Duke Harewood

How a solo builder plus an AI agent ship on-brand UIs fast using a DESIGN.md from the registry. The leverage that closes the design gap without a designer.

A guided tour of the 135+ agent-ready design systems in the aiskill.market Designs category: the sub-categories, the standouts, and how to actually use them.

Every model launch ships with bar charts where the new model wins. Here's a reusable checklist for sanity-checking those numbers — using Grok 4.5's July 2026 launch as the worked example.

Grok 4.5 ranks #4 on the independent Intelligence Index at a price >60% below Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5. Here's what that price-per-intelligence unlocks for high-volume skill and agent workloads.

xAI reports Grok 4.5 using ~4x fewer output tokens than Opus 4.8 on SWE-Bench Pro. For long agentic loops where output dominates the bill, that can matter more than winning the benchmark.

'On par with GPT-5.5/Codex at lower cost' sounds decisive — until you notice it's a harness score, not a model score. What that means when you pick a coding backend for a skill.

Grok's DeepSearch is an iterative RAG loop with live X integration. Treated as an agent primitive, it changes what a research skill can answer. Here's how it compares to Claude tool-use plus web search.

Stop hardcoding one model. Build a router that sends cheap high-volume work to Grok 4.5, hard long-horizon work to Fable 5, and the balanced middle to Opus 4.8 — with a decision table you can copy.

GPT-Live does live translation, but its Hindi demo landed with a heavy American accent. That gap is the case for purpose-built translation voice skills on gpt-realtime-translate — here's when a demo isn't enough.

SIP telephony turns a marketplace voice skill into a real inbound and outbound calling agent. Here's the architecture, the support use cases it unlocks, and the cautions before you dial out.

The Realtime API's remote MCP, image, and SIP support let a voice agent call the same skills your text agents use. Here's the architecture — and a wiring diagram as a list.

OpenAI's GPT-Live makes always-listening full-duplex voice the default in ChatGPT. Here's why that resets how you design voice-first agents — and what to build on.

GPT-Live shipped without video or screen sharing — you fall back to legacy voice for those. Here's a route-to-X-when-Y decision list for where a custom Realtime-API skill fills the gaps.

OpenAI shipped two voice things in one week. GPT-Live is the ChatGPT app; gpt-realtime is the API you build on. Here's which track to pick and why it matters.

gpt-realtime-2.1 adds configurable reasoning effort and function calling over live voice. Here's how to build an agent that plans a step, calls your function, then answers — out loud.

Grok 4.5's API is OpenAI- and Anthropic-SDK compatible. Adding it to an agent is a base-URL and model-string swap, not a rewrite. Here's the wiring and where it fits next to Claude.

Grok 4.5 is fast and cheap — but the spec sheet has four gotchas that break naive integrations: 500K (not 1M) context, image-in but text-only out, ~17s first token, and voice that isn't the LLM.

xAI's launch page pits Grok 4.5 against Opus 4.8. The honest read is a 2-of-4 split with Claude Fable 5 leading all four. Here's how to separate first-party numbers from independent ones.

A skeptic's field guide to Grok 4.5. What's independently verified, what's only xAI-claimed, and what it means if you build skills and agents on top of frontier models.

Without design context, AI agents produce generic, AI-looking UIs. A DESIGN.md gives them the colors, type, and spacing to build on-brand work instead.

The dev-tool design aesthetic decoded: dark-first, dense, keyboard-driven systems from Raycast, MongoDB, and Linear-like tools — and how to give your agent the look.

Fable 5 requires 30-day data retention and is not available under zero-data-retention. A ZDR org gets a 400 on every request. Here's the compliance decision guide for teams shipping skills.

GPT-Live can say 'mhmm', stay quiet while you think, and let you cut in mid-sentence. Turn that full-duplex behavior into concrete UX rules and a checklist for your own voice-agent skills.

OpenAI's GPT-Live ships predefined voices only, blocks cloning, and builds in teen safety. Translate those safeguards into a concrete publishing checklist for responsible voice skills.

How fintech and crypto design systems engineer trust through restraint, precise typography, and generous spacing — and how to give your agent the same signals.

Fable 5 costs roughly 2x Opus 4.8. That doesn't mean run everything on the cheaper model. Here's a routing heuristic for deciding which turns deserve the premium tier.

gpt-realtime-2.1 cut p95 voice latency by 25%+ via caching. Here's the latency budget of a voice turn, the cached-vs-fresh audio economics, and when to reach for the mini variant.

A practical Claude Code workflow for handing your agent a DESIGN.md so it builds on-brand UIs. Includes the exact prompt and project setup to use today.

Fable 5 performs strongly with a markdown memory system. Here's the exact format Anthropic recommends, how to package it as a reusable skill, and why one lesson per file beats a growing scratch log.

A style guide is a human PDF; a DESIGN.md is an agent-parseable spec. Here's the head-to-head on format, audience, and which one your AI agent can actually use.

Fable 5 dispatches parallel subagents more readily than older models. Spawn-and-block leaves that capability on the table. Here are the orchestration patterns that actually pay off.

Encode a type scale, font family, weights, line-height and letter-spacing as DESIGN.md tokens so your AI agent ships consistent, readable text every time.

Fable 5 turns can run for minutes and autonomous runs for hours. If your harness assumes sub-30-second replies, it will time out mid-thought. Here's how to redesign for long turns.

Define semantic color tokens and pass WCAG contrast for an agent-ready palette. A step-by-step guide to building an accessible DESIGN.md color system.

Fable 5 replaces the token budget with five effort levels. Here's how to route skills and subagents — routine work at low-medium, long-horizon at xhigh-max — plus what Claude Code's ultracode really is.

