Big Idea

The argument in one line.

The mental block around building AI agents dissolves once you realize a Claude skill is just a folder of plain markdown files, and a tool called Skillsmith scaffolds that folder from a voice prompt in under ten minutes.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…

You want to build a Claude Code agent or automation but feel blocked by the technical complexity.
You are using Claude Code daily and want a faster way to package repeatable workflows into reusable slash commands.
You want to pull live data from Instagram or YouTube into Claude and get a structured analysis report automatically.
You are curious how Apify's MCP works as a data-scraping layer inside Claude Code workflows.

SKIP IF…

You are not using Claude Code — this workflow is specific to the Claude Code environment.
You want production-grade agent infrastructure with error handling and retries — this is a beginner-to-intermediate onramp.

TL;DR

The full version, fast.

Building a Claude agent is really just building a Claude skill — a folder with five components (SKILL.md, context, frameworks, tasks, templates), all in plain markdown. A plugin called Skillsmith turns that insight into a ten-minute workflow: you describe what you want in plain English (or by voice), Skillsmith generates the folder structure, and you run it with a slash command. The video demonstrates this by building a social media creative director skill that connects to the Apify MCP, scrapes Instagram and YouTube data, ranks content by engagement, and outputs a coaching brief — all without writing custom code.

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Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:00 – 00:56

01 · Agents vs Skills Explained

Reframes the premise: Claude officially recommends building skills over agents. Defines a skill as a named worker with its own tools and routing, packaged in plain markdown.

00:56 – 02:00

02 · Inside a Skill Folder

Screen-share of a real skill folder. Five components explained: SKILL.md, context, frameworks, tasks, templates.

02:00 – 02:42

03 · Meet Skillsmith Plugin

Introduces Skillsmith: one /skillsmith command with four routing modes — Discover, Scaffold, Distill, Audit.

02:42 – 03:06

04 · Install and Launch Skillsmith

Install command from the repo, paste in terminal, type /skillsmith, choose Discover.

03:06 – 06:16

05 · Build a Skill Live

Builds a Social Media Guru / creative director skill. Voice-prompts the spec into Skillsmith. Explains Apify MCP as a marketplace of 39,332 data actors. Connects Instagram scraper and YouTube scraper.

06:16 – 07:06

06 · Run the Skill Live

Runs the creative-director skill. It calls Apify actors in parallel, scrapes Instagram reels and YouTube top 10, and generates a ranked markdown report.

07:06 – 07:52

07 · Results

Shows the completed report: Instagram top 10 posts, pinned all-time bangers, YouTube top 10 shorts and long-form, and a coaching brief from the creative director.

07:52 – 08:33

08 · Next: Autonomous Agents

Teases episode 2: three paths to make skills run without manual commands — Hermes (self-hosted VPS), Claude Managed Agents, n8n + MCP server.

08:33 – 09:08

09 · CTA and Sign-off

Pitches Charlie OS personal operating system with 60-day revenue sprint. Subscribe and like ask.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

A Claude skill is nothing more than a folder of markdown files — SKILL.md, context, frameworks, tasks, and templates — no custom code required.
Anthropic has publicly stated to focus on building skills rather than building agents, which means the agent mental model is the obstacle.
Skillsmith is a single /skillsmith command with four routing modes: Discover (spec), Scaffold (build), Distill (SOPs and videos to frameworks), and Audit (improve existing skills).
You can voice-prompt a skill specification into Skillsmith using Whisper — no typing the full prompt required.
Apify is a marketplace of 39,332 data actors; adding their MCP lets Claude Code browse the marketplace and call any actor as part of a skill workflow.
An MCP is a bridge between Claude Code and another software — you do not need one to start building skills; add external data connections only when the use case demands it.
The coaching brief structure (Synopsis, What the Winners Did, What Cost the Rest, Do This Next Batch) is a content review template that works for any channel running regular creative output.
Three paths to making skills autonomous without manual commands: Hermes on a self-hosted VPS, Claude Managed Agents via the CLI, or connecting an n8n MCP server.
After 40-plus skills built, the creator finds the folder-based approach 10 times easier than the old workflow of n8n automations or custom code.

Takeaway

A Claude skill is just a folder — start there.

WHAT TO LEARN

The barrier to building AI automations in Claude Code is mostly conceptual: once you see the folder structure, the whole thing becomes approachable.

