§ 01 · The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Most people using Claude Code are leaving half the toolkit on the table. Alex McFarland opens with the kind of claim that stops the scroll — ninety-nine percent don't know this exists — then spends twenty minutes proving it by installing Anthropic's official skills repository live and watching it generate a branded nine-slide presentation in under five minutes.
What the video promised.
stated at 00:04 "I'm gonna show you how to upgrade your co writer inside of Claude by using Anthropics official repository of Claude's skills." delivered at 08:00
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 01:04
01 · Intro & pre-sell
States the promise ('upgrade your co-writer'), acknowledges the Claude Code Masterclass as prerequisite, sets up the skills concept.
01:04 – 02:35
02 · What are skills?
Four-property definition: packaged instructions, teach Claude HOW, write once/use forever, auto-activate. Not traditional prompts.
02:35 – 04:20
03 · Skill structure
Two-column diagram — Basic (.claude/skills/name/SKILL.md) vs With Resources (adds templates/ and references/). ICP context profile as the worked example.
04:20 – 05:05
04 · How skills auto-activate
Flow diagram: ask → scan available skills → find match → load skill → execute automatically. Notes near-100% hit rate in practice.
05:05 – 08:00
05 · Installing Anthropic's official skills
Live terminal demo: type `claude` → /plugin → Marketplaces tab → Add Marketplace → paste anthropics/skills → enter. Error shown confirms it was already installed. Two categories: document skills and example skills.
08:00 – 10:00
06 · The full list + picks for writers
Queries Claude for available skills. Full list: PDF, spreadsheet, document, presentations, frontend-design, canvas-design, algorithmic-arts, Theme Factory, MCP Builder, Skill Creator, web app testing. Then 2x2 grid: frontend-design (TOP PICK), pdf (TOP PICK), xlsx (ESSENTIAL), skill-creator (ESSENTIAL).
10:00 – 11:00
07 · Auto-invocation mechanics
Core message: you don't invoke manually. Describe what you want, Claude scans skills and picks. Caveat: watch the thinking stream to confirm activation; cancel + restart if it skips.
11:00 – 12:25
08 · The magic — skills + context profiles
Standalone skills are good. Combined with voice DNA, ICP JSON, business profile, brand colors folder — that's supercharging. The co-writer becomes context-aware.
12:25 – 15:30
09 · Live demo: presentation
Opens Claude Code, references Substack newsletter, sends 'create a presentation using your front end design skill.' Watches skill activate in thinking stream. Output: 9-slide HTML presentation with dark editorial aesthetic, glowing effects, code callouts.
15:30 – 17:25
10 · Iterating with brand guidelines
Shows raw output, admits it doesn't look perfect yet. Explains the iteration loop: point Claude to brand folder, images, guidelines — keep rebuilding. His own polished presentations came from this loop.
17:25 – 19:00
11 · Live demo: PDF lead magnet
Same newsletter, 'create a PDF I can use as a lead magnet.' PDF skill writes a Python script internally, generates PDF, saves to project root. Same brand iteration caveat applies.
19:00 – 19:52
12 · Wrap + coming up
CTA: Substack, waitlist for co-writer system, comment what you built. Teases next: deep dives, chaining skills together, full Claude features breakdown for writers.
Visual structure at a glance.
Named ideas worth stealing.
01:04
concept
Skills = Packaged Instructions
- Packaged instructions — not prompts
- Teach Claude HOW to do specific tasks
- Write once, use forever
- Auto-activate when relevant
Four-property definition that positions skills as a different category from prompts or procedures.
Steal for Any explainer of a new tool type — lead with what it ISN'T before defining what it IS
02:35
model
Basic vs With Resources skill structure
- Basic: .claude/skills/name/SKILL.md
- With Resources: adds templates/ and references/ subfolders
Two-tier architecture for skills — markdown-only vs markdown + supporting files. The ICP questionnaire is the worked example of the With Resources tier.
Steal for Packaging any repeatable Claude workflow — templates and references make skills much more powerful than a standalone prompt
11:00
model
Co-Writer Context Stack
- Voice DNA — writes in your voice
- ICP JSON — who your audience is
- Business profile — goals/offers/positioning
- Brand folder — colors, fonts, images
The layering of context profiles that makes skills output match your brand instead of generic AI output.
Steal for Joe's JoeFlow / MCN+ co-writer setup — this is exactly the context architecture Joe already runs, but McFarland is monetizing it as a product
Lines you could clip.
19:04
"99% of people don't even realize that they can be doing this."
10:18
"You don't invoke them manually. Just describe what you want, and Claude figures out the skill."
