Skill From Masters

Stand on the shoulders of giants — Create AI skills built on proven methodologies from domain experts.

A skill that helps you discover and incorporate frameworks, principles, and best practices from recognized masters before generating any new skill. Works with Claude Code, Codex, and other AI agent platforms.

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Why This Skill?

The hard part of creating a skill isn't the format — it's knowing the best way to do the thing.

Most professional domains have masters who spent decades figuring out what works:

• Jobs on product, hiring, and marketing
• Bezos on writing (6-pager) and decision-making
• Munger on mental models
• Chris Voss on negotiation

This skill surfaces their methodologies before you write a single line, so your skill embodies world-class expertise from day one.

How It Works

1. You: "I want to create a skill for user interviews"

2. Skill-from-masters:
   ├── Checks local methodology database
   ├── Searches web for additional experts
   ├── Finds golden examples of great outputs
   ├── Identifies common mistakes to avoid
   └── Cross-validates across sources

3. Surfaces experts:
   - Rob Fitzpatrick (The Mom Test)
   - Steve Portigal (Interviewing Users)
   - Nielsen Norman Group best practices

4. You select which methodologies to incorporate

5. Extracts actionable principles from primary sources

6. Hands off to skill-creator to generate the final skill

Key Features

Methodology Database

The skill includes a curated database covering 15+ domains:

Plus an "Oral Tradition" section for experts who share primarily through talks and interviews (Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Patrick Collison, etc.)

Installation

Option 1: Clone directly (Recommended)

# Navigate to your skills directory
cd ~/.claude/skills  # Claude Code
# or your platform's skills path

# Clone this skill
git clone https://github.com/anthropics/skill-from-masters.git

Option 2: Manual installation

1. Download the skill-from-masters folder
2. Place it in your skills directory

Dependency

This skill works with skill-creator. Make sure skill-creator is available in your environment.

Usage

The skill automatically activates when you ask to create a new skill. It runs before skill-creator to ensure your skill is built on proven methodologies.

Example Session

You: "Help me create a skill for writing product requirement documents"

Skill-from-masters:

Let me search for the best methodologies on PRD writing.

[Searches: "PRD best practices expert", "product requirements document methodology"]

I found several strong frameworks:

Product Management:

• Marty Cagan: Problem-first PRDs, separating problem space from solution space
• Teresa Torres: Outcome-focused requirements

Business Writing:

• Barbara Minto: Pyramid Principle - lead with conclusion, MECE structure
• Amazon: Working backwards, 6-pager narrative format

Golden Examples Found:

• Intercom's public PRD template
• Linear's product spec format

Common Mistakes:

• Jumping to solutions before defining the problem
• Writing for engineers instead of for alignment
• Missing success metrics

Which approaches resonate? Or should I search deeper into any of them?

You: "I like Amazon's approach combined with Cagan's problem-first thinking."

Skill-from-masters: [Fetches primary sources on Amazon's methodology, extracts principles, then generates skill via skill-creator]

Skills

This repository contains the following skills:

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