I Tried 100+ Claude Code Skills. These 6 Are The Best
By Nate Herk | AI Automation
Summary
Topics Covered
- Skill Creator Is the Factory That Makes Everything Else Possible
- Superpowers Forces Claude to Work Like a Senior Developer
- Context Rot Destroys Sessions After 30 Minutes
- 40% of Your Context Window Is Garbage After 30 Minutes
- Stop Selling Workflows, Sell the Outcome
Full Transcript
After spending 400 hours in CloudCode, I noticed something. Most people online
noticed something. Most people online are developing fancy skills for the sake of a cool video, but businesses don't actually want that. They want six types of skills. They're simple, they're
of skills. They're simple, they're boring, but they are effective. Skills
that save time, save money, or remove mistakes. And the crazy part is, these
mistakes. And the crazy part is, these six skills are the ones that clients will pay the most for because they allow you to build the best agents at the lowest cost. So, in this video, I'll
lowest cost. So, in this video, I'll show you what they are, why they sell, and how you can use them to sell AI automations. But before we jump into the
automations. But before we jump into the first one, let me show you how I figured all of this out. I've worked with real estate agencies, HVAC companies, coaches, marketing agencies, and more.
And I've seen the same patterns across every business. They're different
every business. They're different industries, sure, but they face the same problems. And these skills keep showing up again and again. So, if you're watching this and you want to make money selling AI in 2026, don't overthink it.
Just start with what the businesses are already paying for. All right, let's get into the first skill. So, the first skill that I install is the one that builds every other skill, and it's called the skill creator. It's one of the official skills from Anthropic. You
basically just describe what you want in plain English, Claude drafts the skill, tests it, iterates on it, and it packages it into something that you can use forever. You don't have to manually
use forever. You don't have to manually touch or edit a skill.md5. You don't
have to figure out the formatting. You
just talk to Claude like you're explaining the job to a co-worker, and you walk away with a skill that runs the same every time. You can even drop in like an SOP, and it would be able to turn that into a reusable skill. So, the
problem it solves is very simple. Most
people who get into ClaudeCode try to write skills manually, and they immediately hit a wall. They don't know the structure, they don't know what makes a skill reliable versus flaky. So,
they either give up or they cobble something together that breaks the second a client touches it. So, the
skill creator removes all of that headache. Now, honestly, the skill
headache. Now, honestly, the skill itself isn't what a client pays for, but every single skill that you're going to sell to an HVAC company, a real estate agency, a coach, whatever, they all come out of this one. It's the factory that
builds the product. So, indirectly, this is the skill that can help make all of the other dollars possible. So, here's a simple example. Let's say a real estate
simple example. Let's say a real estate agency tells you they waste hours every week writing property descriptions.
Without Skill Creator, you'd be writing out the whole skill.md5, figuring out the trigger conditions, testing it over and over, and it would probably break a few times, and you could obviously get to a spot where you have a good working skill. But with the Skill Creator, you
skill. But with the Skill Creator, you can just explain it more naturally, and it will help you build, test, and package it. So, it just compresses that
package it. So, it just compresses that learning curve. To install this, you can
learning curve. To install this, you can run /plugin install skill creator. I'll
put the full command right up here and in the description. And I'll include all of the actual commands that you'll need in the description so you can just copy and paste them. I personally installed this skill globally on a user scope, so no matter what product that I'm actually working in, if I ever need to build a
skill, it just automatically invokes this, and I don't even have to think about it at all. All right, so quick thing before we get into the rest.
You're going to hear me use the word skill throughout this video, but technically some of these are plugins. A
skill is basically a package that you install that teaches Claude how to do a specific job better. It is the markdown file, but a plugin is a bigger package around that skill because it can contain multiple other skills, plus extra things
like hooks or MCP servers. And all of that changes how ClaudeCode behaves under the hood because of that plugin.
