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Skills System

TL;DR

Skills are SKILL.md files that act as SOPs for Claude Code. Type /morning and Claude follows a step-by-step procedure. Fifteen published skills cover daily planning, meeting prep, document review, content creation, task management, and weekly maintenance. Write your own in under 10 minutes.

What

A skill is a SKILL.md file that acts as a standard operating procedure (SOP) for Claude Code. When you type /morning, Claude reads the corresponding SKILL.md and follows its instructions step by step. Skills are versionable, inspectable, and modular - plain markdown files checked into git.

Why

System prompts are invisible and monolithic. SKILL.md files fix both problems. You can read them, edit them, diff them, and share them. Each skill owns one workflow. When a skill breaks, you fix one file. When you want a new capability, you write one file.

The alternative - cramming everything into CLAUDE.md - produces a bloated instruction file that Claude struggles to follow consistently. Skills decompose that complexity into focused, testable units.

How

SKILL.md Format

Every skill starts with YAML frontmatter:

---
name: morning
description: Generate daily plan with AI prioritisation. Run every morning (5 min).
argument-hint:
allowed-tools: Read, Write, Bash, Glob
model: sonnet
---

Key fields:

  • name - The slash command trigger
  • description - What it does and how long it takes
  • allowed-tools - Which Claude Code tools the skill can use (security boundary)
  • model - Which model to use (sonnet for routine work, opus for strategic analysis)

Below the frontmatter, the skill body defines the procedure: what to read, how to process, what to output.

The Gather-Analyse-Synthesise Pattern

Most skills follow the same three-phase structure:

sequenceDiagram
    actor User
    participant Skill as SKILL.md
    participant Vault as Vault Files
    participant Output as Output File

    User->>Skill: /morning
    activate Skill
    Note over Skill: Phase 1: Gather
    par Read in parallel
        Skill->>Vault: tasks.md
        Skill->>Vault: MEMORY.md
        Skill->>Vault: theme/status.md
        Skill->>Vault: calibration-log.md
    end
    Note over Skill: Phase 2: Analyse
    Skill->>Skill: Apply leverage scoring
    Skill->>Skill: Weight by strategic priority
    Skill->>Skill: Draft follow-ups for stale items
    Note over Skill: Phase 3: Synthesise
    Skill->>Output: Write daily-plan.md
    Skill->>User: Present prioritised plan
    deactivate Skill
  1. Gather context - Read vault files in parallel (tasks, theme status, memory)
  2. Analyse - Apply domain logic (prioritisation, scoring, pattern matching)
  3. Output - Write results to a specific file or present to the user

Skills can spawn Task subagents for parallel execution. The /morning skill, for example, reads tasks and four theme status files simultaneously before synthesising priorities.

Published Skills

Skill Purpose Runtime
/morning Daily prioritised plan ~5 min
/brief Fast pre-meeting one-pager ~2 min
/challenge Red team / critical review ~5 min
/stress-test Multi-persona adversarial debate ~15 min
/transform Process content into vault ~5 min
/draft Outbound content (emails, LinkedIn) ~5 min
/prep Vault research before writing ~10 min
/prompt Structure thinking into briefs ~30 sec
/capture Store rhetorical weapons ~30 sec
/inbox Process captures and route ~5 min
/show Filtered task views ~30 sec
/weekly Archive, audit, review ~30 min
/changelog Inspect iteration decisions ~1 min
/visualise Diagrams from vault notes ~2 min
/evening End-of-day reflection ~5 min

Creating Your Own Skill

  1. Create .claude/skills/[name]/SKILL.md
  2. Add YAML frontmatter with name, description, allowed-tools
  3. Write the procedure as numbered steps
  4. Reference vault paths explicitly (skills should be self-contained)
  5. Test by running /[name] in Claude Code

Key Insight

Skills are SOPs for an AI employee. The same principle applies: if you wouldn't trust a new hire to figure out a workflow from scratch every time, write it down. The SKILL.md file is the written procedure.

Customisation Points

  • Model selection per skill - use cheaper models for routine work
  • Tool restrictions - limit what each skill can access
  • Argument passing - skills can accept parameters (e.g., /brief #project-a @alex)
  • Nesting - skills can reference other skills' outputs