Convert Figma variables and design tokens into a DESIGN.md file your AI agent can read. A step-by-step guide to tokens-as-code for on-brand output.

On Fable 5, asking the model to explain its reasoning or show its work can be refused with category reasoning_extraction and elevates fallbacks. Read the summarized thinking blocks instead.

Nine standout product design systems — Stripe, Discord, Spotify, Raycast, Humane, MongoDB and more — and the one thing to steal from each for your AI agent.

Fable 5 refusals arrive as HTTP 200 with stop_reason refusal — not an error. Check it before reading content, and wire a server-side or client-side fallback to Opus 4.8. Code and a checklist inside.

How Humane's design system imagines an interface with no screen — projection and voice, black canvas, white foreground, laser-red accent — captured in an agent-readable DESIGN.md.

How Raycast's design system nails the keyboard-first developer aesthetic — sharp dark UI, tight spacing, and monospace accents, captured in an agent-readable DESIGN.md.

Anthropic says skill prompts written for older models are often too prescriptive and degrade Fable 5's output. Here's how to audit yours and swap step-by-step scripts for goal-and-constraints.

How Spotify's design system goes bold and dark — its brand-green accent, expressive large-scale typography, and media-forward layouts, captured in an agent-readable DESIGN.md.

How Discord's design system is built for always-on use — its Blurple brand, dark-first surfaces, rounded friendly components, and high chat readability, captured in a DESIGN.md.

Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 changes six things at once for anyone building skills and agents: always-on thinking, an effort dial, 1M context, new pricing, a refusal stop reason, and 30-day retention.

How Stripe's design system balances technical precision and luxury — its restrained palette, crisp typography, and generous spacing, captured in an agent-readable DESIGN.md.

Stitch-style design systems package design tokens and rationale into one agent-readable file. Here's Google's Stitch pattern and why a standard format matters.

How AI agents turn a DESIGN.md file into on-brand components: the workflow that replaces generic AI output with UI that actually matches your product.

Design tokens are named, reusable values for color, type, spacing, and radii. Here's what they are and how AI agents consume them to build on-brand UIs.

Trust is a design material: confidence, citations, transparency, rubrics, guardrails, and handoffs. The series closer — skills set the floor, taste is yours.

A DESIGN.md file is an agent-readable design spec: YAML design tokens plus markdown rationale that teaches AI agents to build on-brand UIs, not generic output.

A system prompt is an interface. Architect it like one — labeled anatomy, important instructions first and last, parameterized templates, and testable constraints.

A survey of the 2026 loop engineering ecosystem: elorm Loops, explainx, awesome-agent-loops, continuous-claude, Gas Town, and the aiskill.market Loops channel.

Top 10 free AI tools (skills + agents) for solopreneurs in 2026 — covering ops, marketing, support, content, and finance. Install in 60 seconds.

The next design surface isn't the layout — it's how the product behaves. Context budgeting, turn-taking, generative UI, and frustration repair, in one skill.

A mental-model shift for 2026: moving from one-shot prompting to closed-loop systems built on feedback, verification, and bounded autonomy.

Direct 3D and motion graphics by prompt. Claude writes the Blender bpy Python and After Effects ExtendScript over MCP while you art-direct the result.

How browse.sh by Browserbase turns any travel site into an agent-callable skill — the fetch, api, and browser methods, anti-bot handling, and a registry that tracks breakage.

Programmatic video: Claude writes React components, Remotion renders to MP4 — no timeline editor. A heavy kit adds voiceovers, captions and a render-review-fix loop.

How agent loops let one founder run serial tasks unattended — ship, test, coverage, docs — multiplying output without hiring. Which loops to start with and why.

Self-improving agents use reflexion-style loops and memory across iterations to learn from failures. Here is the Guardrails Learning Loop pattern and how to build it.

Build carousels, quote cards and infographics in code so fonts, colors and logos stay correct — exported as crisp PNG/PDF, locked to a reusable weekly template.

A tutorial on using AI skills to compare travel deals across Expedia and Priceline — bundle hotels, flights, and cars, and decide package versus a la carte fast.

The PR Babysitter loop watches an open pull request, auto-fixes failing CI, and addresses reviewer comments iteration after iteration until the PR is merge-ready.

Generate blog headers, thumbnails and mockups without leaving the agent (~$0.04/image), and use a 5-component formula to turn a lazy one-liner into a directed shot.

A tour of the aiskill.market Loops channel: 152 ready-to-run agent loops from three sources, each shipping a goal, exit condition, iteration cap, and check command.

Use AI skills to extract Tripadvisor and Cruise Critic reviews and find nearby attractions with Wanderboat — turn thousands of reviews into ranked shortlists.

Code-driven generative art — flow fields, noise, particles — is unique per render and never looks like stock. The anti-slop move for hero textures.

A repeatable agent loop that runs your test suite 20 times, isolates intermittent failures, quarantines or fixes them, and won't stop until 5 consecutive green runs.

One-shot identity boards — logo directions, palette, type, mockups — as reference frames you hand to the coding agent for real code.

Addy Osmani frames self-improving agents as a handful of building blocks plus memory. Here is how that loop-engineering framework maps to real agent loops you can build.

When a Figma file exists you want faithful translation, not the agent improvising. The Figma MCP bridges design to code that respects your system.

Top 10 install-ready AI workflows for backing up your data in 2026 — files, photos, projects, dependencies, and more. Free and automated.

In June 2026 a wave of X posts popularized the term loop engineering almost overnight. Here is how the discourse spread and why the idea resonated with agent builders.

How AI skills search Sixt, Avis, and Costco Travel for rental cars — daily rates, long-term deals (15-330 days), and member-rate price lookups returned as structured data.