A Claude skill has five components — SKILL.md, context, frameworks, tasks, and templates — and all of them are plain text files you can read and edit without touching code.
The Skillsmith plugin handles the scaffolding: describe what you want in plain English, let it build the folder, and you skip the blank-page problem entirely.
Start without external connectors. An MCP or API bridge adds power but also complexity — get the core skill working first, then layer in data sources only when the use case is proven.
The coaching brief output structure (Synopsis, What the Winners Did, What Cost the Rest, Do This Next Batch) transfers to any recurring performance review — content, sales, or operations.
Three paths exist for running skills autonomously — self-hosted (Hermes on a VPS), cloud-managed (Claude Managed Agents), or workflow-triggered (n8n + MCP). Pick based on how much infrastructure you are willing to manage.

Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

Claude skill: A named automation in Claude Code packaged as a folder of plain markdown files, with its own tools and routing instructions. Activated by a slash command.
SKILL.md: The entry-point file inside a skill folder. Defines the triggers that activate the skill, the persona it adopts, and the commands it responds to.
Skillsmith: A Claude Code plugin (slash command) that builds skill folders automatically. It interviews the user about the desired workflow, scaffolds the folder structure, and can distill external SOPs into reusable frameworks.
Apify: A marketplace of over 39,000 pre-built data scraping and automation actors. Their MCP server lets Claude Code discover and invoke these actors directly inside a skill workflow.
MCP (Model Context Protocol): A bridge between Claude Code and an external software or data source. Adding an MCP server gives the skill access to APIs, databases, or automation platforms without custom integration code.
Actor (Apify): A single automated task in the Apify marketplace — for example, an Instagram post scraper or a YouTube channel scraper. Each actor accepts inputs and returns structured data.
Hermes: A self-hosted agent runner the creator prefers for running Claude skills autonomously on a VPS. Mentioned as one of three paths to autonomous execution in episode 2.
Charlie OS: The creator's personal Claude Code operating system, offered as a productized system with a custom roadmap targeting the buyer's biggest revenue bottleneck in a 60-day sprint.

Resources

Things they pointed at.

02:02toolSkillsmith ↗

04:29toolApify Marketplace ↗

08:33productCharlie OS ↗

00:00linkPart 2 (Autonomous Agents) ↗

Quotables

Lines you could clip.

00:20

“Anthropic has publicly stated to focus on building skills versus building agents.”

Cites official guidance — immediately legitimizes the reframe→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote

00:31

“A Claude skill is nothing more than a named worker with access to its own tools and routing.”

Single-sentence definition that demystifies the whole concept→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote

06:49

“Your agents can be simple at nature, and you can build on them as you go.”

Permission statement — lowers the bar to start→ Newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote

The Script

Word for word.

Read-along

Don't just watch it. Burn it in.

See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.

If you were using Quad in 2026 and you're still struggling to build an AI agent, this is for you. Turns out an agent is just a skill, and there's one plugin that builds them in ten minutes.

I'll pull back the curtain and show you exactly what I mean. The old way of building agents was typically through NAN workflows or custom code, and these are a lot more difficult to put together than a custom Claude skill.

And Anthropic has publicly stated to focus on building skills versus building agents. And most important to understand, a Claude skill is nothing more than a named worker with access to its own tools and routing. So essentially, it knows what it can touch and when to load what.

And it's packaged up in plain markdown, which is essentially just a text file. And your skill, aka agent instructions, are readable by yourself, and it's not custom code.

And I've built over 40 plus skills, and this is 10 times easier than the old way of doing things. To your relief, a Claude skill is nothing more than a folder with files inside. This is a skill that I built last week, and it has multiple folders inside of the mother folder here.

As you can see, this is the beginning of everything. It's the triggers, the persona, and the commands. And it's outside of all the subfolders inside of the skill folder right here.

The second one is the context file. The context file is everything that the skill should know to operate. We could see that context file right here with everything it needs to know about my business.

And we can take a look at the frameworks here, and it's all the playbooks that the skill needs to understand. Essentially, methods that it's gonna follow, and there are four particular frameworks inside of here. The tasks are essentially the workflows that it needs to follow, and there's one file here inside of tasks.

It tells Claude how to put everything together and create a cohesive workflow around the frameworks, the context, and ultimately, the Skill MD. And last but not least, we have templates. This is how the agent will understand what the output should look like when it's done running the skill or workflow inside of the skill.