Also, because I know you guys are going to say so in the comments, I'm not an AI avatar. This is really me here to speak
avatar. This is really me here to speak to you guys. But anyways, for this video, I'm going to be calling some of these [music] skills because the point isn't the technical category, it's that each one of these makes Claude noticeably better at its job. Anyways,
the next skill is called superpowers, and this one literally gives Claude superpowers. It's a great name. It
superpowers. It's a great name. It
forces Claude to work the way that a senior developer works, meaning instead of jumping in and writing code right away, Claude will now step back and plan the whole thing first. It works in an isolated environment, so nothing breaks your main project. It writes tests
before it writes code. It brainstorms,
and it reviews its own work in two stages. Once for whether it actually
stages. Once for whether it actually matches the spec, and once for code quality. The problem it solves is the
quality. The problem it solves is the number one failure mode when people use ClaudeCode, which is rushed or sloppy code. You ask for something, Claude
code. You ask for something, Claude sprints to write it, and on the surface it looks fine, but then when you start to run it and use it, it falls apart. Or
worse, your client runs it, and it falls apart. So, Superpowers slows Claude down
apart. So, Superpowers slows Claude down just enough to actually think the problem through, and it doesn't let Claude skip steps. So, really any project where you're building software or automations that will actually be put into production needs this skill. An
HVAC company paying for a dispatch system, a marketing agency paying for a custom reporting tool. These clients
don't care how many lines of code you wrote, they care that the system works when their business depends on it.
Without a framework like Superpowers, Claude might write the whole automation in one shot and miss an edge case. But
with Superpowers, Claude can plan it out, it can write the tests, it can find edge case scenarios, and it can catch those gaps before ever reaches your client. Now, it's not realistic to say
client. Now, it's not realistic to say that it's still going to be able to one-shot everything. Ultimately, when
one-shot everything. Ultimately, when you're building, a large part of your job is QA, quality assurance. And on
your first pass, if you can get somewhere like 80% of the way there rather than just like 60% of the way there, that's a win. Fewer debugging
cycles means less time spent fixing things and lower token costs. This is
also why Superpowers is one of the most popular community skills out there with over 150,000 stars on GitHub. So, to
install it, just run this command right up here. I'll put this in the
up here. I'll put this in the description. And by the way, I also made
description. And by the way, I also made a full YouTube video breaking down this Superpower skill and talking about the tokens that it actually spends. So, you
can check that out right up here. All
right, skill number three is called GSD, which stands for get done. And if
Superpowers is about how Claude writes code, then GSD is about the environment that Claude actually writes that code in. Every ClaudeCode user eventually
in. Every ClaudeCode user eventually hits that wall, right? You start a session, things are going great, Claude's nailing everything, and somewhere around halfway through your context window, it starts to fall apart.
You know, code gets sloppy, Claude forgets requirements that you set at [music] the beginning of the session. It
starts skipping steps, and it actually cuts corners, and it might tell you things are done when they're not. And
this is essentially called context rot.
Now, GSD fixes this with context engineering. Instead of letting one big
engineering. Instead of letting one big session slowly degrade, it spawns fresh sub-agents for each task, and each one has a clean context window focused on only what they need to know. So, your
main session stays clean, each task gets the full power of Claude's context window instead of just the leftovers. It
also has built-in quality gates that catch real problems during execution.
Scope production detection catches the planner when it silently drops a requirement that you asked for. Security
enforcement anchors verification to your threat model. These aren't things that
threat model. These aren't things that you'd manually think to go check through, especially if you're not coming from a software engineering background, which is exactly why having them automated really matters. There's also
an autonomous mode if you want to hand Claude a spec and just walk away. It'll
plan, execute, commit, and work through the whole project without you having to babysit it as much. Now, one thing I want to be up front about is that GSD isn't really a token saving plugin. All
of these sub-agents cost tokens, but what it saves you is the hours you'd otherwise spend redoing work that Claude broke because it forgot what you asked in the first place. So, Superpowers
gives Claude the process, plan, [music] test, review, repeat. GSD gives Claude the clean context so that processing actually works every time. So, to
install this one, just run this command in your terminal, and then you can also type /gsd-help inside of ClaudeCode to see what other commands are available within that plugin. Okay, so the fourth one isn't
plugin. Okay, so the fourth one isn't actually a skill that you install, it's already built into ClaudeCode, and most people just aren't using it. It's the
/review command and its more powerful cousin /ultra review. So, when you finish writing code and you type /review, Claude does a structured code review on what you just built. It looks
for bugs, edge cases, and design issues, all of the stuff that a careful reviewer would be flagging. It runs locally, it's fast, it costs you nothing beyond your usual usage tokens. And then we have /ultra review, which launched alongside
Opus 4.7. Now, this one, instead of
Opus 4.7. Now, this one, instead of running locally, it uploads your branch to a cloud sandbox and spins up a fleet of reviewer agents in parallel. Each
agent will attack your code base from a different angle, logic, security, performance, edge cases. And here's the part that's really cool, before any bug shows up on your list, it has to be independently reproduced and verified.