Agents invent a fresh hex per component. A token system generated from one brand color makes consistency automatic instead of accidental.

Tutorial for using AI skills to search China Railway 12306 and Trainline schedules — train numbers, classes, durations, and cheapest fares across China, the UK, and Europe.

The three reasons agent loops never stop — no exit condition, non-deterministic checks, and metric-gaming — plus the guardrails that make loops terminate reliably.

A motion auditor blends three conflicting philosophies — restraint, polish, play — weighted to context to catch the tells of generic AI animation.

The exit condition, plus a max-iterations cap, check command, and anti-gaming guardrails, is what separates a useful agent loop from an infinite one.

The hard motion rules that separate senior animation from slop: durations, easing, exits faster than entrances, transform-only for 60fps, and reduced-motion respect.

Nine ready-to-run agent loops from the Loops channel — Ship PR Until Green, Test Until Green, PR Babysitter and more, each with its one-line goal and exit condition.

Top 10 free AI agents for researchers, grad students, and academics in 2026 — covering literature, grants, writing, and analysis.

The single highest-leverage move in AI design: let the agent screenshot the rendered page, compare to a reference, and iterate. Without eyes you trust a blind model.

A head-to-head comparison of loop engineering and prompt engineering: inputs, failure modes, cost, and exactly when to use each in 2026.

Blended design is dead design. Why committing to one extreme — brutalist, editorial, luxury, maximalist — beats the safe middle, and the skills that force the commitment.

Continuous Claude runs Claude Code in a Ralph-style loop that opens PRs, waits for CI, merges, and repeats — turning overnight hours into shipped serial changes.

How AI flight-search skills compare Google Flights, Kayak and Skyscanner against airline-direct sites — plus live FlightAware tracking. Find the cheapest fare hands-free.

Inter, Roboto, Arial, Space Grotesk — the fonts models default to and why they read as AI-generated. What committed type pairing looks like instead.

A step-by-step guide to building a self-healing test loop in Claude Code — run the suite, read failures, fix, repeat until green, with a paste-ready kickoff prompt.

Top 10 AI agents that work seamlessly with Cursor IDE in 2026 — engineering, security, design, testing, and more. All free to install.

You don't need a pile of design skills to beat AI slop. You need four: a taste base, motion, tokens, and a visual feedback loop. Here's the recipe.

The three native loop primitives in Claude Code — /loop, /goal, and /schedule — what each does, how they differ, and when to reach for which, with examples.

The complete guide to 26 free AI travel skills that autonomously drive Kayak, Booking.com, 12306 and more — search flights, hotels, trains, cars and cruises hands-free.

AI design slop lives on six layers, from frontend UI to trust and orchestration. Here's the full map and the skill that fixes each one.

OpenClaw and Claude Code are converging toward a unified skill layer. Markdown config, skill registries, tool use, memory -- the architecture is aligning.

Dissect Ship PR Until Green field by field — goal, exit condition, max-iterations, check command, and the kickoff prompt that drives Claude Code to a passing PR.

Top 10 code review AI skills for 2026 — covering security, debugging, testing, polish, and PR workflows. Free to install with Claude Code.

A design skill is a plain-markdown SKILL.md the agent loads on every turn. Here's why that beats a one-off prompt, plus the three ways to install one.

The Ralph technique runs a coding agent in a plain while-loop with fresh context each iteration. Here is why restarting beats one long session for autonomous agents.

Every vibe-coded site has the same signature: purple gradient, Inter, four cards, one weak hover. Here's why models ship it and how to overwrite it.

10 AI workflows that automate your morning — from inbox triage and calendar prep to focus mode and project kickoff. Free to install.

Why loop engineering replaced prompt engineering in 2026, and what changes for builders when the unit of work becomes an autonomous loop instead of a prompt.

Loop engineering is the 2026 successor to prompt engineering: designing autonomous agent loops that act, observe, decide, and repeat until a verifiable exit condition.

A five-layer framework for turning domain expertise into scalable AI skill revenue. From knowledge encoding to pricing models that work.

Top 10 free customer support AI agents for 2026 — covering tickets, success, community, and escalation. All install-ready in 60 seconds.

Top 10 AI skills for technical writers in 2026 — covering docs, releases, polishing, formats, and reusable templates. All free to install.

10 install-ready privacy-focused AI workflows for 2026 — covering local checks, secret scans, subscription audits, and data hygiene.

Top 10 AI agents for project managers in 2026 — covering scrum, planning, delivery, risk, and stakeholder communication. Free to install.

A comprehensive guide to 33 free AI skills that automate every step of your France Schengen visa application — from document preparation to appointment booking and tracking.

Bank statement requirements for a Schengen visa application including the 3-month rule, EUR 65/day minimum balance, proper formatting, and red flags that trigger refusals. AI skills that validate your financial evidence.

Step-by-step guide to writing a Schengen visa cover letter that covers purpose, dates, accommodation, finances, and ties to home country. Includes common mistakes and an AI skill that drafts it for you.

Complete Schengen visa document checklist organized by category with AI skills that verify each requirement. Covers identity, financial, accommodation, employment, and travel documents for a France Schengen visa.

Everything parents need to know about applying for a France Schengen visa for children under 18 — birth certificates, parental consent, school absence letters, and five AI skills that handle the extra paperwork.

Complete ICAO photo requirements for Schengen visa applications including dimensions, background, expression rules, and glasses policy. Plus an AI skill that validates your photo before submission.

A practical guide to handling a France Schengen visa refusal — understanding refusal codes, the appeal process through the Commission de Recours, and when to reapply instead. AI skills that audit your application and prepare you for next steps.

A week-by-week timeline for France Schengen visa applications — when to start, what to prepare each week, critical deadlines, and how the AI Timeline Planner skill backwards-plans everything from your travel date.