And a quick disclaimer, I'm using agents and skills interchangeably because they're pretty much the same thing. And ultimately, what you guys came here for is the one plugin that allows me to build my skills in minutes with no hassle, no trial and error, and that plugin is called Skillsmith. In a second, I'm gonna show you how I use this plugin inside of my Claude code setup and will build a skill live.

But before I do that, it's important for you to understand there's one command with four different routing available. So we could chat with Skillsmith about interviewing an idea and turning it into a spec file. We can move it into Scaffold and actually build the skill.

We could take long form YouTube videos or other SOPs and distill them into frameworks that can be turned into skills. And ultimately, we can audit preexisting skills and other frameworks inside of your Claude code setup to improve them over time. So before I show you guys how to use it in real time, this is gonna be the repo link.

And if you guys want access to it, it's gonna be in the description below. To install it, just scroll down until you see this install command, grab it, open a fresh terminal, paste this in, click enter, and just follow the steps. Once it's installed, all you're gonna do is type in slash skillsmith, let it run, and here are our choices.

And we're gonna go through Discover. To keep it fun and relevant, I was thinking about creating a skill called Social Media Guru. I have something similar inside of my workspace.

It's called viral audit as you could see right here. It'll go through my Instagram and YouTube and tell me what's working and what's not based off of engagement, follows, things of that nature.

But we're gonna create a simple version here together. But most importantly, if you guys are enjoying this content and getting value out of this particular video, please drop a like and consider subscribing because it's gonna be the best way to support me, and I drop one to two videos like this every single week. And after running Viral Audit, I found that 90% of my viewers aren't even subscribed.

So if you guys love the content I'm dropping, please subscribe or else I'll create a skill to find you. Anyways, I'm gonna use whisper here. I'm gonna drop a prompt and we're gonna start building this skill together.

And you guys can pause to see the prompt that I had put in here, but essentially, I wanted Claude to create a social media guru command so I can activate it with a slash command. I wanted to pull my social media data from YouTube and Instagram of the past thirty days of content. I wanted to act as a creative director, drop a markdown file with all the data, with my videos ranked from best to worst.

And this got chopped up here, but I wanted to find the best Apify actors. I'll explain what that is in a sec. And then I gave it some context as to how to rank the videos for me.

I then explained the format of how I want the output to look. And then ultimately, some interview questions of what we should do with the videos once we actually found the top performers. Last but not least, a TLDR for my creative director in the markdown file so I know what I could be doing better.

Apify is an entire marketplace with different actors that can take different actions on your behalf. And as you can see up here, they've released their new MCP. If you're not familiar with an MCP, it's basically a bridge between Claude Code and another software.

So this MCP allows Claude Code to come inside of the marketplace and find the right actors that can take the right actions for the workflow that I've described for this particular agent, the social media guru. I'll also link the Apify marketplace link below. And if you guys wanna learn how to set up the Apify MCP, go ahead and just ask in the comment section below.

I can always do a video on this. And this might be a little hard to see, but I wanted to zoom out to show you guys the skill folder for creative director right here. And it has the context folder, the frameworks, tasks, and the templates of how the output should look.

So if I open up channels m d for the context, we could see the context of the social media handles that it should be locking into and just a few more details of what it should be looking for. The individual frameworks for the creative director as well as the performance signals that I mentioned were my top priority versus what was not priority to rank off of, the coaching brief at the end of my MD that I asked for, the workflow on how to rank, and then ultimately the output of how the ranking markdown file should look.

And, of course, this is just scrunched up. Last but not least, we have the ultimate creative director skill right here for the overall agent or skill. And now you're thinking that was super easy.

I don't know why I was stressed out about building agents or skills before. Well, now you have the right framework. And I wanna show you guys the specific Apify actors that it's chosen to go through the workflow.

What we're looking at is the Instagram post scraper so it can pull my data from Instagram, and then an actor specifically built for pulling the same data but from YouTube instead. Now we could see creative director is now available to be run, and when I ran it, it pulled all the correct files from the skill here and it went through an interview process to ask us if we got the right tags for our social media hunt.

And I'd rather just rank on views to keep it simple for now. And as we could see here, it's calling Apify as per my workflow instructions. And inside of my MCPs, I already have Apify right here.

Now if I come inside Apify's console, I could see Instagram post scraper is the first one that it's running. And there we go.

The YouTube scraper just went off. And adding the Apify MCP added another layer of complexity, but you don't need API connectors or MCP or as I would call them bridges to other softwares just yet.