So, you're not going to get a pile of style nitpicks or false positives, you're going to be getting confirmed bugs. Practically, I mean, this fits at
bugs. Practically, I mean, this fits at the end of any ClaudeCode workflow. You
plan with Superpowers, you execute with clean context using GSD, and then before you merge anything important, you run /ultra review to catch the bugs that Claude missed on its own. A few things to know before you run it, you need
ClaudeCode version 2.1.86 or later, you need to be signed in with a Claude account, an API key alone won't work. And when you run the /ultra
work. And when you run the /ultra review, it could take, you know, 10 to 20 minutes, but it runs in the background so that you can keep working.
You'll want to use /review for fast feedback on everything, and you can use /ultra review when you're about to merge something that actually matters, like a big refactor or anything touching payments or auth or a database migration. The kind of commit where a
migration. The kind of commit where a production bug costs way more than the time and the tokens that ultra review may cost you. And also, quick heads-up, ultra review isn't free. Pro and max plans get three free runs to try, it might have changed by the time you're
watching this, but after that, it might cost five to 20 bucks per run depending on size. Once again, you don't need to
on size. Once again, you don't need to go install this if you're on ClaudeCode 2.1.86 or later, just type /review or /ultra review in your terminal, and it should work. All right, this fifth
should work. All right, this fifth plugin is context mode. So, here is the problem. Every tool call that you make,
problem. Every tool call that you make, Claude dumps raw data into your context window. So, a Playwright snapshot might
window. So, a Playwright snapshot might be 56 kilobytes, 20 GitHub issues might be 59 kilobytes. And after about 30 minutes of real work, 40% of your context window is just garbage, log output, raw data, you know, stuff that
you never actually need Claude to look at. And when Claude runs out of space
at. And when Claude runs out of space and compacts the conversation, it forgets what files it was editing, what tasks were in progress, and what you last asked it to do. So, Context Mode's job is to fix both halves of these
problems. First, it keeps the garbage out. When Claude runs a command or
out. When Claude runs a command or fetches a URL, Context Mode routes that call through a sandbox. So, your code runs in an isolated sub-process, the raw output gets captured, and only the part that Claude actually needs comes back
into the context window. Now, according
to their own benchmarks, a 56 kilobyte Playwright snapshot becomes 299 bytes, a 46 kilobyte access log becomes 155 bytes. So, over a full session, 315
bytes. So, over a full session, 315 kilobytes of raw output becomes 5 kilobytes total. That's obviously from
kilobytes total. That's obviously from their published benchmarks, and you can see your own numbers by running /contextmode:ctx-stats at any point. Now, second, and this is the part that I didn't even know I needed until I had it, Context Mode
tracks every meaningful event in your session in a local SQL database. Every
file you edit, every task you create, every decision you make, every error that comes up. When Claude compacts the conversation, it doesn't lose any of that. Context Mode rebuilds a session
that. Context Mode rebuilds a session snapshot and injects it back in. So, the
model picks up exactly where you left off with your files, your tasks, and your last prompt [music] intact.
Practically, what does this mean for your ClaudeCode projects? Sessions that
used to fall apart around the 30-minute mark now run for 3 hours because you don't hit any slowdown. You stop wasting prompts reminding Claude of the context it already had. So, to install this one on ClaudeCode, just type in these two commands right here, and then you
restart ClaudeCode, and that's basically it. The plugin auto-installs the MCP
it. The plugin auto-installs the MCP server, the hooks, and the routing instructions. All right, and now this
instructions. All right, and now this last skill is called ClaudeMem. And if
Context Mode keeps your current session clean, then ClaudeMem is what carries knowledge across all of your future sessions. ClaudeCode starts every new
sessions. ClaudeCode starts every new session from scratch. So, you open up a session and you're explaining the project for the fifth time this month because every new conversation costs you maybe 10 minutes and thousands of tokens just getting Claude caught up. Now, you
can try to solve this with things like your Claude.md files and your memory
your Claude.md files and your memory files, which obviously are important.
