Claude is capable. It just does not know how you work. Skills fix that.
You can spend a week prompting Claude into doing a job properly, and then open a new chat tomorrow and start from zero. Skills are the fix. They are written instructions that live in a folder, and Claude reads them before it starts working.
Here are the five I actually run, what each one is for, and the exact command to install it.
What is a skill?
A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file inside it. That file describes how you want a particular kind of job done: the process, the constraints, the format of the output.
Without one, Claude guesses how you want a job done, and guesses differently every time.
With one, it reads your process first, then works to it.
The part most people miss: Claude only loads a skill when the job in front of it matches that skill’s description. A folder of ten skills costs you nothing in context until one of them is actually needed. So there is no reason to be precious about installing them.
Before you start
You need Claude Code installed, plus Node for the npx installs and Python for the one pip install. Everything below takes a couple of minutes per skill.
1. claude-mem
What it does: Claude forgets everything the moment a chat ends. claude-mem saves what happened and feeds the relevant parts back in next session, so you stop repeating yourself.
Why it matters: It hooks into the session lifecycle, stores what it captures with vector search behind it, and retrieves in layers rather than dumping everything back into context. That is the difference between memory that helps and memory that eats your context window.
Install:
npx claude-mem install2. agent-skills
What it does: Addy Osmani packaged 25 engineering workflows into one install: test driven development, code review, debugging, security hardening, shipping. Claude loads whichever one fits the job.
Why it matters: This is the highest value per minute of the five. One command and Claude stops writing code like a very fast intern and starts writing it like someone who has shipped before.
Install:
npx skills add addyosmani/agent-skills3. headroom
What it does: Headroom compresses tool output before it reaches the model, about 20 percent fewer tokens on coding work and up to 95 percent on JSON.
Why it matters: It runs as a local proxy, so there is nothing to change in how you work and nothing gets uploaded to be compressed. The originals stay cached on your machine and are retrievable, so the model can still reach full context when it needs to without paying for it every turn.
Install:
pip install "headroom-ai[all]"4. remotion-reel
What it does: Drop a raw recording into the folder and Claude cuts it into a finished vertical reel: word level captions, motion graphics that match what you said, and a few hook variants to test.
Why it matters: This is the one that took my editing from an hour a video down to about twenty minutes. It is not that Claude got better at CapCut, it is that the whole edit is described once in a file and then run.
Get it: → remotion-reel on Google Drive
Download the folder and add it into your Claude desktop app.
5. web-designer
What it does: It interviews you about your brand and your audience first, then builds the site: scroll animation, WebGL, page transitions.
Why it matters: Every other AI site builder has a house style, which is why AI built sites all look like each other. This one asks before it assumes, so two sites built with it never come out looking alike.
Get it: → web-designer on Google Drive
Download the folder and add it into your Claude desktop app.