ablate-ai-layer

Cole's AI Skills

The skills I actually use to build software with coding agents. Straight out of my .claude/skills/ folder.

What this is

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md in it: a name, a description of when to use it, and the procedure the agent should follow. Your agent loads the description at startup and pulls in the full skill only when the work matches. That's the whole idea, and it's why skills scale where a 2,000-line CLAUDE.md doesn't.

These 34 skills are the AI Layer from my Agentic Coding course. They're built around one loop I run on nearly every ticket:

prime → plan → implement → validate → review → commit → PR

Around that loop sit the pieces that feed it (PRD, architecture, epic slicing), the pieces that run it in parallel (worktrees), and the meta-skills that let you build more of your own AI Layer (rules, hooks, skills, opportunity scans).

Nothing here is a framework. Each skill is a plain markdown file you can read in two minutes, disagree with, and edit. That's the point: read them, take the ones that fit how you work, rewrite the rest.

Bring them in

As a Claude Code plugin (easiest, stays updated)

Run these two commands inside Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add coleam00/skills
/plugin install skills@cole-medin

That's it. All 34 skills, managed and read-only, and /plugin marketplace update pulls new ones as I add them. Plugin skills are namespaced, so you invoke them as /skills:piv-implement.

The whole set costs roughly 4,400 tokens of always-on context (just the descriptions; the bodies load only when a skill fires). Run claude plugin details skills to see the per-skill breakdown, and disable the plugin any time with /plugin.

If that first command fails with Permission denied (publickey): the owner/repo shorthand prefers SSH, and your SSH key isn't authenticating to GitHub. Recent Claude Code versions detect that and fall back to HTTPS on their own. If yours doesn't, pass the HTTPS URL directly, which needs no key:

/plugin marketplace add https://github.com/coleam00/skills.git

Setting CLAUDE_CODE_PLUGIN_PREFER_HTTPS=1 in your environment makes the shorthand use HTTPS permanently.

As editable files, in any agent

npx skills add coleam00/skills                             # everything
npx skills add coleam00/skills --list                      # see what's here first
npx skills add coleam00/skills --skill piv-plan-implementation piv-implement piv-validate

Add -g to install globally (~/.claude/skills/) instead of into the current project. This route writes real files into your repo, so you can edit them, which is what I'd actually recommend once you know which ones you keep reaching for.

Or just clone and copy

They're only markdown files:

git clone https://github.com/coleam00/skills.git
cp -r skills/.claude/skills/piv-implement your-project/.claude/skills/

Or ask your agent

This works fine too:

Clone https://github.com/coleam00/skills, look at the skills in .claude/skills/, and copy the ones that fit this project into my .claude/skills/ folder. Tell me which ones you picked and why.

For the last two, restart your session (or run /skills) and they'll show up.

The skills

Prime: load the right context, and only that

Plan: intent before implementation

The PIV loop: plan, implement, validate

Issues: diagnose before you fix

Parallel work

Build your own AI Layer: the meta-skills

Autonomy: hand the whole loop over

Tools

Using these with other agents

Skills are just markdown. There is no Claude-specific runtime here, so most of this works anywhere a coding agent can read files.

The npx skills CLI installs to 75+ agents (Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Cline, Windsurf, OpenCode, Continue and the rest) into whatever directory each one expects:

npx skills add coleam00/skills -a codex
npx skills add coleam00/skills -a cursor -a claude-code

If your agent has no skills mechanism at all, the fallback is boring and effective: keep the folder in your repo and point at it from AGENTS.md (or the equivalent), telling the agent to read