5 posts tagged with "Skills"

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").

The previous parts were about what Hydra does. This part is about how: the skills that let the personas do their job. By the end you'll know which skills the automated pipeline (the "Hydra factory") runs and which ones you call yourself as a human, you'll know the five families, and you'll be able to judge when a new skill is worth writing.