Agent Skills

This course teaches you to create, distribute, and compose Agent Skills for Claude Code. By the end you’ll have built three skills, bundled them into a distributable marketplace, and used them in a multi-layer workflow alongside harness and workflow skills.

Before starting, ensure you have:

Claude Code installed and working (claude --version)
An Anthropic API key configured
A GitHub account (for Module 4)
Basic comfort with the terminal and git

What You’ll Build

Throughout this course, you’ll build several skills that form a conference-speaking toolkit:

talk-outliner — Your first skill: generates structured talk outlines with timing breakdowns (Module 2)
abstract-writer — A more advanced skill with templates for drafting CFP abstracts (Module 3)
conf-finder — Discovers relevant conferences matching your interests (Module 4)
trip-report — Generates post-conference writeups with executable components (Module 4)

The last three will be bundled into a distributable marketplace called conference-toolkit that you can share and install across projects.

Course Modules

Introduction to Agent Skills — What skills are, where they live, and how to use one from the Anthropic marketplace.
Creating Your First Skill — Hand-write talk-outliner from scratch with a single SKILL.md file, learning skill anatomy and progressive disclosure.
Advanced Skills with skill-creator — Use skill-creator to generate abstract-writer, then refine it with templates and supporting files.
Marketplaces and Plugins — Build conf-finder and trip-report, bundle them with abstract-writer into a conference-toolkit marketplace.
The Full Monty — Use superpowers + beads + your marketplace together in a real workflow.
Bonus: Programmatic Skills — (Coming soon) Using skills in Deep Agents and skills-calling-skills patterns.

Throughout this course, we’ll call out equivalent patterns for Cursor (.cursorrules) where relevant, though the primary focus is Claude Code’s skills ecosystem.