Hand your agent the manual.
A skill is one markdown file an agent reads before it calls anything: the verbs, the filters, the prices, the rules of citation. Install one and stop pasting documentation into prompts.
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/1stauthor curl -fsSL https://1stauthor.com/skills/1stauthor/SKILL.md \ -o ~/.claude/skills/1stauthor/SKILL.md
# download the file curl -fsSL https://1stauthor.com/skills/1stauthor/SKILL.md -o SKILL.md # in the Claude app: Settings → Capabilities → Skills → upload # one folder per skill, keep the file named SKILL.md
# plain markdown — hand it to any model curl -fsSL https://1stauthor.com/skills/1stauthor/SKILL.md | your-agent --system-prompt-file -
Each file is generated from the live self-description, so a skill never describes an API that has moved. The skills expect your key in FA_API_KEY — create one in the dashboard.
Start with one
The core skill covers what every domain shares. Add a domain skill when the work is in that domain.
The three verbs, the credits, the error codes, and what each domain holds — everything the domains have in common.
One per domain
Filters, reading levels, extras, citation format, and what the corpus will not tell you.
arXiv full text, structured section by section with a TLDR for each; bioRxiv and medRxiv alongside it.
Statutes from two dozen-odd jurisdictions, retrieved article by article, with translations and article-level extraction.
Chinese judgments: criminal is complete, and the civil backfill has finished too. Against every court document ever published this is still a part, and every response says so in coverage.
Federal and state statutes, regulations and court rules, clause by clause, across 53 US jurisdictions.
Every registered clinical study — design, arms, eligibility, outcomes — one document per NCT id.
US drug labels by set id: what a drug is approved to do, and what it must warn about.
NIH, NSF and CORDIS awards: who was funded for what, with abstracts and amounts.
Corporate filings on both sides of the Pacific — SEC forms, A-share reports, inquiry letters, enforcement.
The Chinese national standards catalogue: which GB applies, its status, and whether the text is public. Catalogue only, not the text.
Researcher profiles: education, career, representative work, open source, with Scholar metrics rendered live. One document per person.
Which academicians and society fellows have cited a paper, in their own words — and a citable appraisal written from those sentences.
Public vulnerabilities with the two things that decide urgency: whether CISA has seen it exploited, and how likely exploitation is.
The Federal Register itself — who changed what, when, and what is still open for comment.
Task skills
Reference skills tell an agent what exists. Task skills will walk it through a job end to end — the search, the reading order, the shape of the write-up. Coming next:
Regenerated with the API 2026-10-14. Read the docs →