Skills

What a "skill" is

A skill is a small, named capability you can ask Claude to use during a task. Think of it like a specialty: instead of asking "do this whole thing from scratch," you point Claude at the right pre-built skill and it knows the exact procedure.

In this pipeline, skills do the focused supporting work that sits around the main video creation flow — researching what's trending, transcribing reference videos, uploading files to Google Drive, fine-tuning a prompt by iterating with visual judgment, syncing project state to a tracker spreadsheet.

You don't write skills yourself. You invoke them by name and Claude follows the recipe inside.

How you invoke a skill

In a conversation with Claude, just say what you want. The system recognizes phrases that match a skill:

You: research what's trending in the magnesium supplement niche over the last month

Claude: [triggers the last30days skill, runs multi-source research]

Or directly by name:

You: use the whisper skill to transcribe this video → /path/to/video.mp4

Claude: [triggers the whisper skill, produces a transcript with timestamps]

You can also use the /<skill-name> shorthand in some interfaces (e.g. /last30 or /whisper).

Skills used in this pipeline

Skill	What it does	When you'd use it
prompt-tuning	Iteratively refine an image or video prompt across multiple generations with visual judgment between each	A prompt is "close but not quite" and you want it dialed in
tracker-sync	Sync project state to the master Google Sheets tracker	After a workflow ships or hits a milestone
last30days	Research a topic across Reddit, X, YouTube, TikTok, etc. from the last 30 days	At the start of a workflow when you want trend / hook research
whisper	Transcribe a video or audio file, extract dialogue	Reverse-engineering a viral video, or ingesting source material
creator-scanner	Scan a creator account, analyze their hook patterns and viral mechanics	Researching a creator to learn from or model after
notebooklm	Query Google NotebookLM notebooks with citations	Looking up source-grounded answers from research material
gdrive	Upload files to Google Drive, create folders, get share links	Sharing assets with clients or team
avoid-ai-writing	Audit text for AI-isms and rewrite to sound human	Cleaning up a script that reads as AI-generated
xlsx	Create, read, edit Excel files	When working with spreadsheet data outside the gsheets MCP

Where skills fit in the pipeline

flowchart LR
    A[Brief & Setup] -->|last30days<br/>creator-scanner| B[Script]
    B -->|avoid-ai-writing| C[Storyboard]
    C --> D[PatchWork .nbflow]
    D -->|prompt-tuning| E[Generation]
    E --> F[Review]
    F -->|tracker-sync<br/>gdrive| G[Delivery]
    H[Reference video] -->|whisper| A
    I[Research material] -->|notebooklm| A

Skills are tools the Manager and the specialized agents call on when they need a specific capability. You don't have to memorize when to use which one — phrase your request naturally and Claude picks the right skill.

Skill vs Agent — what's the difference?

A common point of confusion:

Skill	Agent
A small named capability ("transcribe this video")	A persona with broad responsibility ("the Script Writer")
Recipe-style — does one thing well	Multi-step — coordinates work, makes decisions
Invoked by name when needed	Delegated to with a brief, returns a finished artifact
whisper, last30days, tracker-sync	Script Writer, Visual Planner, Image Prompter, Generation Runner

Skills are callable functions. Agents are collaborators.