Make your own skill

The speaker emphasizes the value of creating personalized skills for coding agents like Claude, Cursor, or Amp, rather than relying solely on pre-built ones. They compare it to building IKEA furniture, where the act of creation leads to greater familiarity and ownership. While pre-built skills aim to serve a broad audience, custom skills are tailored to specific needs and avoid unnecessary bloat.

The speaker demonstrates creating a "TDD" (Test-Driven Development) skill by directly asking the coding agent for assistance. They highlight the importance of using deep research capabilities (like Claude on the web or Gemini) to define the skill's behavior and best practices, especially if you don't know everything about TDD.

The creation process involves answering questions about the skill's scope (personal vs. project), the strictness of the TDD cycle, framework dependency (agnostic vs. tailored), and granularity. The agent then generates the skill, complete with arguments (parameters) for customization and instructions on how to use it.

The speaker illustrates how arguments allow users to interact with the skill more dynamically. Skills can be designed to prompt for missing arguments, increasing usability and making them interactive (like the "interview me" skill). They also highlight the ability to make skills framework-agnostic, allowing them to adapt to different tech stacks.

The speaker then showcases a real-world example of a custom skill called "quick test," which parallelizes a project's test suite to reduce execution time. This skill demonstrates how tailoring skills to specific project needs can significantly improve developer productivity. This "quick test" skill dispatches various checks to separate sub-agents, each a separate Claude instance, running them simultaneously, and reporting results in a summary table.

The key takeaway is that creating custom skills is now easier than ever and should be leveraged to automate repetitive tasks and enforce preferred coding styles. By building a personal "tool chest" of skills, developers can eliminate minor inefficiencies and significantly improve their workflow. The speaker also notes the importance of aiming to remember as little as possible, and using these agents to write commands for you.