Maker Skills

Maker Skills is an open-source plugin for AI coding agents — built by Corey Haines, founder of Conversion Factory and Magister — that packages 19 structured workflow skills for founders and indie operators. It installs via npx skills add or Claude Code's plugin marketplace and works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other Agent Skills hosts. The project is MIT-licensed and has accumulated over 461 stars on GitHub since its creation.

What It Is

Maker Skills is a skill pack — a collection of SKILL.md workflow documents that AI agents load and execute on demand. Each skill is a structured, documentation-first workflow: the agent reads the SKILL.md, follows the steps, and produces written output to disk. The plugin is not a SaaS product or hosted service; it runs locally inside your AI coding agent environment. Skills cover five families: meta/authoring (skillify, toolify, loopify), decision and strategy (decide, business-brainstorm, domain, deep-research, unstuck), knowledge and content consumption (second-brain, company-brain, read-book, watch-video), output and creative (jab-hook, slide-deck), and operations and utilities (pm, personal-cfo, company-cfo, paste, social-fetch).

How the Skill Architecture Works

Each skill is a SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter (name, description, metadata.version) that tells the agent when to load it and what triggers it. Skills compose with each other by name — when one skill's job hits an adjacent job, it routes to the sibling rather than reimplementing. The most-referenced skills in the collection are watch-video (54 cross-references), skillify (51), second-brain (48), slide-deck (38), and company-brain (33). Personal data (config, archives, vault paths) lives separately in ~/.config/makerskills/ and is never committed to the public repo, keeping the repository generic and shareable.

The 19 Skills at a Glance

• Meta (-ify trifecta): skillify creates/adapts/updates skills; toolify wires APIs and MCP servers into Next.js or Rails projects; loopify sets up agent loops and cron-scheduled tasks.
• Decision & strategy: decide applies the 37signals framework (38 questions, triaged to 6–8 per decision, with Q39 opportunity cost added in v1.4.0); unstuck classifies blockers and runs lateral-thinking techniques; domain runs an 11-step .com hunt using Vercel CLI, Domainr, Namecheap, RDAP, and USPTO trademark screening.
• Knowledge: second-brain manages a personal markdown vault (Karpathy LLM Wiki workflow); company-brain is the team-scope sibling with multi-author attribution, sensitivity tagging, and optional auto-sync from Fathom/Gong/Granola/CRM.
• Output: jab-hook plans social content rotation on X and LinkedIn via Typefully; slide-deck generates branded React decks in Next.js with PPT conversion and Playwright export.
• Ops: personal-cfo models household financial scenarios; company-cfo runs monthly/weekly CFO cadence pulling from bank, payment processor, payroll, and expense management integrations.

Setup Path

Installation takes one command in Claude Code (/plugin marketplace add coreyhaines31/makerskills) or via npx skills add coreyhaines31/makerskills. Local development uses a symlink from the cloned repo into ~/.claude/plugins/makerskills. The recommended first-touch experience is running /decide with no config required, then reading one SKILL.md to understand the pattern, then trying /paste twitter as a pure utility with no config file needed. Full env var setup is documented in INSTALL.md.

Update: v1.4.0 — decide: Q39 Opportunity Cost

The latest release, v1.4.0 (published July 16, 2026), adds Q39 opportunity cost to the decide skill's 37signals question framework. The project uses two levels of semver: a plugin-level release tag for the overall collection and per-skill metadata.version in each SKILL.md frontmatter that evolves independently. A related skill pack, marketingskills, extends the ecosystem with 46 marketing-focused skills covering CRO, copywriting, SEO, and ads.