How to Keep Track of Your Skills

I used to buy books I knew I would never read.

Something would catch my eye. A good deal, maybe. Or just a title that sounded right in the moment. A little dopamine hit, "ooh, this looks good, let me get it," and onto the shelf it went. Most of them stayed exactly there. Unread. Just... collected.

Really, I was just building my shelf-esteem.

Now I recognise I'm doing the same thing with AI skills.

The AI Skills Hoarding Cycle

If you're anywhere near AI content right now, you know the pattern.

Someone showing off a workflow, and the comments are just "link please," a keyword "XYZ," over and over.

Someone drops the repo. You click through, you install it onto Claude or ChatGPT or whatever you're running, and it takes maybe 2 minutes.

You now have a new skill. It’s like Neo in the Matrix being able to install new skills - that's the easy part.

So why does it still feel like a mess?

Because 2 minutes later, I've got 15 spanking brand-new skills installed into my account, and I genuinely cannot tell someone what they do.

I've installed them the same way I've been buying books, on impulse. In the moment.

And I move straight on to the next video without actually using those skills.

And it compounds.

New skills get recommended every single day. Half the time I click through excited about some "new" find, only to realise I already installed it weeks ago and completely forgot.

Same shelf-esteem, just showing up as skills instead of books.

You're probably doing this too right now, saving links and installing skills without ever making sense of what you've got or how to use it.

What I'm actually doing about it

I'm turning this into a growing record, a running post of exactly what skills I've installed, on my computer and on the web versions, and how each one is actually meant to be used.

A working list I can come back to.

Because honestly, I may never remember why I installed half of these in the first place. But if I've got a proper overview, I can look at it and actually decide, keep this, update that one now that the repo's changed, delete this because I clearly never needed it.

I don't want another shelf. I want skills I actually open and use.

I'll be updating this as I go. If you're sitting on the same pile of unused skills, you already know exactly what I'm talking about.

What's Actually On The Shelf

So here's the shelf, opened up properly.

Below is the real list: every skill I've got running in Claude and Claude Code, on web and desktop, no more guessing what's actually installed. Each entry gets a date I added it, where I got it from, why I bothered in the first place, whether it clashed with something I already had, whether it's been improved or folded into anything else since, and whether it's something I actually built myself instead of grabbed off someone's repo.

Last updated: 31 August 2026.