Paperthin

Paperthin is an open-source set of agent skills that turns classic engineering practices into habits for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and others.

Paperthin is a collection of low-level design patterns for AI agents, packaged as skills that work with Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Antigravity, Copilot, Cursor, Grok Build, Pi, Hermes, OpenClaw and other agents. Each skill turns a piece of established engineering practice into something the agent reaches for on its own, such as re0 for rewriting a drifted document or file into a clean version, readchk for checking its reading of a request, aim for proposing intent from handed-over data, and modelchk for choosing the cheapest sufficient model and reasoning effort. Some skills are read-only checks and others act, and they are organised in a map by how many artifacts and how much time they cover. A single install command links the skills into every agent the user has, they update automatically, and a command upgrades them on request. The project is open source on GitHub.

Paperthin at a glance

Best for: Software engineer
Runs on: CLI, open source
Pricing: Free and open source
Released: June 2026
Category: AI coding tool
Website: github.com/LilMGenius/paperthin

Key features

Engineering-practice skills for coding agents
re0, readchk, aim, modelchk and many more
Works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and others
One install for every agent on the machine
Automatic updates through symlinks
Model-invoked and user-invoked skills

Use it for

Stop an agent from patching a drifted file over and over
Have an agent confirm its reading of a vague request
Pick a cheaper model tier for a simple task

Companions

Tools that articles about Paperthin recommend using with it, each with its job.

Claude Code — Built to work with Claude Code.
Codex — Built to work with Codex.
Cursor — Built to work with Cursor.
Context7 — Provides up-to-date documentation for AI agents and code editors.
Superpowers — Brainstorm, plan and execute skills for bigger tasks.
Playwright MCP — Enables LLMs to interact with web pages using structured accessibility snapshots.

Alternatives to Paperthin

Agent Skills — Encodes senior-engineer workflows and quality gates into 24 skills.
pstack — Improves AI coding agent outcomes with rigorous workflows.
Paper Menu — It inventories local skills and creates a structured project directory before execution.
Papermorph — Converts static PDF documents into interactive and narrated web books.
Agent Scripts — One place for AGENTS.md, skills and hooks across coding agents
Paper2Agent — It enables direct interaction with research papers and automatic result reproduction.
Claude Skills Pack — 388 production-ready skills across 13 tools with zero-dependency Python tools.
Skill Seekers — Converts 18 data sources into structured AI skills for 22 platforms.
Tech Leads Agent Skills — Extends AI coding agents with security-scanned, specialized workflows and tools.
Waza — Embeds structured engineering habits into AI agents to prevent generic, imprecise output.
Tstack — Automates complex pull request workflows and multi-model code reviews.
Skill-Up — Measures behavior across cases and compares runs with and without skills.

All Paperthin alternatives