Your agents can be simple at nature, and you can build on them as you go. To keep you guys on the same page, it fetched all the data from Apify, and now it's just writing the report. Now I have my entire report right here from Instagram and YouTube with my top ranked reels as well as my carousels.

It looked at my all time bangers that I pinned on my actual feed. It went through my top 10 shorts on YouTube as well as the top 10 long form pieces that I have. And as we can see at the bottom, the coaching brief is not set up yet because as per how I set up the skill, I wanted it to transcribe and watch the videos.

So this is the last part of the workflow. So in this case, I'm probably just gonna end up choosing them all so we can get all the data and then get a full conclusive idea of how this entire workflow is gonna run. So I went through and actually analyzed the winners, and it's updating my coach brief right now.

So here's the entire coaching brief with all the details, and the workflow is complete. So that's the easiest way to build a skill slash agent, and this is a two part series because in the next video that I'm gonna drop, I'm gonna show you how to make these skills or agents run completely without you so that they can run on a schedule or a simple message from maybe Telegram or Slack.

Because as of right now, they're just running on a manual command, which is totally fine. And I have three potential autonomous solutions for you. One of which is Hermes, which I prefer over OpenClaw, which can be run on a self hosted VPS, quad managed agents, which is the easiest in my opinion, and last, you can connect the NA and MCP server.

If you did wanna build an autonomous agent, you can build a workflow and let that run autonomously. So we have three solutions. We'll go over each in episode two.

If you guys enjoyed the video, please like it and remember to subscribe. And if you guys wanna go deeper and work with me on AI systems for your business, consider clicking the first link in the description. You can get my personal operating system for ClaudeCode, which I call Charlie OS, and our goal is to deliver Charlie OS with a custom roadmap to solve your biggest revenue bottleneck in a sixty day sprint.

But on that note, you guys can subscribe and wait for episode two where we will showcase the three solutions that I have in mind for a fully autonomous skill. Thanks for watching. I will see you guys on the next one.

The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

The title is a trap — and it works. By the time the creator says this is for you, the viewer already suspects they have been thinking about agents the wrong way. What follows is a reframe that makes nine minutes feel like relief.

Frameworks

Named ideas worth stealing.

00:56list

The Skill Folder Structure

SKILL.md (triggers, persona, commands)
context/ (what it knows)
frameworks/ (the playbooks it follows)
tasks/ (the steps it runs)
templates/ (the shape of the output)

Five-component folder structure that defines any Claude skill. All plain markdown — no code.

Steal forAny repeatable Claude Code workflow you want to package as a slash command

02:00list

Skillsmith Routing Modes

Discover — interview idea into spec
Scaffold — build skill from spec
Distill — SOPs/videos into frameworks
Audit — improve existing skills

Four modes of the Skillsmith plugin covering the full skill lifecycle.

Steal forSkill development workflow — from ideation to refinement

07:06model

Creative Director Coaching Brief

Synopsis (2-3 sentences: what this batch tells you)
What the Winners Did (highest-leverage delta)
What Cost the Rest (recurring weakness in lower ranks)
Do This Next Batch

Output template for a content performance review. Generated by the skill after analyzing ranked posts.

Steal forAny recurring content audit — social media, newsletter, podcast

07:52list

Three Paths to Autonomous Skills

Hermes — self-hosted on a VPS, Slack-triggered
Claude Managed Agents — cloud-hosted via the CLI, no infra
n8n + MCP server — workflow-triggered, drops into your Slack

Three deployment options for making a manual skill run on a schedule or message trigger.

Steal forDeciding which autonomous execution path fits your infrastructure comfort level

CTA Breakdown

How they asked for the click.

VERBAL ASK

08:33product

“You can get my personal operating system for Claude Code, which I call Charlie OS, and our goal is to deliver Charlie OS with a custom roadmap to solve your biggest revenue bottleneck in a sixty day sprint.”

Clear offer, specific outcome framing (revenue bottleneck + 60-day sprint), placed at the end after the value has been fully delivered. Low-friction because the free Skillsmith repo is linked separately — the paid offer is clearly differentiated.

MENTIONED ON CAMERA

02:02toolSkillsmith ↗

04:29toolApify Marketplace ↗

08:33productCharlie OS ↗

00:00linkPart 2 (Autonomous Agents) ↗

FROM THE DESCRIPTION

PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.

AFFILIATECommission earned if you click.