11:03
"If you have standalone skills, that's great. They work incredible. But when you combine these with our cowriting system, with our context profiles — that's when you're really supercharging your cowriter."
01:40
"Write once and use forever and then auto activate."
How they spent the runtime.
Hook length60s
Info densitymedium
Filler15%
Things they pointed at.
00:41linkClaude Code Masterclass (prerequisite)
16:00productLovable (mentioned as comparison)
How they asked for the click.
19:15
newsletter
"Make sure to check out my Substack. Subscribe if you want any of the assets I use in my videos. Sign up for a wait list if you're interested in getting my entire collection of skills and system prompts."
Soft close, no hard sell. Three parallel CTAs: subscribe, waitlist, comment. Waitlist is the money ask buried in the middle.
Word for word.
HOOK opening / re-engagementCTA the pitch metaphor analogy
00:00HOOKIn today's video, I'm gonna show you how to upgrade your co writer inside of Claude by using Anthropics official repository of Claude's skills. If you are not using Claude code for co writing tasks, you're behind. You should be doing that. But if you're serious about writing in any way or if writing is important to your career, your role, whatever it is you're doing, your business, your brand,
00:24then you should be building out a cowriting system inside of Claude code. And once you do that, you can start upgrading it with all of these cool new tools that are coming out like Anthropix Claude skills. Now before doing that, I recommend that you check out my Claude code master class that I released last week. Because inside of that Claude code master class, which I'll link here, you're gonna get a starting folder, a starting pack, a Claude code starting pack that you can use with Claude code as your co writer.
00:52HOOKAnd you can open it up with Claude code, and you just jump right ahead with everything you need. I'm not gonna rehash everything here. Check out that video. I'll link it. But if you do have that, it's gonna make this easier to jump right into. Alright? So go set up your cowriting system, and then what we can do is upgrade it with Claude's skills. So what are skills? A quick quick rundown in case you don't know. These are packaged instructions.
01:16HOOKAlright? These are packaged instructions you can hand off to Claude. These are not your traditional prompts. These are not like a structured procedure you follow. It's like a one and done, write it once, use it forever type situation. And what these Claude skills do is they teach Claude how to do specific tasks the right way. They give it a you know, in other words, it's like specialized knowledge that you're putting inside of your co writer.
01:40HOOKAnd, like I said, write once and use forever and then auto activate. So Claude will invoke these. Claude code, your co writer system will invoke these automatically or autonomously, and you don't really have to do anything about it. So if you tell it, you know, to complete a task and it has one of these skills available to it, it should autonomously invoke it. It doesn't work a 100 of the time, but almost always,
02:03HOOKit will invoke it. So before we start looking at how to actually put this into our co writer, there's really two main skill structures that you're gonna see that are really important that exists with Claude or Anthropix official skills as well as custom skills that I build and other people build. You're gonna see two types here. So the basic here on the left that you're looking at in this presentation, this is your basic skills file. And what this looks like is it's inside of your dot Claude folder, which is your most important folder in Claude code. It's where all of your Claude stuff lives, your agents, your Claude skills, your settings, and stuff like that. So you're gonna have a skills folder inside of that dot Claude folder,
02:42and then you're simply gonna have the file, which is the skill name. And then inside of it, you're gonna have a markdown file, and that's all it is. A skill, you know, a simple skill. Your basic skill is going to be just a really long markdown file. Alright? Formatted in a very specific way, which you can read and and we'll talk about, but you need to format it in a specific way, and that's how it works. But you can also upgrade that skill even further by putting subfolders in here of, like, templates and references. So for example,
03:12you know, one of these skills I have is a Claude skill that helps you that helps you develop a ideal client profile context profile. Sounds crazy, but an ICP context profile. So this is like a JSON document you can put inside of your co writer, and then Claude will always know who your audience is, you know, who you're writing for, who you're targeting. Right? Your ICP.
03:37And I have a skill that does that, that literally will interview you. Alright? It's gonna interview you. And in these, like, templates here in these references, I'll include an entire, you know, set 20 plus interview questions for Claude to follow when interviewing the user for building their ICP. Alright? And and then that is, like, besides the this is next to the regular markdown file, which teaches it what to do. So the markdown file might tell it, like, check out your your questionnaire that's in your templates and then use that. So that's just how it works. You could package up, you know, a simple Markdown file, or you can have it with resources. So you could really get creative here and build really cool stuff
04:16inside of Claude Skills. Claude Skills have been out for a while now, more than a month or maybe even longer, but people are not utilizing it enough. It is one of the greatest features that we have for cowriting inside of Claude. So, you know, I use them every day across all sorts of use cases. So how skills work? Basically, you ask Claude to do something.
