7 posts tagged with "Claude Code"

Heads up — this is an optional, situational tutorial. Most developers will never need to run a retrofit. Day-to-day work in a Conduction app — writing changes, implementing tasks, opening PRs — doesn't touch any of the commands below. You can finish Parts 1 + 2 and go straight to the Hydra series or the Claude skills series without losing anything.

This part is only relevant in one specific case: an older Conduction app needs to be brought up to date with the current OpenSpec convention after the fact. A small number of our apps were built before openspec/specs/ and the @spec-tag convention existed — they have working code, but no specs and no annotations pointing from code to requirements. If one of those apps ever has to be brought into line with the convention, this is the playbook for it. We work through the retrofit playbook end to end.

With the runtimes in place from Part 2, it's time to add the AI pair programmer we actually work with: Claude Code. This part covers the install, the sign-in, and — the bit you should not skip — the mandatory global settings and safety hooks that keep Claude from running destructive shell commands without your approval. Short part, important part.

Claude Skills are the mechanism for extending Claude Code with reusable, specialised behaviours. Think of Conduction's own /review-pr, /opsx-new, or the whole hydra-gate-* family: each one is a skill. This first part explains in ten minutes what a skill is, how it gets activated, and when you should not write one. It's part 1 of a four-part track; by the end you'll be ready to write your own in part 2 — and in part 3 we introduce the 7-level maturity framework that takes a skill from "feels good" to "measured good" (part 4 continues with L6 and L7).

In part 3 you took a skill from "feels right" to "measurably right" — Maturity Level 5. For most skills that's enough. But for a handful of skills you use daily, or that steer other skills, you want to go further: a skill that learns from its own executions (L6), and a skill that steers other agents inside a larger workflow (L7). This fourth part shows how you get there — and how the Hydra dashboard lets you monitor your whole skill library for maturity at once.

In part 1 you saw what a skill is. In this part you'll write one yourself: a working git-status-summary skill that produces a readable summary of the current working tree. At the end it sits in your ~/.claude/skills/ folder, you can invoke it via /git-status-summary, and you'll know how to share it with your team.

You now have a working skill — but does it actually work well? And does it keep working when Claude itself gets upgraded or when you tweak the skill? This third, optional part shows how to evaluate a skill systematically: test scenarios, trigger tests, a baseline measurement, and the eval runner that /skill-creator sets up for you. This is the step from Maturity Level 4 ("feels right") to Level 5 ("measurably right").

Time to see OpenSpec in action. In this part you'll create your first real change inside a Conduction project — from empty folder, through a spec-delta with a requirement and scenario, to a validated proposal ready for implementation. We do that with the Claude Code skills /opsx-new and /opsx-ff.