Mandatory travel insurance requirements for a Schengen visa including EUR 30,000 coverage, Schengen-wide scope, repatriation clause, and date matching. AI skill that validates your policy before submission.

A practical guide to booking TLScontact appointments for France Schengen visas in the UK — covering centre options, service levels, peak season strategies, and AI skills that help you find slots faster.

10 install-ready AI workflows that turn any solo developer into a one-person team — focus, standups, security, backups, and more.

OpenClaw agents write and deploy their own skills. This self-modifying capability changes skill development from handcrafted to emergent.

Top 10 Python AI skills every developer should install in 2026 — for testing, debugging, packaging, data, and ML workflows. All free.

Top 10 free AI skills for JavaScript developers in 2026 — covering testing, debugging, code review, docs, and Node tooling. Install in 60 seconds.

MCP hosting is the unsexy but essential layer that makes AI skill ecosystems work at scale. Compare self-hosting, managed, and cloud options.

The Top 10 AI agents every PM should hire in 2026 — covering discovery, analytics, roadmaps, delivery, and stakeholder comms. Free to install.

Karpathy's pedagogy prizes building from first principles. The Claude Code skills ecosystem prizes install-and-ship. These aren't in conflict — but the tension is real and worth naming.

CLAUDE.md files have become the standard context-injection point for Claude Code projects. Karpathy's coding guidelines show exactly why the practice is more powerful than it looks.

Karpathy's 'build it from scratch' lineage — nanoGPT, micrograd, makemore — encodes a theory of understanding that ports directly into how the best Claude skills are designed.

Karpathy named December 2025 as the inflection point for agentic coding. Here's his actual framework for thinking about agents, the limits he flags, and what it means for Claude Code workflows.

The multica-ai/andrej-karpathy-skills repo contains exactly one skill. That single-skill design is itself a statement about how to write useful AI guidance.

A close reading of the karpathy-guidelines skill — four rules, 65 lines, no ceremony. What each rule actually does and why the structure matters.

The karpathy-guidelines skill is 65 lines. The Hermes superbundle is 144 skills. These represent opposite theories of how to encode AI capability. Karpathy's approach has specific advantages worth understanding.

Karpathy's Software 1.0/2.0/3.0 framing maps cleanly onto how Claude Code skills, prompts, and agentic workflows actually work. Here's the translation.

Karpathy coined 'vibe coding' in February 2025. It became Collins' Word of the Year. By 2026, the term had split into two very different practices. Here's where it stands.

Karpathy's guidelines say nothing about testing strategy, team collaboration, or long-term codebase health. Those omissions are intentional — and they teach something important about scope.

Hand-picked Top 10 data science AI skills for 2026 — covering analysis, ML, notebooks, and reporting. Install in 60 seconds with Claude Code.

Ranked guide to the 10 best free sales AI agents in 2026, with install commands, real use cases, and clear methodology behind every pick.

Agents use tools, persist state, and take autonomous action. Chatbots just respond. Understanding this distinction explains why skill ecosystems exist.

Ranked guide to the 10 best AI agents for content creators in 2026, with install commands, real use cases, and clear methodology.

Ranked guide to the 10 best AI workflows for remote teams in 2026, with install commands, real use cases, and clear methodology.

Ranked guide to the 10 best testing-focused AI agents in 2026, with install commands, real use cases, and the methodology behind each pick.

Top 12 browser-automation skills for Claude Code, ranked. Five are Playwright wrappers; the differentiated picks are accessibility-tree, native-UI, and API-backed.

Top 15 Claude Code skills for marketing, copywriting, SEO, and competitive intel — ranked. AdMapix leads with 78.9K signal; 23-skill marketing bundles are the second wave.

Top 15 Claude Code skills for video, image generation, and UI design — ranked by usage and quality. Only two skills carry 5/5 quality: Remotion and Impeccable.

Top 15 data and analytics skills for Claude Code, ranked. Stock-trading skills dominate; only 5 of 15 are general-purpose data tools.

Top 15 enterprise-integration skills for Claude Code, ranked. GitHub leads, but two AI-makes-phone-calls skills crack the top 5 — a 2026 trend nobody saw coming.

A curated 12-skill stack for first-time founders — validation, MVP, GTM, ops — pulled from across categories. Not a ranking; a working setup.

Top 15 research and science skills for Claude Code. Nine are web search; only three (Biomni, AnnData, ClinVar) are actual scientific tooling — and they're the only 3/5-quality picks.

Top 15 specialist Claude Code skills — fortune-telling, legal docs, language tutoring, medical-device risk — all at similar install volume. Eclectic by design.

Top 11 Claude skills for backend & API development. Architecture patterns and Node.js bundles lead; the language-specific skills (Spring Boot, WebSocket) cluster in the bottom half.

Top 15 Claude skills for CI/CD. The data reveals 2026's truth: 'CI/CD' has become *deployment* — actual CI skills barely crack the top 10. The category is now platform automation.

Top 15 Claude skills for code review. The #1 and #2 entries are a paired workflow (receiving + requesting review) from obra/superpowers — install both together.

Top 15 Claude skills for content writing. SEO audit leads (92K signal, 4/5 quality); platform-specific writers (RedNote, multi-platform Chinese social, TikTok) dominate the rest.

Top 15 Claude skills for research work. Academic-paper skills lead by signal; last30days (#8, 5/5 quality) is the standout for actual customer/market research across Reddit, X, HN, Polymarket.

Top 15 Claude skills for database work. Supabase leads with two 5/5-quality skills; database vendors are publishing official skills as a competitive moat.

Top 15 Claude skills for debugging. Methodology beats tooling — the top 2 entries are systematic-debugging frameworks; tactical tools (log analyzers, Chrome DevTools) start at #4.

