5 installable skills that upgrade Claude

What a skill is, and why they stack

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file inside. That file has a name, a one-line description of when to use it, and a set of instructions. Claude reads only the name and description by default, then pulls the full skill into context the moment your request matches it. That is the whole trick: you can have twenty skills installed and Claude only loads the one the task needs, so nothing slows down.

This is why installing skills beats keeping a notes file of giant prompts. You stop re-pasting the same instructions every session, and you stop hoping you remembered to. Anthropic's Agent Skills overview is the official explainer if you want the deeper version.

The 3 install routes

1. 💻 The skills CLI, in Claude Code. The general-purpose route for any skill that lives in a GitHub repo. From your project folder run npx skills add owner/repo. The CLI detects which agents you have and asks where to install, dropping the skill into .claude/skills/ for Claude Code. It is maintained at vercel-labs/skills.
2. 🔌 The plugin marketplace, in Claude Code. Some repos ship as a plugin, which bundles several skills at once. You add the repo as a marketplace, then install the plugin from it. Two lines, no folder wrangling.
3. 🌐 The app upload, no terminal. On claude.ai or in Claude Desktop: open Customize, then Skills, then Add, then Upload a skill, and give it a zip with the SKILL.md at the top level of the folder. Skills work on every plan including Free. Full steps in Anthropic's creating custom skills article.

1. marketingskills, a whole marketing team

This is the one I would install first if you market anything. It is not seven agents, it is a library of around 48 separate skills covering CRO, copywriting, SEO, paid ads, ad creative, analytics, cold email, pricing, launches, lead magnets and more, each one a focused instruction set rather than a vague "be a marketer" prompt. The repo sits at coreyhaines31/marketingskills with roughly 44.7k stars.

Install the whole library, or pick the two or three you will actually use:

npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills -a claude-code

# or just the ones you need
npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill cro copywriting -a claude-code

# or as a plugin
/plugin marketplace add coreyhaines31/marketingskills
/plugin install marketing-skills

Run npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills --list first if you want to read the menu before committing. Once installed you do not call skills by name, you describe the job and Claude reaches for the right one.

I am about to rewrite the landing page for [what you sell, who it is for, and the one action you want them to take]. Use your CRO and copywriting skills on this properly rather than giving me generic advice.

First, tell me what you would need to know to do this well and ask me for it: the current page, the traffic source, what objection kills most deals, and what proof I actually have. Then diagnose the page section by section, naming the specific conversion problem in each one rather than saying it could be stronger.

Then rewrite it. Give me two versions of the headline and the first paragraph built on different angles, explain which angle you would test first and why, and list the three things you would measure to know if it worked.

2. awesome-claude-skills, the shopping list

This one is not a skill, it is the index you shop from, and that is exactly why it belongs on the list. ComposioHQ/awesome-claude-skills (around 72.7k stars) is a curated directory of skills sorted by category: writing, business and marketing, data and analysis, design, creative, developer tooling. Before you build anything custom, look here, because someone has usually already built it.

1. 🔎 Search the list for the job, not the tool. Open the repo and use your browser's find function for the verb you care about, for example "invoice", "transcript", "changelog" or "slides". You are looking for the task you repeat, not the fanciest entry.
2. 📖 Open the skill's own repo and read the SKILL.md. Two minutes of reading tells you what it will actually do and what it needs. A skill with a vague description will trigger at the wrong times, which is worse than not having it.
3. 📦 Install that one skill only. Use npx skills add owner/repo for the specific repo you found, or the plugin lines if it ships as a plugin. Resist installing ten at once.
4. 🧪 Test it on a real task before you trust it. Run it once on work you can check, then decide whether it stays. Skills you never verified are just clutter that fills your context.

3. banana-claude, images without leaving Claude

This turns Claude into the creative director in front of an image model. You describe what you want in plain language, the skill builds the properly structured prompt using a five-part formula, then generates with the Nano Banana image model. It ships nine domain modes (cinema, product, portrait, editorial, UI and web, logo, landscape, infographic, abstract), batch variations, multi-turn sessions where you refine one image across several messages, and output up to 4K across 14 aspect ratios. Repo: AgriciDaniel/banana-claude.

/plugin marketplace add AgriciDaniel/banana-claude
/plugin install banana-claude@banana-claude-marketplace

Generate a product hero image for [your product], and treat this as a real art direction job rather than a single prompt.