04:36It scans all of its available skills. This is a very basic way of looking at it. It scans all of its available skills, and then when it finds something that matches, it'll autonomously load up that skill with all the context inside of it and then use it. Alright? And it's just scanning, you know, summaries of each skill to know which one to use and then pull that in. Now,
04:55you know, like I said, that's just a very basic way of doing it, but you can get really creative in a cowriting system. You can have agents. You can point skill. You can tell agents to point towards specific skills, etcetera. So there are many different things to do here. But today, what we're focused on is Anthropix official repository of Claude skills, which nobody you know, a lot of people don't talk about. Alright? And to do that, all you're gonna do is come to the public repository, which I'll link below.
05:19And you can read through this if you want, but it's gonna talk about it, what this is. This repository contains skills that demonstrate what's possible with Claude's skills system. These skills range from creative applications to technical tasks, like testing web apps, MCP servers, to enterprise workflows communication branding. Alright? Each skill is self contained in its own folder with a skill dot m d file containing the instructions and metadata that Claude uses.
05:45Browse through these, and then you're gonna see some instructions for installing it, which I'm gonna show you right now, which is super simple. And if you click this folder here, you can see all of the skills here. Right? Now to install it, it's super easy. What we're gonna do is I'm gonna open up my co writer here. Like I said, check out the master class if you haven't already. So that's what you're looking at. And I have my whole co writing system opened up here as my folder.
06:09And what we're gonna do here is when you if you're using, for example, this extension on cursor, you need to open up a terminal because it's only gonna work in the regular terminal here with Claude. So we're gonna activate Claude. We're gonna tell it gonna activate it just by saying Claude inside of our terminal. And to to install all of these skills inside of Claude, what you need to do here is very simply do slash plugin. Alright? And these skills are included in a plugin that you could put inside of Cloud Code. We're not gonna dive deep into plugins in this video. That's a whole another thing to talk about, but you don't need to know much about it for this right now. So you're just gonna put slash plugin,
06:50And what this is gonna do is open up, okay, all these different plug ins that you can install. But what we wanna do is tab over to marketplaces here. Okay? And you're gonna get over to marketplaces, and you're gonna click add marketplace. And when you click add marketplace, you're gonna come back to the the GitHub documentation here, and you're gonna see that you have right here, plug in marketplaceaddanthropics.skills.
07:15All we gotta do is take this anthropix. Or anthropicanthropix/skills, and you're gonna add it in the marketplace right here. And you're gonna click enter. And this is gonna add it into your colloid code. You're gonna see I'm gonna get an error here because it's already installed here. But when you do it, if you haven't installed already, it's gonna upload all of these skills into your marketplace.
07:35And then all you gotta do, let's go back in the plugin once you have it installed, and you're gonna come over here and you're gonna see you're gonna have discover and install, and you're gonna be able to install Now there are two categories that Anthropic uses for their official skills. We have document skills,
07:52and we have example skills. And this breaks down into, like, creating specific documents. We're talking PDFs, PowerPoints, and then other skills. So it's broken down into two categories. I just upload all of them. Okay? I uploaded all the skills here so we have access to all of it. And then what's gonna happen is these skills are living in the plugin, so you don't have to mess with them. You don't have to do anything else manually. These are already inside of your Claude code, inside of your co writer here, your project. And then we'll just test it out by asking Claude,
08:22can you tell me what available skills you have from the Anthropic marketplace? We're just gonna ask you that so we can see. But it's as simple as that. You're just gonna use a plugin, you're gonna add the marketplace, and you are going to install all the skills. You could see here I just asked it what available skills there are, and it's telling us here we have PDF manipulation.
08:43We have spreadsheet creation, document creation, presentations. Then we have some design and creative skills. We have front end design, canvas design, algorithmic arts. And we have Theme Factory, MCP Builder, Skill Creator,
08:58web app testing. So we asked them what the skills are. We know they're already loaded up. Alright? This is the full list here, which I kinda just read to you. But there are a couple that I think are super important for people who are using Clyde Code as a cowriter, and that is front end design, which is gonna allow you to create, like, incredible visuals,
09:18landing pages, web content, supplemental content that goes alongside your writing. For For example, in these presentations that you're watching that I do, I've had a lot of comments on them from YouTube, people asking about it, and I'm literally using a front end design skill in Cloud Code inside of my co writer to create these presentations. Another one's PDF, which works for lead magnets, downloadable guides, formatting documents, professional papers, reports, all of that. We also have spreadsheets, which is cool and important. And then skill creator, which is literally a skill that helps you create other skills. Okay? And we're not gonna dive into that today, but when we talk about custom skills, that's that's an easy way to package it up into a custom skill. Okay? So we installed it already. We talked about what happens. These get registered, and now we can access them all. You don't invoke them manually. Like I mentioned, you don't have to invoke these manually, which I'm gonna now run through and show you. You can just describe what you want, and then Claude will autonomously decide on what skill to use. Now with that said, this does not work a 100% of the time, so you need to always make sure that if you really want it to be using a specific skill, you might as well just call out that skill or just pay attention to make sure that as in its thinking process and it's running, it actually activates that skill. If not, you need to cancel and start over. But, really, theoretically, and what works most of the time in my experience is you can just simply say things like, create a presentation about x, and it's gonna use front end design or the PowerPoint. You're gonna say, a PDF guide for my lead magnet. Boom. It's gonna activate the PDF skill. Build me a spreadsheet to track content, etcetera, creating landing page for my course. Alright. So it does a really good job at that. Now the magic the magic that really comes in is skills. If you have standalone skills, that's great. They work incredible.