Top 15 Claude skills for frontend development. Anthropic's Frontend Design leads (119K signal, 3/5); the 5/5-quality pick is Impeccable — the only anti-AI-design-slop skill in the catalog.

Top 15 Claude skills for Git workflows. The #1 and #2 picks aren't about running git — they're about deciding *when* and *how* to integrate work. Worktrees lead the pack.

Top 11 Claude skills for pitch decks and presentations. The standout for investor pitches is #11 AI Presentation Maker — interview-driven generation tuned for pitch context.

Top 15 Claude skills for project auditing and health checks. SEO and website audits lead; security and UI audits round out the list. Two 4/5+ quality picks.

Slack and Discord skills for Claude Code — a 7-skill curated stack pulled from the Enterprise category, organized by use case (read, write, automate, monitor).

Top 15 Claude Code skills for testing and TDD. The #1 and #2 entries aren't test runners — they're TDD methodology skills at 4/5 quality, totaling 290K install signal.

Top 15 Claude skills for video production. Remotion dominates (4 entries); pixel-art at #1 is a tag-miscategorization with high Hermes signal.

Every official Anthropic-published Claude skill, ranked. All 11 carry a 5/5 quality score; Frontend Design is 57× more installed than the next entry.

Ranked guide to the 10 best free DevOps automation workflows in 2026, with install commands, real use cases, and a clear methodology.

Deep dive into OpenClaw's 7 workspace files: AGENTS.md, SOUL.md, TOOLS.md, IDENTITY.md, USER.md, HEARTBEAT.md, and MEMORY.md. Configuration-as-markdown explained.

Fifteen skills for building, running, and improving AI agents — ranked across 465 candidates. The dominant 2026 pattern: agent memory and self-improvement. 10 of the top 15 are about either remembering or evolving.

Fifteen Claude Code skills ranked for the day-to-day developer workflow — code review, debugging, git, testing, auth, frontend. obra/superpowers takes the top 3.

Twelve skills for the operational side of AI-assisted development — auto-updaters, MCP management, Docker, git, tmux. The top picks are about keeping your AI stack healthy, not deploying it.

Twelve skills for processing, transforming, and humanizing documents. The most installed: Summarize, at 171K signal. The most uncomfortable trend: three of the top 9 are AI-text humanizers.

Fifteen productivity skills ranked from 454 candidates. The category splits cleanly: meta-cognition (plan/execute) versus office-app integrations (Notion, PowerPoint, Lark). Both win.

Twelve security skills ranked. The most surprising finding: the top of the list isn't about securing your code — it's about securing the skills you install before they touch your code.

Ranked guide to the 10 best AI skills for startup founders, with install commands, real founder use cases, and a clear methodology.

RAG-based code search hits a wall at scale: the index is stale before it ships. Claude Code's grep-and-read approach trades upfront indexing for live traversal — and that tradeoff scales differently than most teams realize.

Anthropic's Founder's Playbook quietly settled an argument I've been having with founders for a year: which Claude surface do you use, when, and why. Here's the decoder, and what each one is structurally good and bad at.

Instructions that helped your old model can hurt your new one. Anthropic's Applied AI team just put a number on how often you should audit your CLAUDE.md, hooks, and skills — and gave two concrete examples of rules that aged badly.

The MVP stage has a second goal that almost nobody talks about: building in a way that doesn't accrue technical debt you'll struggle to pay off. Anthropic's playbook names the load-bearing tool that prevents that — and most founders skip it.

Ask AI for evidence supporting any idea and it'll find it. Anthropic's Founder's Playbook names this 'confirmation bias with a research engine' — and prescribes the exact antidote: structured adversarial thinking at every stage.

Most MVP guidance talks about what to build. Anthropic's Founder's Playbook does something rarer: it names five specific failure modes by name, and prescribes the antidote to each. Worth taping to your wall.

Anthropic's new Founder's Playbook makes an argument I've been waiting to see in print: the wall between people who can build and people who can sell is gone. The founder identity model that survives 2026 is the one that adapts to that.

When AI removes the engineering moat that used to defend startups, what's left? Anthropic's Founder's Playbook names four — accumulated depth, behavioral data, codified domain expertise, and workflow lock-in. Each is a separate compounding move.

Wang Jianshuo shipped a Chinese-podcast-to-YouTube-Shorts pipeline as 15 single-purpose Claude Code skills. The interesting part isn't the result — it's the design.

At the MVP stage, the founder being in every loop is an asset. At Launch, the same instinct becomes the constraint that stalls the company. Anthropic's playbook names the transition and prescribes the audit.

Anthropic's enterprise team is direct: for multi-language codebases, Language Server Protocol integration is one of the highest-leverage investments you can make. One enterprise rolled it out org-wide before opening Claude Code access. Here's why.

The founders who mis-identify early traction as product-market fit are typically the same ones who started tracking data after launch. Anthropic's Founder's Playbook prescribes the inversion — and the two tests that actually distinguish signal from flattery.

Wang Jianshuo spent five years trying to build AI video editing. Claude Code reproduced his progress in a night. Then he tore the codebase down and rebuilt it as 15 verbs. Here's why.

42% of startups die because they built something nobody wanted. Anthropic's new Founder's Playbook is direct: agentic coding makes that failure mode MORE likely, not less. Here's why, and what to do about it.

Bottoms-up adoption gets you to 30% engagement. Then it stops. Anthropic's Applied AI team just named the missing piece: a directly responsible individual for the Claude Code configuration. Most orgs don't have one.

Anthropic's Applied AI team published their patterns from enterprise rollouts. The headline finding: the ecosystem around the model — the harness — determines outcomes more than the model itself.

