Harvard Agentic Science — Shared Skills

Skills are reusable agent files that give Claude Code or Codex a specific role and set of instructions. Each skill has two files:

• skill-name.md — The agent file. This is what Claude reads. It contains frontmatter (name, description, model) and the agent's instructions. You drop this into .claude/agents/ in your project.
• description.md — A human-readable description. This explains what the skill does, how to use it, and what options it has. This is what you read when deciding whether to download it.

Browse the skills/ directory to see what is available.

This repository can also include shared workflow utilities. Utilities are not agent prompts; they are installable scripts or configuration packages that make research computing workflows easier to reproduce.

Using a Codex plugin

Codex plugins package reusable skills so they can be installed across research repositories. Add this repository as a marketplace once:

codex plugin marketplace add Harvard-Agentic-Science/Skills

Then install a plugin:

codex plugin add grant-researcher@harvard-agentic-science

Start Codex in any Git repository and invoke it explicitly:

Use $grant-researcher to research "NSF Physics Frontiers Centers" and create a grant workspace in this repository.

Available Codex plugins:

• grant-researcher — researches a funding opportunity, prior awardees, competitors, collaborators, requirements, and project fit, then creates a sourced proposal workspace under grants/.

Using a skill

1. Find a skill in skills/ that fits your task.
2. Read the description.md to see what it does.
3. Copy the agent .md file to .claude/agents/ in your project.
4. Run it by name: "run the paper-reviewer agent."

Or just ask Claude to do it:

Go to https://github.com/Harvard-Agentic-Science/Skills and download the paper-reviewer skill. Save it to .claude/agents/paper-reviewer.md in my project.

Using a utility

Utilities live under utilities/. Read the utility's README before running its installer.

Available utilities:

• utilities/fasrc-vscode — installs the fasrc command for opening VS Code on FASRC SLURM compute nodes, with shared Remote-SSH, LaTeX Workshop, Claude Code, ClaudeTeX, and OpenAI Codex setup.

Example:

cd utilities/fasrc-vscode
./install.sh --user YOUR_FASRC_USERNAME
fasrc setup

Contributing

For skills, add a folder under skills/ with both the agent file and a description. Use the templates in template/ as a starting point:

• template/skill-template.md — Template for the agent file
• template/description-template.md — Template for the description

For utilities, add a self-contained folder under utilities/ with a README and any install scripts or configuration files it needs.

For Codex plugins, add a valid package under plugins/ and register it in .agents/plugins/marketplace.json. Keep reusable workflows in the plugin's skills/ directory and include deterministic scripts for repeatable setup.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full walkthrough.

More context

For background on agentic workflows and how skills fit into a research workflow, visit https://ai.physics.harvard.edu