Three Claude Skills that sharpened my work

The Skills I use most are unglamorous. They are not magic. They are senior-reviewer judgment, on demand, at midnight.

The first one reviews a prototype the way a strong design lead would. Friction points, accessibility gaps, visual inconsistencies, ranked. I run it after every iteration cycle. The notes it returns are not new — I knew most of them — but knowing and writing-down are different problems.

The second one reads raw interview transcripts and returns themes, contradictions across participants, and shipping recommendations. The win is that contradictions are explicit. When two power users want opposite things, the Skill names it. Most synthesis tools blur this. Naming it is the whole job.

The third one drafts the one-pager I will read aloud in a meeting. It takes the proposal and the audience, and returns the framing, the anticipated objections with answers, and a sixty-second narration. It is the worst of the three at first pass. It is the best after one round of editing. That is true of most writing.

None of them replace doing the thing. Auditing a prototype does not design it. Synthesizing interviews does not interview anyone. Selling an idea does not actually sit in the room.

The win is not output. It is the smaller delta between a first draft and something I would be proud to ship.