10:59But when you combine these with our cowriting system, with our context profiles, and then you combine those with our skills, that's when you're really, like, .
11:11So let's take a look at that now and what I mean by that. So when you watch the master class or when you build a cowriting system, one of the things you really need to have are context profiles like this, like our voice DNA, which writes in our voice, my ICP, which I talked about earlier, which is my audience. I have a business profile. Right? Really multipage context profiles. Then I have even more in supplementary.
11:36Product page product pages, pricing, etcetera. We could put brand colors here in our cowriting system as well, which doesn't even need to be in the context profiles. We can have a brand folder here in our cowriter talking about our colors, our fonts, everything. And that is when it just really starts to supercharge everything. So, for example, let's do this. Let's let's take a look. If you look here, I have my co writer. Probably looks different than yours because it's built out. Like, I have everything built out in here, but we could take a look at our newsletters here. And one of the substack newsletters I posted, right, which was the Claude code master class last week. Alright? What I can do is open a new Claude code, and to the right here, you see this is the substack I did on my Claude code master class. And what I can do is literally tell Claude right here,
12:24take a look at my Claude code for writing master class sub stack newsletter and create a presentation using your front end design skill. And we're just gonna send that. And you're gonna see that now it's gonna create a presentation
12:38for my newsletter. You can use this with transcripts. You can use it for marketing material. Everybody has their own use cases of what you can use this for. In my co writer, what's gonna happen is it's gonna read all my context profiles in my system. And as you can see right here, what's happening is it reviewed the cloud code for writing master class newsletter, and now it's creating a presentation using the front end design skill. In this, you could see it's activating the skill right here. Alright?
13:07Skill document skills front end design, launching skills document front end design. And then this that pops up is the actual skill. So you can read through that. For example, this skill guides the creation of distinctive production grade front end interfaces combining with all of my own context and knowledge here.
13:27What it's gonna do here is create the whole presentation. So I'm gonna let that run for a second, and then I'm gonna open up another one just to show you a couple different things we can do. What we can do now is take a look at my colloid code master class published newsletter and create a PDF document or a PDF guide that I can use as a lead magnet based on that master class. We're gonna tell her that, and now it should
13:51invoke the PDF skill to create a PDF, which you could, you know, brand and use as a lead magnet or whatever, send to clients, whatever it is you do. So here, it's gonna think, and it's gonna read my context profiles. It's gonna understand my system here because I have a very detailed system instructions here inside of Claude telling it to read my context profiles.
14:13If that's something you're interested in, make sure to join my Substack, sign up for my wait list for the co writer system, which is going to teach you how to build out these really detailed system instructions and, honestly, just give you the ones I use as well. So it's gonna ask now, do we wanna proceed with this skill? And now it's using the PDF skills. So now it's gonna create a PDF. So I'm gonna let those two run and then show you because those are the two that I think are, you know, two of the best ones is PDFs and presentations.
14:42And then we can come back here and check what it's like when it's done. Okay. So after a few minutes, it runs through the skills, and it did both. It created the presentation, and it created the PDF. Let's take a look at both, starting with the presentation. I told it to take a look at my Claude code writing master class newsletter and create a presentation using the front end design skill. It used it and
15:03done. What it did was created a nine slide interactive presentation. It saved it here into our cowriting folders, and it saved it. It gave us some details about the design direction, the different slides. And what we're gonna do is you're gonna see it right here. It saves it as an HTML file on your computer. So now you just gotta open that in your browser. So I have it open right here. I'm gonna open, and here is the presentation. So we have Cloud Code for writing, build an AI co writing system that actually knows you. We're gonna go through The Internet is drowning in AI swap. We have from prompting the systems.
