-claimant budget, single agent first, evidence at exit) as steps an agent cannot silently skip. They are also the same skills the 24-week curriculum teaches a human, so by Week 12 you can read your agent's playbook because you wrote it.

Authoring a new skill (the checklist)

Earn the right first: use the workflow by hand on a real task, collect the steps you actually took and the failure you actually hit, then:

[ ] One skill, one class of task. Two tasks = two skills.
[ ] Frontmatter description is a concrete picker hint with trigger words, the agent will choose the skill on that sentence alone.
[ ] Procedure steps follow the clarity rules above (imperative, one action, warnings first, numbers over adjectives).
[ ] Anti-rationalization table has at least three rows you have heard or caught yourself thinking.
[ ] Verify section names evidence that must exist, not vibes.
[ ] ZoroLogistics example included, so the skill stays teachable.
[ ] Add the row to this catalog and cross-link the related program week.
[ ] Run python scripts/check_links.py from the repo root.

Zorost Agent Skills: Catalog ​

What a skill is (and is not) ​

The Zorost skill standard (how every skill here is written) ​

Installing the skills ​

The catalog ​

Define: decide what "done" means before building ​

Build: construct the AI component ​

Verify: prove it works ​

Ship & operate: run it in production ​

Meta ​

How these skills relate to the ecosystem ​

Authoring a new skill (the checklist) ​