Anthropic's Founder's Playbook closes with one line that summarizes the entire AI-native startup era: 'The bottlenecks are no longer what you can build, but what you choose to build.' That sentence reframes the founder's craft.

Ranked guide to the 10 best free design-focused AI agents in 2026, with install commands, real use cases, and clear methodology.

Learn how to build AI agents without writing code using OpenClaw workspace files. Configure personality, memory, and skills in plain English markdown.

Ranked guide to the 10 best security-focused AI agents in 2026, with install commands, real use cases, and clear methodology for every pick.

Week 19 of Claude Code (v2.1.128–v2.1.136) lets you load plugins directly from a .zip archive or a URL. Combined with worktree.baseRef and auto-mode hard-deny rules, distribution and safety took a step up together.

Claude Code's /ultrareview command opened as a public research preview in Week 17 (April 2026). A fleet of bug-hunting agents runs in the cloud and findings land back in your CLI. Here's how to use it well.

Week 16 made Claude Opus 4.7 the default on Max and Team Premium and introduced the xhigh effort level. Here's what xhigh actually does, when to use it, and how the new /effort slider changes day-to-day work.

Hermes Agent v0.13.0, tagged v2026.5.7, ships durable Kanban, a persistent /goal, Checkpoints v2 with /rollback, gateway auto-resume, post-write linting, and eight P0 security fixes.

Hermes v0.13.0 ships Checkpoints v2 — structured snapshots of agent state, taken automatically before destructive actions, that you can return to with /rollback. Here's how it changes how you delegate.

OpenClaw's May 2026 release focuses on the unglamorous parts of agent reliability — computed status, false-success prevention, credential boundaries, plugin verification, and stale context invalidation. Here's what each change buys you.

OpenClaw's April 2026 release added provenance to every memory item — who said it, when, in what context, from which provider. Here's why memory provenance changes how an agent reasons.

OpenClaw's April 2026 cycle added TaskFlow orchestration — durable, inspectable flows that survive crashes, restarts, and human handoffs. Here's why it's the single most structurally important update of the year.

OpenClaw and Hermes Agent are the two leading open agent runtimes of 2026. They look similar from a distance and diverge sharply up close. Here's the head-to-head, post-May 2026 updates.

OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, and Claude Code are often pitched as alternatives. They aren't. Each is shaped for a different job. Here's the 2026 three-way comparison after the May releases.

A ranked beginner-friendly guide to the 10 best Claude Code skills to install first in 2026, with install commands and clear use cases.

A ranked list of the 10 best free automation workflows in 2026, with install commands, real use cases, and the methodology behind every pick.

Seven proven strategies to generate revenue with OpenClaw AI skills, from automation services to micro SaaS. Real business models, not theory.

A ranked list of the 10 best AI agents for engineering teams, with install commands, real use cases, and a clear methodology behind every pick.

Ranked guide to the 10 best free marketing AI agents in 2026, with install commands, real use cases, and a methodology you can trust.

Ranked guide to the 10 most useful Claude Code workflows in 2026, with install commands, real use cases, and selection methodology.

Compare three OpenClaw hosting options: self-host, Agent37 managed hosting, and VPS with Docker. Pricing, security, and performance breakdown.

The definitive ranked list of the 10 best AI agents for software developers in 2026, with install commands, real use cases, and selection criteria.

A ranked guide to the 10 most useful free OpenClaw skills you can install today, with use cases, install commands, and selection criteria.

50 articles across two series — AI agents and ClawFlows workflows. Here's what we learned, what surprised us, and where the automation frontier is heading.

Why every knowledge worker should install ten AI agents this week, and how to pick the right ones for your role.

The build-packing-list ClawFlows workflow generates trip-specific packing lists from destination, weather, duration, and activities. Deep dive.

Compare all 12+ AI providers supported by OpenClaw including Claude, GPT, Grok, Kimi, and more. See which model fits your use case best.

The agency-agents support lineup: tier 1, tier 2, customer success, and documentation specialists for growing SaaS.

Why does activate-focus-mode work when willpower doesn't? The psychology of ritual, pre-commitment, and friction in automation design.

The agency-agents paid media roundup: Meta Ads, Google Ads, TikTok, LinkedIn, and programmatic display specialists.

How OpenClaw delivers AI through WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, and 4 more channels. Architecture, setup, security, and what it means for skill deployment.

A thorough review of the Blockchain Security Auditor agent, including what it catches, what it misses, and how to use it on real smart contracts.

Zapier is great for non-technical users. ClawFlows is built for developers who want text-based, version-controlled, self-hosted automation.

A step-by-step tutorial for authoring a new agency-agent, including structure, tuning, and publishing to the community.

The check-dependencies ClawFlows workflow audits your NPM and package dependencies for security issues, outdated versions, and license problems.

A roundup of ClawFlows workflows for digital hygiene — session clearing, OAuth revocation, cookie cleanup, and the routines that protect your privacy.

The agency-agents academic lineup: thesis advisors, citation managers, literature reviewers, and grant writers for grad students.

Step-by-step tutorial for shipping a working voice AI agent using the official ElevenLabs voice-agents skill. Covers persona, tools, streaming, and turn-taking.

Step-by-step guide to installing OpenClaw, choosing a model provider, configuring a messaging channel, and sending your first AI-powered message.

The build-changelog ClawFlows workflow generates release notes from Git history in under a minute. Here's how it works and why it's my favorite dev workflow.

ElevenLabs published a first-party Agent Skills bundle covering voice, transcription, music, and sound effects. It's a preview of how vendors will ship to AI coding agents.

Creating AI skills is solved. Distributing them is not. The SKILL_SEARCH flag confirms skill discovery is the next strategic layer in AI development.

