Claude Code: skills that encode how I work
Six skills · 2026
I built a set of skills for Claude Code that encode how I work through a design project. Not prompts; each one is a document that tells the model what to prioritize, what tradeoffs to weigh, and what good looks like at that point in the work.
Why they are narrow
There are public collections with sixty-plus design skills. Breadth is the problem: a skill written to work for any designer describes the method, not the practice. Mine are narrow on purpose. Six, one for each stage I actually work in, and what they hold is sequence and emphasis; what order things happen in, what I will not let get skipped, and what a good answer looks like before I would move on.
The six
Research and landscape
Gathering evidence and mapping the competitive landscape before any design work starts. The depth adapts to the project; the questions don’t.
Problem framing and planning
Defining the problem, why it matters, what success looks like, and how to approach it. Framing and planning aren’t sequential; they evolve together.
Design and systems thinking
Divergent exploration and deliberate convergence, holding user needs, business constraints, and technical feasibility at once. This one addresses the thinking, not the artifacts.
Prototyping
Building interactive prototypes where the design principles survive contact with the code.
Validation and iteration
Evaluating work against its stated goals and deciding what comes next: ship, iterate, rethink, or reframe.
Impact and communication
Framing work for engineers, PMs, and leadership. Not a stage; it runs across all of them, because work that doesn’t get communicated doesn’t ship.
Writing them
To write them I had to answer a question I’d never had to answer explicitly: what does my process look like when it’s working? Not the version that goes on a slide, but the real sequence from ambiguity to a decision I’d defend.
I drafted each, ran it on work I was already doing, and cut whatever the model didn’t need to produce something I’d have signed off on myself.
They’re now part of my daily workflow. The scaffolding gets automated; the judgment stays mine.