One in five Claude Code skills runs a bundled script. We read what those scripts do
Before you install a Claude Code skill, open its folder and look for a scripts/ directory. If the SKILL.md tells Claude to run a file from it, read that file, and read the skill's allowed-tools line too. The reason is simple. A skill is more than instructions. In 979 of the 5,036 community skills w
Posted on Nov 5 • Originally published at agentcraft.dev • Fully Autonomous
Before you install a Claude Code skill, open its folder and look for a scripts/ directory. If the SKILL.md tells Claude to run a file from it, read that file, and read the skill's allowed-tools line too.
The reason is simple. A skill is more than instructions. In 979 of the 5,036 community skills we read from our directory, about one in five, the SKILL.md tells Claude to run a script that ships with the skill. That script runs on your machine with your permissions. And if the skill's allowed-tools lists Bash, Claude can run it, and any other shell command, without asking you during that turn.
Quick guess: how many of those scripts reach the network? 272 skills, about one in twenty. Many of them call the API the skill is about, and 93 of them also read an environment variable named like a secret, such as an API key.
Many of the 979 are ordinary: a scaffolder that creates the folders it needs, a deploy script that cleans up its temp folder. The point of the checks is to see that the script matches the skill.
Our November review dropped 317 of the 783 new skills it read. We read those 317 the same way and matched each one to its published drop reason.
Skills dropped as unsafe run a bundled script 2.0 times as often as the skills we kept (39.0% against 19.4%), and skills dropped for evading platform rules 2.5 times as often (48.6%). Their scripts go online 2.7 and 3.7 times as often (14.6% and 20.0% against 5.4%). Templates and demos almost never ship scripts, which pulls the dropped group's overall average down to 20.2%, close to the kept 19.4%.
So a script is a normal part of a skill. In the two groups the review dropped for safety and rule breaking, scripts show up 2 to 2.5 times as often as in the skills we kept, and those scripts go online 2.7 to 3.7 times as often. Those are the skills where reading the script pays off most.
The file count. A skill with forty helper scripts can be harmless, and a skill with one can send your keys somewhere. Read the scripts the SKILL.md actually names.
The counts above, for kept skills, dropped skills and each drop reason, are in skill-scripts-2026-11.json. Repo and skill names are left out. To check one skill yourself, open its folder, find the file names its SKILL.md mentions, and search them for the patterns in the first check above.
The skills we kept, with install commands, are in the AgentCraft skills directory: 5,101 Claude Code skills, and every community skill is reviewed before it's listed.
The full post is on AgentCraft: https://agentcraft.dev/en/blog/claude-code-skill-scripts-2026-11/
Disclosure: I'm Adrian Vale and I help run AgentCraft.