The agency-agents spatial computing lineup for AR, VR, and WebXR builders, including Vision Pro, Quest, and WebXR specialists.

How to combine ElevenLabs' text-to-speech, speech-to-text, music, sound-effects, and voice-isolator skills to handle podcasting, video, gaming, and accessibility work without leaving Claude Code.

Most ML papers can't be reproduced by the labs that published them. This skill turns paper reproduction into a structured 4-step workflow — and surfaces exactly where the gap is.

Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry skill is the 3rd most-installed on skills.sh. That number is a dispatch from the real world of enterprise AI adoption.

Better Auth's 43K installs in a short window suggest the current constraints — framework-agnostic, TypeScript-first, self-hostable — weren't covered by existing solutions.

The caveman skill compresses prompts into minimal, primitive English — and when the agent performs identically on 46% fewer tokens, you learn what information wasn't actually there.

Every new requirement adds a prop to the parent, which propagates to the children, which needs null checks. Vercel's Composition Patterns encodes the specific patterns that stop it — not as a blog post, but as running instructions.

Convex's pitch: write server functions, subscribe from the client, get real-time updates automatically. The agent skill is how the Convex team corrects for generic backend assumptions.

The coreyhaines31/marketingskills copywriting skill is a structured framework — Hormozi-style, benefit-led, metric-heavy. 82.5K installs on a skill that treats writing as a repeatable system.

The Emil Kowalski Design Engineering skill packages his micro-interaction sensibility as agent instructions. The claim it makes — that taste is encodable in repeatable patterns — is a bold one worth examining.

Every codebase has an implicit design system locked in component files. Extract Design System reads them all at once and makes the invisible explicit.

find-skills from vercel-labs has 1.3M installs — more than any coding or workflow skill. What it says about where AI agent tooling actually is right now.

When a company the size of Google chooses Agent Skills as the distribution mechanism for developer knowledge, it's worth asking why — and what they're signaling about the future of docs.

Firecrawl turns a URL into clean markdown in one call. The shift isn't technical — it's a conceptual reframe of what the web is.

GitHub Actions Docs from xixu-me ships 77.9K installs because the official docs are written for linear reading but agents need random access. The skill is essentially a well-indexed version of what your agent already half-knows.

The agent skills wrapping Google Stitch encode something more useful than how-to: the design → generate → refine → design again cycle that makes Stitch actually work.

Most code review is polite. Grill Me is not. It finds every assumption you made and every edge case you didn't handle — and the reason it works is there's no relationship to protect.

Lark has 23 agent skills covering documents, calendar, IM, spreadsheets, approvals, and OKRs. The breadth is telling.

marketing-psychology from coreyhaines31 puts behavioral science frameworks — reciprocity, social proof, scarcity, authority — into a skill with 60.7K installs. The uncomfortable question it raises.

The Neon agent skill isn't documentation. It's the Neon team telling your AI how to use Neon the way Neon intended.

A flaky test costs CI time, interrupts your flow, and eventually gets marked .skip. Currents builds Playwright tooling professionally — what they encoded is what breaks production test suites.

react-best-practices ships 40 React performance rules as agent instructions rather than documentation. Blog posts expire. Skills run on every edit.

The React Native Guidelines skill has 103K installs because web developers keep making the same category error: treating mobile as a subset of web.

Remotion's thesis is that animation timelines and React component trees are isomorphic. The best practices skill is the logical extension of that thesis.

The Sentry CLI skill lets your agent create releases, tag deployments, and query issues — turning error tracking from something you do after things break into part of shipping.

The most-installed marketing skill on the platform does a full SEO audit in a single prompt. The surprising insight isn't the speed — it's that 200 checks were codifiable at all.

The shadcn/ui Expert skill formalises what the library's design always implied — copy-paste components, no package lock-in, composable primitives are architecture for agent operation.

supabase-postgres-best-practices encodes the query patterns the Supabase team sees go wrong in production — N+1s, missing indexes, unnecessary realtime. The library is fine. The patterns aren't.

The discipline of writing the test first keeps reasserting itself because it enforces something most developers skip: defining the contract before writing the code.

The Advanced TypeScript Types skill from wshobson/agents injects knowledge that doesn't come up in tutorials but routinely comes up in production code — conditional types, mapped types, infer.

web-design-guidelines from vercel-labs ships 100 UI rules as agent instructions. The difference between a style guide and a skill is when the knowledge gets applied.

The website audit skill compresses a consultant's checklist into a prompt. The interesting question isn't whether it replaces the consultant — it's what changes when the audit is free.

Cron jobs, shell scripts, and ClawFlows workflows all automate tasks — but they're designed for different problems. Here's how to choose.

The agency-agents game development lineup: engine specialists, level designers, narrative writers, and the rest of your indie studio.

Step-by-step guide to authoring your first ClawFlows workflow. Structure, steps, state, error handling, and how to test it locally.

A deep review of the Product Manager agent from agency-agents: PRDs, prioritization, stakeholder management, and where it falls short.

ClawHub hosts 13,000+ skills for OpenClaw. Here's how the registry works, how skills are structured, and what its rapid growth means for the AI skill economy.

32 build-time feature flags reveal Claude Code's roadmap: voice mode, web browsing, skill search, self-hosting. Here's what each signal means for builders.

The Health category in ClawFlows includes medication-reminder, workout-log, and sleep-tracking workflows that quietly maintain your health routines.

The agency-agents testing lineup: unit, integration, E2E, accessibility, and load testing specialists for modern software teams.

The brainstorming skill from obra/superpowers enforces a hard gate before any code gets written — and that constraint turns out to be the most productive thing you can add to your workflow.

