makerskills

AI agent skills for the personal operator's craft. Decisions, research, second-brain workflows, content rotation, scenario modeling, CFO cadence, domain hunts, and the meta-skills to author more.

Built for founders and indie operators. Works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other Agent Skills hosts.

Site: maker-skills.com

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Install

# In Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add coreyhaines31/makerskills
/plugin install makerskills@makerskills

Or symlink for local dev:

git clone https://github.com/coreyhaines31/makerskills ~/code/makerskills
ln -s ~/code/makerskills ~/.claude/plugins/makerskills

See INSTALL.md for env vars, personal-config setup, and runtime dependencies.

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Getting started — 5-minute path

New to the plugin? Do these in order. Everything else can wait until you need it.

1. Install the plugin (above), then set the base env var in ~/.zshenv:

export MAKERSKILLS_CONFIG="$HOME/.config/makerskills"

Reload your shell.

2. Run your first skill — start with decide. No config required:

/decide

It'll ask what decision you're facing, pick the right questions from the 37signals framework, and archive the result with a revisit date. That's the first-touch experience: any skill in this plugin. Structured input → structured output → written to disk.

3. Read one SKILL.md to see the pattern:

open ~/code/makerskills/skills/decide/SKILL.md

Each skill is a workflow doc — you can invoke via /decide OR read the SKILL.md and run the steps by hand. The plugin is documentation-first; the automation is a side effect.

4. Try one more skill that involves personal config, so you understand the pattern:

/paste twitter

It'll read your clipboard, strip formatting, warn if over 280 chars, and copy back the cleaned output. First invocation may prompt you to install pbcopy-adjacent deps if missing. No config file needed — this is a pure utility.

5. Now branch out. Skim The 24 skills below and pick one that maps to a workflow you're already doing manually. That's the highest-leverage adoption path.

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Which skill do I invoke when?

Routing table for common operator jobs. Match your intent → skill.

I want to...	Skill
Think through a decision with a real fork	decide
Break through a wall ("this seems impossible")	unstuck
Get a board of famous founders to weigh in	maker-council
Pressure-test a new business or product idea	business-brainstorm
Research a topic with citations	deep-research
Find an available .com for a new project	domain
Watch known sources daily and feed the good stuff into my brain	radar
Capture / query / lint my personal knowledge base	second-brain
Same but for a team-shared knowledge base	company-brain
Extract notes / highlights / summaries from a book	read-book
Extract a transcript or key moments from a video	watch-video
Turn a call transcript or client message into issues + reply	ingest
Hand a task to Codex / Gemini / another model, or get second opinions from several	castmate
Fetch any social post by URL as structured data	social-fetch
Plan / draft social content rotation across a portfolio	jab-hook
Draft, update, convert, or export a slide deck	slide-deck
Clean terminal output for Slack / LinkedIn / X / Notion etc.	paste
Manage projects across businesses (kanban)	pm
Model personal financial scenarios (house, cash flow, etc.)	personal-cfo
Run monthly / weekly CFO for a company or agency	company-cfo
Cut GitHub Actions minutes and CI wait time	ci-audit
Create, adapt, or update a skill	skillify
Wire up an integration / API / MCP into a project	toolify
Set up an agent loop or scheduled task	loopify

Not sure between two? The skill's SKILL.md description always includes trigger phrases and disambiguation from adjacent skills.

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The 24 skills

Meta — extend Claude Code (the -ify trifecta)

Skill	What
skillify	Create, adapt, or update a skill in any sibling repo. Three modes: CREATE (from-chat / from-video / from-dump / from-scratch), ADAPT (port external skill with license check + attribution), UPDATE (improve existing skills with cross-skill propagation + semver discipline), TEST (role-play users through a skill and judge transcripts against a rubric).
toolify	Wire up an integration, API, MCP server, or third-party service into a Next.js or Rails project. Interactive wizard for auth, env vars, client wrapper, webhook handling, and smoke-test.
loopify	Set up an agent loop, cron-scheduled task, or recurring workflow. Judgment layer on top of ScheduleWakeup / CronCreate / /loop — picks pattern (dynamic / cron / one-shot), tunes delay for cache windows, enforces idempotency + bail-out conditions.

