Claude Skills: The Paid Work Playbook

Build the intake sheet: what each skill claims, when it last fired, whether you have seen it work.

Run the same prompt in two fresh sessions, skill off then on, and get a number for whether it helped.

Price what your folder loads into every conversation, then rank each skill by cost against how often it fires.

Write one skill with an explicit trigger and prove it fires three times without you naming it.

Add the sources a skill must use, the shapes it must never produce, and one worked example of a right answer.

Give a skill an abstain rule, then run the near-miss prompts that must not trigger it.

A five-question screen that rejects a bad skill in ninety seconds.

Read a public skill line by line before installing it, then write your own version that borrows none of the text.

Make a skill report what it did NOT do, then sort its output into send-as-is, read-first, or never-leaves-your-desk.

Package the folder for a paying client: naming, a manifest, and a one-page description of what fires when.

A pruning routine that drops anything unfired in thirty days, merges duplicates, and re-measures the bill.

The release-day re-test you run when a new model ships and half your folder stops working.