The executing-plans skill from obra/superpowers draws a sharp line between the planning session and the implementation session — and holding that line turns out to be harder than it sounds.

The gap between 'implementation complete' and 'work integrated' is where branches go to die — and most engineers never develop a consistent protocol for crossing it.

using-git-worktrees isn't a workflow convenience — it's the physical infrastructure that makes running multiple agents simultaneously coherent rather than chaotic.

Performative agreement in code review feels like good collaboration but it's actually a form of technical negligence — and the superpowers skill names it clearly.

The moment you frame a code review request determines the quality of feedback you get — and most developers frame it wrong by default.

Most debugging sessions fail not because the problem is hard, but because engineers skip the investigation and go straight to fixes — a habit that compounds.

using-superpowers isn't a capability — it's the operating system for every other skill, and using it changes how you orient before any task.

The verification-before-completion skill from obra/superpowers treats unverified completion claims as dishonesty — and the more I've used it, the more I think that framing is exactly right.

The writing-plans skill from obra/superpowers produces implementation plans detailed enough that a skilled developer with zero codebase context could execute them — and that constraint teaches you something about how well you actually understood the work.

writing-skills forces you to separate what you know from what you've proven — and that gap reveals whether your expertise is reusable or just locally-applicable habit.

The docker-cleanup ClawFlows workflow reclaims disk space by pruning unused Docker images, containers, and volumes — safely and on a schedule.

The full roster of sales specialists in the agency-agents library, mapped to the stages of a modern B2B sales cycle.

gstack's CSO skill runs a 14-phase security audit across your entire codebase. What it finds — and what most solo builders never think about — is the uncomfortable part.

Garry Tan claims he ships at 810× his 2013 pace while running YC full-time. The math is in the tooling. Here's how gstack's 35 skills make that number possible.

gstack's investigate skill enforces a root-cause-first debugging protocol. The real insight is about the mental habit it builds — and why most developers never develop it.

gstack's office-hours skill doesn't help you build faster. It helps you build the right thing by forcing the questions most founders are afraid to ask.

gstack's ship skill automates the release pipeline. But the real value is what it reveals about why builders stay stuck at 90% done.

A detailed comparison of OpenClaw and Claude Code across architecture, model flexibility, extensibility, messaging channels, and security models.

Using Hermes's Daytona backend to give every agent task a fresh workspace. Walkthrough, contrast with Docker, and when clean rooms are worth the slower start.

The check-email ClawFlows workflow triages your inbox, flags what matters, archives the noise, and drafts replies to the obvious ones.

Meet the Agents Orchestrator, the specialized agent that coordinates the other 149 agents in the agency-agents library.

Both Hermes and Claude Code support lifecycle hooks. The events, the execution model, and the debugging experience differ — here is how to pick the right one.

ClawFlows workflows compose skills into routines. Here's the architecture — how workflows call skills, pass state, and handle errors across steps.

Context compaction silently reshapes your skill's output. Learn token budgets, auto-compact triggers, and design patterns for skills that survive compression.

The three cost levers that keep Hermes agents from burning your API budget: turn caps, hard USD limits, and a fallback model chain that downgrades on failure.

Step-by-step guide to installing agency-agents in GitHub Copilot, including workarounds for Copilot's single-instructions limitation.

A toolset comparison between Hermes and Claude Code. Hermes ships 47 built-in tools for general agent work; Claude Code's narrower set is tighter for code.

Every Claude user has lived through session amnesia. Here's why it happens, why CLAUDE.md is a partial fix, and how Hermes solves it at the runtime layer.

A precise walkthrough for installing and invoking agency-agents inside Cursor, including Rules file format and common pitfalls.

A look at Hermes push-to-talk voice mode: 20-language support, the edge-tts output stack, Claude doing the reasoning, and where voice actually beats chat.

The Home & Life category in ClawFlows hides the best everyday workflows — meal planning, chore tracking, family handoffs, and household routines.

Using Hermes's delegate_task() to run several Claude instances in parallel, each with isolated context. A concrete CVE-triage example and notes on rate limits.

Self-improvement in Hermes is not model fine-tuning. It is the agent writing markdown SKILL.md files when it encounters a lesson worth remembering.

OpenClaw is an open-source personal AI assistant that runs locally, supports 12+ model providers, and has 13,000+ skills on ClawHub. Here's what you need to know.

Using Hermes's Modal terminal backend to run Claude agents serverlessly. Cost math vs a VPS, cold-start tradeoffs, and when each model actually wins.

How Hermes Agent remembers between sessions: markdown files in ~/.hermes, FTS5 full-text search, LLM summarization, and agent-curated persistence.

Why persona-based agents consistently outperform ad-hoc prompt engineering, and what the shift means for how we use LLMs.

MCP connects to external services. Skills encode domain expertise. Together they form the complete AI extensibility stack. Learn when to build each.

Step-by-step setup for Hermes's Telegram and Discord gateways, with safe defaults (allowed_users), a YAML config template, and notes on the other six backends.

Configure Hermes to use Claude Sonnet 4.6 with provider aliases, credential sharing from Claude Code, and sensible fallback models.

Write a Hermes SKILL.md from scratch with the full frontmatter reference, layout conventions, and portability notes for Claude Code users.

The activate-sleep-mode ClawFlows workflow closes your day cleanly — charges devices, dims screens, silences notifications, and preps tomorrow.

A walkthrough of how Hermes distributes skills: the bundled library, the community Hub, install flow, permissions, and how this intersects with aiskill.market.

How agentskills.io became the markdown-native skill format shared across Hermes, Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex — and what it means for portability.

Stand up a persistent Claude agent on a $5 Hetzner or DigitalOcean VPS in under 15 minutes. Full install walkthrough with config.