15:39It's very dynamic. You can see here with glowing effects and hovers. It even does these, like, amazing, like, code callouts, these designs, the emoji. The point of this front end design is to I'm sure you've seen it by now. There's a lot of people who create websites and apps and stuff on Lovable, and they all look like they just screamed AI generator, right, with the colors,
15:59with the emojis, and stuff like this. So the front end design is supposed to avoid that. You could see we have a lot more dynamic stuff that we wouldn't get on something like Lovable. We can even put buttons and everything. Now with that said, if you look at this, you know, it still doesn't look perfect to me. Like, I I don't I don't like this necessarily, and it doesn't match with my brand. So that is where
16:19you are going to find so much success by having a a a really built out co writer system. Because what you can do, for exam is then in your Claude code, you can literally, like, for example, in your chat, start telling Claude now, alright. Now make this edit or make that edit. You can point it towards folders in your co writer system. You could point it towards branding folders with images. Claude can look at images. It can process images, colors, maybe have branding guidelines, stuff to follow, and you can point it to that and keep rebuilding. And what you're gonna end up with,
16:52which is exactly what I did, is a presentation like this that a lot of you have called beautiful and loved it in my YouTube comments. And that is because I worked together with Claude in my co writer system to build it out with my, you know, correct brand guidelines, font, colors, you know, just all around how I how I like it. It was never really that possible to
17:14get these AI tools to build it exactly what it is, you know, that you wanted, but we're getting pretty close here. So that's the presentation you can do with Claude skills in your co writer system. Now let's look at the PDF, which is the last thing we did. And I open up this this second shot here, and it's really interesting how this works. So once we tell it to create a PDF, we use the same newsletter and master class. What it's gonna actually do is it's gonna invoke that skill, and with that skill, it's going to write up an entire Python script to create a PDF, and then it's gonna create it here. You're gonna see it generated the PDF lead magnet. You can literally download it here and put it puts it inside of your folders here in your root files.
17:53And then it created the PDF. It gives a summary, and then we could click this here. And here is the PDF it created for the collide code for writing quick start guide, those are AI co writing system in thirty minutes. It gives us two different things to follow. And same scenario applies here as the presentation where, of course, right now, this doesn't look great. I would not just send this out. But what I can do now is iterate inside of this chat with natural language. I don't have to be technical. I don't have to know anything about this. I can just ask Claude to make these changes to this PDF,
18:26CTAput branding in it, put images. If I want, I can create a folder of assets here. I can point Claude to that folder, tell it to use these assets in the PDF. Like, there's no limit to what you could do with all of this stuff. It's pretty incredible. 99% of people don't even realize that they can be doing this. So if you are a writer, if you are a professional and you rely on content in any way, shape, or form, which is pretty much everybody at this point, if you're a technical writer, professional writer, marketing professional, ghostwriter, anything like that, There are so many tools available to you if you build a CoWriter system now that you can build out lead magnets, assets, presentations. I run all my operations
19:04CTAsolo by myself, true solopreneur. I've talked about it before, and I do all of this with all the amazing stuff I run with my CoWriter system and using Claude's skills and building out assets. So definitely go check this out. Supercharge your system with these Claude's skills. This is only 16 of Anthropic's official repository.
19:23CTAThere's communities of skills that you can be using. Alright? So make sure to check that out. Make sure to check out my Substack. Subscribe if you want any of the assets I use in my videos. Sign up for a wait list if you're interested in getting my entire collection of skills and system prompts, drop a comment below. Let me know. Drop a comment about what you build or what you would like to see because then maybe we could create cloud skills or find one out there. Alright? Check it out. Subscribe. Check out the cloud code masterclass, and until next video.
— full transcript
§ 05 · For Joe
Teach the tool by using the tool as the demo.
Steal this format
McFarland built his presentation with the exact frontend-design skill he's demonstrating — the deck IS the proof of concept, and that closed loop is what makes the tutorial land.
- Install Anthropic's official skills repo right now: /plugin → Marketplaces → add anthropics/skills. Two minutes.
- The skill-creator skill builds other skills — use it to package your own JoeFlow or MCN workflows.
- Standalone skills are good. Skills + context profiles (voice DNA, ICP, brand folder) is the unlock — that's the system Joe already has, he just needs to formalize the folder structure.
- The 2x2 'TOP PICK / ESSENTIAL' grid format is clean for any 'here's the library, here's what matters' video — steal it for a JoeFlow features breakdown.
- McFarland is monetizing this co-writer system as a Substack waitlist product. Joe could out-execute this with JoeFlow as the delivery mechanism — own your tools, don't rent a Substack.