And these are plain text files that you write to give Claude persistent project instructions. And those work, but you do
instructions. And those work, but you do have to kind of think about maintaining them by hand. So, if you miss an update on one of those files, then Claude will also miss that context. So, Claude Mem basically takes this completely over. It
hooks into Claude's session life cycle and it automatically captures what happened during your session. It'll look
at the file edits, the decisions, the bug fixes, the commands, things like that. And then, it will use Claude's own
that. And then, it will use Claude's own agent SDK to compress all of that semantic summaries and stores everything into a local SQLite database with vector search. So, when you open up a new
search. So, when you open up a new session, the relevant parts get injected back in automatically. And it also auto generates folder-level Claude.md files
and updates them as you work. So, your
project documentation literally writes itself while you code and it's automated. Now, the part that actually
automated. Now, the part that actually saves tokens is the retrieval. So,
instead of dumping every past observation into your context, Claude Mem uses a three-layer search system. It
first returns a compact index of observations and then, you can pull a timeline around the ones that matter.
And only then does it fetch the full details for the handoff that you need.
So, this repo reports about 10 times token savings on retrieval compared to dumping everything in at the session start. So, practically, all of your
start. So, practically, all of your Claude Code projects, you stop paying the startup tax on every new session.
You stop repeating yourself. You pick up a project where you haven't touched in 2 weeks and Claude already knows exactly what you're working on and what you've decided and where you left off. And
because everything runs locally on your machine with a web viewer, you can actually see what Claude remembers about your project and you can look through it yourself. Now, inside of Claude Code,
yourself. Now, inside of Claude Code, you can install this using the plugin marketplace with the commands right here on screen. Now, one quick warning from
on screen. Now, one quick warning from the repo itself, you don't have to run this npm install command. That installs
the SDK library only and nothing actually works because the hooks never register. So, stick with the two
register. So, stick with the two commands above and that, ladies and gentlemen, was number six on our list today. But real quick, because I know a
today. But real quick, because I know a lot of you guys are doing things with website design or, you know, building out slide decks and whatnot, bonus skill number seven is the official front-end design skill from Anthropic. You just
install it using the command on screen and I would go ahead and just install that globally. So, whenever you're doing
that globally. So, whenever you're doing things like actually designing things in Claude Code, it will make them look a lot less AI-generated because of that front-end design skill. Now, this type of stuff also is natively baked into Anthropic Labs' new product called
Claude Design. But if you do bring that
Claude Design. But if you do bring that project back into Claude Code, you're going to want to use this skill. Okay.
So, now that you know the skills and what they do, here's how to actually sell them. Because I see so many people
sell them. Because I see so many people starting out trying to sell the actual workflow, but you need to be selling something else. You need to be selling
something else. You need to be selling the outcome. You need to be selling
the outcome. You need to be selling saving the business owner 10 hours a week or cutting their admin mistakes and their human error. You need to be selling the results like speeding up their leads or getting them more leads.
That's what they actually want to pay for. So, instead of offering to build an
for. So, instead of offering to build an AI workflow, you're actually just offering to save time, cut costs, and help them focus on making more profit for their business. And there's actually a simple way to start doing this. If
you're brand new, don't try to use all six of these right away. Just pick one, learn it, build out a few workflows using it, and show business owner a demo. They won't really care about your
demo. They won't really care about your experience, they'll care about the value of what you're showing them. And once
you start to understand how these skills work and how they piece together, you're able to build better automations quicker and hopefully for cheaper, which means you can make more demos. You can make more content. You can automate more
more content. You can automate more parts of your own business. All of that experience is going to help you communicate the value of what you know to business owners much better. So, I
know that we covered a ton of information in this video. So, what I did is I threw all of this into a resource guide that you can access for completely free inside of my free school community. You can check that out using
community. You can check that out using the link in the description. And if you want to see exactly how I make money in 2026, then check out this video right up here.
But anyways, that is going to do it for today. So, if you guys enjoyed or you
today. So, if you guys enjoyed or you learned something new, then please give a like. It helps me out a ton. And as
a like. It helps me out a ton. And as
always, I appreciate you guys made it to the end of the video and I'll see you all in the next one. Thanks, everyone.
Loading video analysis...