Ask Claude for a presentation and you might expect a .pptx file to land in the chat. These days you usually get something else first: a live deck that opens right there, one you can page through, present from, and fix by hand. That throws some people off, because the meeting is in PowerPoint and…
Ask an agent to help you work through a long article, one section at a time, and each answer on its own looks completely fine. One quote, a short one, properly attributed. Ask again about the next section, same thing. By the fifth or sixth exchange, you’ve technically never broken a single rule in any…
Ask “where did my tokens go” and most tools hand you a raw number. A session used however many thousands of tokens, full stop. That’s not an answer; it’s a receipt with no line items. There’s a skill built for exactly this question, and instead of a total, it gives you a breakdown you can…
There’s a skill for building skills. That sounds like a joke, but it’s the fastest way to go from “I keep explaining this the same way every time” to a file Claude reads on its own. Here’s what actually happens when you use it, start to finish. Scaffolding the draft Skill-creator doesn’t start by asking…
At some point, one CLAUDE.md file stops being able to hold everything. It’s got “reply in the same thread as the last email” sitting a few lines above “always build a branding card for every blog post,” and neither rule is wrong; they just have nothing to do with each other. Once you’re using Claude…
Ask for something that clearly involves another app, “spot issues in my Medicare documentation,” “ping the team that the build is green,” “who’s oncall this week,” and there’s an obvious failure mode: Claude doesn’t have a connector for that yet, and just says so. Task over, back to doing it yourself. That’s not actually what…
Every session starts the same way: read the memory file, then get to work. Do that for a few months and the file stops being a quick briefing and turns into an archive. A deadline that passed in June is still sitting next to this week’s actual preferences. Two entries describe the same project because…
Install one skill and you’ve taught Claude a single habit. Install a plugin and you’ve handed it a whole job description. That’s the short version of what’s different here, but it’s worth slowing down, because “plugin” gets used loosely enough that people assume it’s just a bigger skill, or a fancier connector. It’s neither. It’s…
Ask an agent to check the weather, pull tomorrow’s calendar, and look up a flight status, and there are two ways it can go. It can check the weather, wait for the answer, then check the calendar, wait for that answer, then look up the flight, wait again. Or it can fire all three at…
I spent about three weeks re-explaining the same things to Claude at the start of every chat before it occurred to me there might be a better way. My tone preferences, my build commands, the fact that I use Proton instead of Gmail – all of it, retyped, every session, because a new chat starts…