Claude Code Skills & skills.sh - Crash Course transcript

Good morning, everyone. How's it going? Welcome back to the channel. Today, we're going to be covering skills for AI agents. And the idea is that this is the only video that you're going to need in order to understand everything related to skills. Okay. So what we're going to be covering is what are agent skills and skills.sh, which is the new CLI by Vercel to manage and install skills. We're going to see a demo of some of the greatest skills that are out there so far.

We're going to show you how to create your own skills. We're going to show you how to share your skills. And we're going to show you some best practices when building your skills. And if we have time, we're also going to cover a little bit about marketplaces and plugins diantropic, which is another more sophisticated way to share your skills. And just as a sneak peek of what we're going to be doing, I'm going to show you how you can turn a website that looks like this into a website that looks much less like AI slop built by Claude using a skill.

So let's get right into it. Okay, so first of all, what are skills? Now, skills actually started back in October of 2025 when Anthropic introduced CloudCode agent skills. And this was a new way to share procedural knowledge for agents. And it's a very straightforward and very simple thing. In short, skills are essentially just markdown files with very straightforward instructions about something very specific. And in order to show you, let me just open this very quick skill right here, which is called Skill Creator.

It's a skill developed by Anthropik, which teaches CloudCode or any other AI agent how to create a skill in itself. And as you can see, it is essentially just a markdown file with very clear instructions about how this works. and up right here at the top if you see the row format of this skill you can see that it has a yaml header with a name and a description parameter now these parameters are very important because these are the only thing that the agent sees in context before actually loading the skill and that's essentially all that skill is a very clear markdown file with very specialized instructions and that's what was introduced officially in October of last year.

Now since then in December of this year we got the open standard which was very quickly adopted by most of the AI agent builders in the world by OpenAI Codex, by Microsoft, by GitHub, by Cursor. Everybody was adopting skills as a way to create portable capabilities for their agents and that's when agent skills, the open standard actually came out. And after that, just a few days ago, actually, Vercel introduced skills.sh, which is a CLI tool that allows you to manage and install skills very, very easily, which is the one that we're actually going to be using to share with you how this works.

But let me just go back to one of the skills to show you a little bit more about how it works. Actually, the skill I want to show you is this one right here. It's going to be front-end design. and as you can see it's a very straightforward skill it contains just a very straightforward markdown file with a very short set of descriptions and instructions on how to build a good front end and this is what we're going to be using so we're going to be loading it there are multiple ways to add a skill to your specific agent but in this case I'm going to show you the easiest one which is with the skill CLI that I just showed you before and the way that we're going to be doing this is that I'm going to be showing this with two different pages.

So here I have a landing page that is like just very straightforward and very dumb, very dull. And we're going to be improving the design using Cloud Code. And so in order to do that, I'm just going to go right here and open Cloud Code again. But in this case, what I'm going to do is I'm going to run clod on two different instances. So the first one I'm going to load clod code right here without the skill and I'm going to ask it to fix the UI of this landing page.

Okay so I'm just going to copy this very straightforward prompt which basically just says fix the style of the UI of the landing page here, make it look modern and appealing, include some additional sections with placeholder text if the text is not available. Include a FAQ pricing section with three pricing plans, a nice hero, a few sections that cover different features, and a CTA email form so that the user can sign up to the newsletter.

And I'm going to send it right here. Just to be clear right here, I'm going to be sending it without a skill. Okay, so there you go. And on the other side, what I'm going to do is I'm going to load the same landing page, but this time with a scale. So what I'm going to do right here is I'm going to be using the npxcli as I told you before and the way to do that is very straightforward. You just do npxscalesadd and then the owner and the repo.

So I'm just going to copy this right here. I'm just going to paste it right here and from here what I'm going to do is I'm going to come back right here to the scales from Anthropic that I told you before I just going to copy the owner and the name of the repo and I just paste it right here It going to ask me if I want to install the package Of course I want to say yes and there we go We can select the skill that we want to use In my case, as I told you before, it is front-end design.

I'm going to enable it for all detected agents, and I'm going to install it in the project scope, not my global scope, and then I'm going to use the SimLink and then just proceed to the installation, and now my skill is installed. If I go to clod and I do slash skills, I will see my frontend design skill right here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy and paste the exact same prompt right here, but this clod instance does have a skill for frontend design, so let's see how it does.

And here it's asking me to accept the changes that it wants to do. And there we go. On the left, we have the first one that is already finished. It finished without the scale, and it does look a little bit better than it was before. It looks very professional, but it still looks a little bit like it was made by AI. And let's see how this one on the side ends up once it's finished. and there we go so now it's finished here we have the super cool design actually I do think it's way better than this one on the left it does look much more professional and most much less like AI slop and as you saw the only thing that we did was use the front and design scale so we went from this AI slope kind of website to this much more professional kind of website.