The mood is [warm and lived-in / clinical and precise / moody and editorial], the light should come from [direction and quality, for example low afternoon side light through a window], and the subject should sit [where in frame], with enough negative space on the [left or right] for headline text. Shoot it as if it were photographed on [a 50mm lens at f/2 / a phone in natural light / a studio setup with a softbox].

Before you generate, show me the full prompt you are about to use so I can adjust the wording. Then produce three variations that change only the lighting, keeping the composition identical, so I can pick the one with the right feeling.

4. Remotion skills, videos written as code

Remotion is a framework for making videos with React, which means a video becomes a file you can version, re-render and template. The official skills bundle at remotion-dev/skills teaches Claude the framework's actual rules: timing, composition structure, captions, media handling, rendering, and how to upgrade a project safely. Twelve skills ship in it, including remotion-create, remotion-markup, remotion-captions, remotion-render and remotion-docs.

Honest framing, because the reel version of this always sounds too easy: one prompt does not produce a finished ad. What it produces is a working animated composition you then direct. That is still a large jump from opening an editor and keyframing by hand, and re-rendering with new text or a new logo takes seconds.

# start a project, then add the skills
npx create-video --yes --blank my-video
cd my-video
npm install
npx skills add remotion-dev/skills -a claude-code

Remotion documents both routes on its Agent Skills page and its skills CLI page, and you are also offered the skills when you create a new project.

Using the Remotion skills in this project, build me a 15 second vertical composition at 1080x1920 that I can re-render with different text later.

The content is: [your hook line, two supporting lines, and a closing line]. Animate the text in on the beat rather than all at once, keep one accent colour, and make every string, colour and duration a prop at the top of the file so I can change them without touching the animation code.

Explain the timing choices in a short comment above each sequence, then tell me the exact command to preview it in the studio and the command to render it to an MP4.

5. Context engineering, so Claude lasts longer

This is the least glamorous one and the one that quietly changes everything. Every message, tool result and file Claude reads spends part of a finite context window, and when it fills, quality degrades and you burn through your usage faster. Context engineering is the practice of curating what goes in there. Anthropic call it the natural progression of prompt engineering in their own write-up, and their guidance is to keep context informative yet tight.

The skills collection at muratcankoylan/Agent-Skills-for-Context-Engineering (around 17.8k stars) packages that practice into skills Claude activates on its own: context-compression, context-optimization, context-degradation, filesystem-context, memory-systems, multi-agent-patterns and more.

/plugin marketplace add muratcankoylan/Agent-Skills-for-Context-Engineering
/plugin install context-engineering@context-engineering-marketplace

Before we keep going, do a context audit of this session and be blunt about what I am wasting.

Tell me what is currently taking up the most room in your context, which parts of it are no longer useful for the task in front of us, and what you would drop or compress if you could. Point out any habit of mine that made this worse, for example pasting entire files when a specific section would have done, or switching topics without closing the previous one.

Then give me a plan for the rest of this session: what to keep in context, what to move into a file you can read on demand instead, and where we should start a fresh conversation rather than continuing this one.

Which one to install tonight

Then build the one nobody else has

Installed skills get you to competent fast. The ones you write yourself are what make Claude feel like it was built for your job, because they encode decisions only you make: your formats, your standards, the corrections you find yourself giving over and over. Once you have installed a couple from this list, spend twenty minutes turning your most repeated task into a skill of your own.

I want to turn a task I repeat every week into a Claude skill so I stop re-explaining it. The task is: [describe it, including what goes in, what comes out, and what makes a good version different from a bad one].

Ask me the three or four questions you need answered before you can write this well, for example my format, my tone, the inputs I usually have, and what I always check before calling it finished. Wait for my answers.

Then write the SKILL.md: a short lowercase-hyphenated name with no "claude" or "anthropic" in it, a description that says exactly what it does AND when it should trigger, and step-by-step instructions in my voice. Finish by telling me how to save it as a zipped folder I can upload under Customize, then Skills, then Add.

Everything linked in one place

coreyhaines31/marketingskills
ComposioHQ/awesome-claude-skills
AgriciDaniel/banana-claude
remotion-dev/skills and the Remotion Agent Skills docs
muratcankoylan/Agent-Skills-for-Context-Engineering
The npx skills CLI
Agent Skills, official overview
Creating custom skills, Claude Help Center
Effective context engineering for AI agents, Anthropic