Decision & strategy

Skill	What
decide	37signals decision framework (38 questions + house additions like Q39 opportunity cost, triaged to 6–8 per decision). Archives with revisit dates.
business-brainstorm	Pressure-test a new business or product on 9 dimensions. Composes with deep-research + domain.
domain	11-step .com domain hunt on Laura Roeder's "availability-first, never fall in love with a name" methodology. Multi-tool ensemble: Vercel CLI + whois (per-TLD) + Domainr API + Namecheap API + rdap.org (modern TLDs) + agent-browser for USPTO trademark screening + aftermarket click-throughs (HugeDomains / Afternic / Sedo / Dan). Handles bare-word + prefix/suffix brainstorming, budget filtering, negotiation guidance, and social handle checks.
deep-research	Multi-source research with citations + archive. WebSearch, WebFetch, agent-browser, /last30days, memory.
unstuck	The roadblock antidote. Classifies what kind of "no" you hit (assumption / framing / gatekeeper / tool / resource / physics), runs targeted lateral-thinking techniques from a 10-technique inventory, 10-angle minimum before evaluating. Agents run it on themselves before reporting any dead end. Upstream of decide.
maker-council	Simulated personal board of advisors — Fried, Musk, Bezos, Jensen, Iger, Graham, Naval, Blakely, Cohen. Seats 3–5 by question type with a designated dissenter; members open blind, debate, and vote on a draft, grounded in documented frameworks (optional live-research pass). Returns scored options, the spread, the dissent, and a call; every round is kept. Custom members via config dir.

Knowledge & content consumption

Skill	What
second-brain	Karpathy LLM Wiki workflow over any markdown vault. Capture / compile / query / lint / connect / search. Personal-scope.
company-brain	Team-scope sibling to second-brain. Structured raw dirs (people / companies / meetings / sops / decisions / customer-language / recurring-questions / sales-objections), multi-author attribution, sensitivity tagging, trust levels + a /cb review culling pass so unreviewed or deprecated info never poisons answers, optional auto-sync from Fathom / Gong / Granola / CRM. Backbone for a Company Brain Setup productized service.
radar	Standing surveillance on known sources — YouTube channels, RSS/blogs, subreddits, Hacker News, X, LinkedIn, keyword searches. Polls on a daily schedule (launchd or systemd), fetches only what's new (per-source state files), scores it against your stated focus, writes one digest to the vault, and auto-captures only what clears the bar. Everything else waits in the digest until you promote it. Fills raw/ for second-brain to compile.
read-book	PDFs, EPUBs, MOBI, markdown — chapter-by-chapter notes, quotes, summaries, or spaced-rep study mode.
watch-video	YouTube, Loom, Vimeo, Riverside, Zoom, MP4. Transcript / visual / multimodal (Gemini-native) modes.
ingest	Raw human input — call transcripts (Grain/Zoom/Granola/Fathom), client texts, emails, voice notes — extracted into decisions, action items (yours vs theirs), filed GitHub issues, vault captures, and a drafted-never-sent reply. Person→project routing via private people.yaml.

Output & creative

Skill	What
jab-hook	Gary Vee's jab-jab-jab-right-hook rhythm applied to your portfolio rotation on X + LinkedIn via Typefully.
slide-deck	Branded React decks (Next.js). "Show, don't tell" narrative pitching, density modes, PPT conversion, Playwright export.

Operations & utilities

Skill	What
pm	Kanban (5-column) + Eisenhower across your portfolio. Tool-agnostic adapters (Notion, GitHub, Plane, Linear, Obsidian, manual).
personal-cfo	Personal financial scenarios — house purchase + rental forecasting, monthly cash flow, big-purchase decisions. Household scope.
company-cfo	Company / agency CFO workflow — monthly snapshots, weekly cash pulse, scenario projector. Transaction-sum EOM methodology, categorization discipline, forward forecasting. Pulls from bank + payment processor + payroll + expense-mgmt via toolify-wired integrations. Team scope.
ci-audit	Find and fix wasted GitHub Actions time across a repo or portfolio. A stdlib script measures queue / setup / run per job, billed minutes (per-job rounding, macOS 10×) and cron runs per month. Checks for silently broken scheduled pipelines first, ranks fixes by minutes saved, and ships them as small PRs with warm-cache before/after numbers.
paste	Clean terminal output for 9 destinations (Slack, Notion, Twitter, LinkedIn, email, GitHub, plain, HTML). Secret-detection first.
social-fetch	Pull any social post by URL across 10 platforms (X, LinkedIn, IG, TikTok, Bluesky, Reddit, Mastodon, Threads, HN). Strategy chain with free + paid fallbacks.
castmate	Pull in the right model for the right job. Delegate a task to one agent CLI (optionally with write access), fan a prompt out to several for independent read-only reviews, or run rounds where castmates challenge each other's findings. Calls the official CLIs you already have (Claude, Codex, Gemini, Amp, OpenCode, Cursor, Kiro, Antigravity); models and groups live in your config dir, and any new model ID passes straight through. Adapted from counselors (MIT).