All right so now that you understand better how the skills work and how you can install them you can go back right here to skills.sh and you can see that here there are a there's a list of a lot of very different skills all of them are very popular and all of them are for very different things. Here for example you can have the skill for remotion for editing videos with cloud code or your ai agent you also have other web design guidelines from versell you have the find skills skill from versell you have an agent browser you have seo audit you have a bunch of different skills that are pretty useful so feel free to take them out and to experiment with them now this right here is probably for another video i'm gonna actually be making a complete video about this but just so you're keep this in mind and keep this as an example of what you can do with this.

Cured Hug and Face, we have a set of very powerful skills in this repository. So if you want to take a look at it, you just go to Hug and Face skills repository right here, and then you go right here to skills, and you will see a list of the skills available. And from here, I want to show you, for example, the model trainer skill, which is a new one. And it literally teaches your AI agent to train or fine-tune a model from scratch with a data set that you can also use the data set from from Hagenface.

So as you can see right here we have the skill.md file which specifies how to do all of the fine-tuning and the training with TRL and then right here you have all the additional references in case your agent requires a more specialized instruction for its specific tasks. So for example the tracheal guide etc and right here you also have the scripts that the agent will run when the task requires it. So for example, a dataset inspector, the estimate cost script, a trend GRPO example, etc.

So you have a bunch of different things right here that are going to be quite useful for your agent. So now let's actually take a look at building our own skill. And in this case, I'm going to be building a skill for one of my personal projects, which is for video editing. So let's take a look at it. All right. So as you can see right here, I have created a new repository where we're going to be creating the skills. Now, the skill that we're going to be creating, we're going to be creating it to share it with other people.

Creating the skill right here will not necessarily load it into our agent. We're just going to be kind of working on a coding project, but not necessarily executing the coding project ourselves. So what we're going to do first whenever you want to initialize a repository or a skill that you want to share in the repository where you want to build it you're going to have to create a new directory called skills and from here you're going to want to create the actual skill that you want now in order to create the skill we're going to want to use the npx skills cli that we had already started using.

So if we do skills right here, help, you're going to see that you have a bunch of different commands available. You can either search for other skills available. You can initialize a skill, which is the one that we're going to be doing. And you can add a new skill, which is what we have already done before So in this example we going to do npx skills initialize and we going to call it video editing But very important remember that this has to be inside my skills directory Okay I just going to initialize it like that And there we go.

Inside skills, we have my new skills.md, skill.md, inside my video editing directory. Okay. So now this right here is already a skill that I can start sharing. And alongside it, I can add scripts, references, additional markdown files, templates etc that I can link to from this skill okay but in this example I'm just going to be creating a very straightforward one and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to install the skill creator skill to teach Claude how to actually create a skill okay so let's do that in order to do that I'm going to use it right here remember that if you go to skills.sh you have wait if you go to skills.sh right here you have a bunch of different skills that you can use one of which is the skills creator by Anthropic so this one was developed by the creator of the skills themselves and you're going to just copy the nice simple copy paste line right here and what I'm going to do just show you you can see that it opens the interactive installer you can either install it for all possible agents which is going to create a bunch of different hidden folders right here but in my case I just want it for cloud code if you have already done that you can you will see this little option right here which is same as last time in my if you don't see that you just go right here and select which agents you want in my case it is only cloud codes I'm going to enter the scope in this case I want it to be restricted to this project I don't want all my projects to be able to use this skill.

So I'm just going to select that. I'm going to use copy tool agent since there's only one. So I'm just going to go for that. Now let's proceed to it. And there you go. So as you can see, that has created my .cloud hidden directory with my skills. And inside of it, we have the skill creator skill, which basically has the instructions on how to create a skill written by Anthropic right here. And now I can actually ask Cloud Code to create a skill inside this file right here for whatever I want, okay?

So let's open this back right here. And now that this thing is installed, let me just show you that I actually have it available. If I do skills available, you can see that the project skills, we have skill creator, okay? and this is the one that we're going to be using. So let's actually have it create this skill. So in order to create the skill, what we're going to do is, first of all, the skill that we want to create is a skill for this CLI.

So I actually use a CLI tool to edit most of my videos. So I basically remove the silences, remove all of the, enhance the audio, maybe clip some stuff, enhance the videos, and then concatenate the clips, et cetera. And all of that, I do it with a very straightforward CLI tool that I coded in the past few months. And what this does is it essentially allows me to use these commands right here. So video tool pipeline, video tool video transcribe, or video tool video timestamps to generate the timestamps of my video.

