The skill-starter skill: bottle the job you keep asking for

You've asked Claude for the same kind of thing three times now. Same explanation retyped, slightly different answer every time, and you fixed the gap by hand each time. That's the signal. A skill freezes the good version so it comes out the same way from one slash command.

skill-starter interviews you about that job and writes the skill for you. It asks what goes in and what comes out, the sloppy phrases you'd actually type at 11pm, how you'd do the job by hand, and where the result should get saved. Then it writes a real SKILL.md into your skills directory and tells you how to test it.

This is the one in our freeskills repo that changes what you are. The other 54 are somebody else's job bottled up. This one bottles yours, and the skills you build for yourself are the ones you'll run every week.

Three lines: clone the repo, make the skills folder, copy this one across. A skill is just a folder with a SKILL.md inside, which is exactly what this one goes on to write for you later.

Restart Claude Code, or start a new session. Setup is finished. No API keys, no config, nothing to sign up for.

Type /skill-starter. The first thing it does is check the job is real: what is it, and how many times have you asked Claude for it? Fewer than two and it tells you to wait, because you'd be guessing at the steps. Do the job by hand once more and come back.

Then it interviews you. What goes in and what comes out, in concrete words. The five to eight ways you might phrase the request months from now, including the sloppy ones. How you'd do the job by hand, start to finish. And the exact file path where the result should land, because chat output disappears and a file doesn't.

It writes ~/.claude/skills/your-slug/SKILL.md, where your-slug is the short name you picked, and that name becomes your slash command. It prints the whole file back in the chat and tells you to restart. Skills load when a session starts, so the one you just wrote won't appear until you open a new one. If your slash command still doesn't show up, the folder name and the name field inside the file don't match.

Bring a real past attempt to the interview. The prompts you already used are the best raw material there is.

The most common failure is a skill that sits there and never runs, because it was described in tidy language and you type clumsy language. Give it your real phrasing.

Skills are files you can edit any time. The moment a result comes out wrong, change the skill rather than patching it in the chat.

Here is what this one does and why it is the skill that changes what you are.

1. 1Hook: there's a brand new free Claude skill that takes you from retyping the same long explanation every week to running that whole job with one slash command you made yourself.
2. 2Mechanism: you name the job you keep re-explaining, and it checks you've done it enough times to know the shape. Then it makes you finish the sentence this takes blank and gives me blank, collects the sloppy phrases you'd really type when you want it, and walks your steps with you one at a time. What comes out is a working skill of your own, in your words, that saves its result to a real file.
3. 3Transformation: you stop being someone who uses tools and start being someone who builds them. The job you kept re-explaining now takes one line, and it comes out the same way every time.
4. 4Close: this is one of 55 free skills we put out, and this is the one that lets you make number 51 yourself. If you want the whole path, Claude Code Club is $9 a month, link below.

Pick the job you're most tired of explaining, run the skill tonight, restart Claude Code, and do one real job with it. Keep the first version small. A rough skill you actually run beats a perfect one you abandoned halfway through.