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Skills compose

Skills call each other by name. When a skill's job hits an adjacent job, it routes there rather than reimplementing. The most-referenced skills are the "central" ones — expect to touch these first as you adopt:

Most referenced by siblings	Composes with...
watch-video (54 refs)	second-brain (capture summary), skillify from-video, social-fetch (X/IG/TikTok metadata), pm (action items), decide (flagged decisions)
skillify (51 refs)	watch-video (record → skill), second-brain (capture source), compound-engineering:* (Anthropic-official skill authoring)
second-brain (48 refs)	deep-research (external gaps), read-book (highlights → wiki), watch-video (summaries → raw), paste (clean captures)
slide-deck (38 refs)	business-brainstorm (pitch decks), watch-video (talk-recording → outline), second-brain (wiki as content)
company-brain (33 refs)	toolify (wire auto-sync), loopify (schedule sync), deep-research (external gaps), decide (structured archive)
domain (32 refs)	business-brainstorm (name after idea passes filter), toolify (wire Domainr + Namecheap), decide (candidate fork)

See each skill's ## Composes with section for the full dependency list.

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Architecture

The repo is public + generic. Your personal data (Typefully workspace IDs, portfolio properties, voice overlays, archives) lives separately in ~/.config/makerskills/ (gitignored, on disk only).

Skills read from ${MAKERSKILLS_CONFIG:-$HOME/.config/makerskills}/<skill>/ paths. Set env vars in ~/.zshenv to point at your locations:

export MAKERSKILLS_CONFIG="$HOME/.config/makerskills"
export SECOND_BRAIN_VAULT="$HOME/Documents/SecondBrain"    # for second-brain (personal-scope vault)
export COMPANY_BRAIN_VAULT="$HOME/Documents/CompanyBrain"  # for company-brain (team-scope vault)
export COMPANY_CFO_ROOT="$HOME/code/company-cfo"           # for company-cfo (reports, projector, config)
export SLIDE_DECK_REPO="$HOME/code/your-site-repo"         # for slide-deck

Full setup in INSTALL.md. Full mental model in ARCHITECTURE.md.

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Versioning

Two levels of semver:

• Plugin release tag (e.g. v0.5.0) — this repo's overall version. Bumped on each meaningful addition to the collection. See CHANGELOG.md.
• Per-skill metadata.version in each SKILL.md frontmatter — that skill's individual version. Evolves independently.

A plugin release at v0.5.0 may contain skills at 0.1.0, 0.1.1, 0.2.0, 0.3.1 simultaneously. That's expected — each skill has its own iteration cadence.

SKILL.md format

---
name: skill-name
description: When the user wants to [X]. Triggers on "[trigger phrase]"...
metadata:
  version: 0.1.0
---

The description is what Claude uses to decide when to load the skill — be specific about triggers and disambiguation from sibling skills.

Cross-referencing other skill packs

Skills can reference each other across plugins. In a SKILL.md description or body:

• Within this plugin: mention by name (see decide)
• Cross-plugin: prefix with the plugin (see marketingskills:cro)

Claude resolves references by description match at load time — no manifest linking needed.

Related skill packs

• marketingskills — 46 marketing skills (CRO, copywriting, SEO, ads, etc.)

Docs

• INSTALL.md — env vars, personal config setup, runtime dependencies
• EXAMPLES.md — one worked example per skill: what you say → what the skill produces
• ARCHITECTURE.md — mental model, families, personal-config pattern, sibling-repo ecosystem
• CHANGELOG.md — release history with per-version details
• CONTRIBUTING.md — how to add a skill, testing, PR conventions
• FAQ.md — common questions and gotchas
• BACKLOG.md — planned skills + brainstorm candidates

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Built by

Corey Haines — founder, Conversion Factory + Magister.