And I can already use it, but I want to teach Claude to use it. So I can just copy this URL, go right here and ask it. And I'm going to paste the URL of my GitHub repository so that it is able to actually read my code. Now, something very interesting about this is notice that my skill is completely contained inside a skills directory. So I can have a bunch of different things right here. So I could actually be doing inside the GitHub, inside the actual repository of the CLI, just add the skill to teach my agents how to use the CLI contained in that same directory, which is actually what I have already done.

I'm going to show you in just a moment. But let's just execute this and see how it does. And there we go. We have the skill that is already created. And you can see that it was created right here. And it was created by Cloud Code, which is, of course, great. And ideally, my code is already able to install it and use the CLI tool, user wants to process a video, installation, how to install the CLI tool, how to configure it, how to process videos, how to concatenate them, etc.

So this is already very useful. Let's just save this and push it to a repository. Alright, now right there I just showed you how to create a skill from scratch, but actually I'm just going to show you how the actual skill looks like in production. So right here I have the skill actually not in its own repository but in the repository of the same CLI that it is teaching the agent how to use and that is convenient in my case because the skill is completely dependent on this tool which makes it much easier to update the skill whenever my tool because they all in the same repository and I can just have clod update the skill if I update the CLI too So remember that the entire set of skills that you going to have in your repository is going to live inside the skills directory and inside of here I have my skill which is video tool and right here I have actually added a few extra files so I have my main skill.md file with the description.

Remember, the description is very important to describe to Claude or to your agent what this skill actually does so that it can actually load it into context if it is necessary. And here's the description. I also have a few workflows right here that are quite useful. And I have some templates because I also use it to generate descriptions and to generate SEO keywords and social media posts, etc. So, as you can see, this is what a skill looks like and it is inside the skills directory and this is exactly the same as what is happening, for example, at Anthropic they have their skills repository, but within it they have the skills directory with all the skills just like I showed you.

So, right here they have their, for example, the frontend design with the skill.md file. Here, for example, let me show you the one from Hugging Face. As you can see right here, if I go to my repository at Hugging Face, you can see that this is the entire repository where all the skills are located, but all the skills actually live inside this skills repository right here. And this is very useful because this is actually a plugin, like an actual plugin that you would have to add as a marketplace to Cloud Code if that is what you wanted to do.

But in this case, I'm just using it as a skills repository. And here, if we go inside skills, you have all the skills available, which, for example, you have the model trainer, which I already showed you with the skill.md scripts, and that's all. So now that I have uploaded this skill right here, I can actually install it in Cloud Code. If I just remove this right here and I do npx, and I add this skill right here, it's going to ask me which one I want so I wanted to use flood code I want it to be in this project and I want it to be a sim link and there we go so I can just say yes and there you go so now it has effectively installed my skill let me just open that actually open this again just to show you here we have inside my agents here we have my video tool skill which is the one that i just cloned from my repository from up here okay so that is how you create your own skills and how you share them with skills.sh which is likely the most i mean the easiest way to create your your skills for your agents so definitely take a look at it try it out if you have workflows that you'll find yourself doing over and over in Cloud Code or your own AI coding assistant like Codex, et cetera, feel free to just create your skill for it.

And at first, it will most likely not work. You're going to have to work iteratively on that skill until you achieve a state where you can actually just delegate to Cloud the whole thing. That's how this works. You have to teach Cloud also the edge cases to make sure that it handles them well, add them to the skill. Always remember to use the skill that I showed you, which is skill creator. And there you go. Now you know how to create skills, where skills come from, what they actually are, and how to share them.

And last but not least, let's talk about the best practices right here. So always remember that you can start by using the existing skills to actually get a hang of them. Also create your own custom skills where you have very specific workflows that you want CloudCode or your own agent to learn how to do. Share the useful ones with the community so that they can also take advantage of them. Use global installs for tools that you're probably going to want to be using over different projects.

So for example, skill creator can be a good one or front-end design if you're a front-end designer. And use project installs if this is a skill that you're going to want to use only for the project that you're currently working on. And there you go. Remember also to generate log files once you have validated that your skill works correctly so that you don't accidentally start using a skill that you did not validate. And there you go.

Just remember that in order to use skills, the skills CLI by Vercel actually makes it very easy and very straightforward to initialize new skills and to load skills from other repositories that are already out there on GitHub. Also, remember that in order to create your skills, All you have to do is create a skill directory inside the skills directory of your repository. And in it, you're going to have to add your skill.md file, which is going to be the entry point of your agent for that skill.

And then all the additional resources that are going to be linked to from this skill.md. And your agent is going to figure out all the rest by using the skill creator skill. So there you go. Thank you very much for watching. and I'll see you in the next one.