$ ls ~/blog
The log
# Notes on Claude Code skills, plugins, marketplaces, MCP, and turning a person into something installable.
>We Made Our Founder Installable. Here's What People Ask Him.
We made our founder installable. Early observations on what people actually ask an installable person, and what it says about async mentorship.
4 min#personas#product
>Office Hours Are a Queue. Personas Are a CDN.
Mentorship has latency. Edge-cache the mentor for the repeated 90%, keep live time for the novel 10%. The CDN metaphor for attention.
4 min#ideas#personas
>Prompt Libraries Are Dead. Long Live Skills.
Copy-paste prompt collections were the MP3 blogs of AI. Skills and plugins are the streaming era: versioned, installable, attributable.
4 min#skills#opinion
>GEO: How AI Answer Engines Decide Who to Cite
Generative engine optimization: what makes a page quotable by AI answer engines, from precise commands to self-contained facts.
5 min#geo#explainer
>Your Best Thinking Is Dying in DMs
The advice you repeat weekly in Slack and WhatsApp is your most valuable, least captured asset. Capture it once and install it.
5 min#ideas
>Why Your Claude Code Plugin Won't Install (and How to Fix It)
A debug field guide for Claude Code plugin installs that do nothing: cached marketplaces, relative source paths, caching, and scope confusion.
5 min#plugins#troubleshooting
>Versioning a Person: Why Personas Ship Releases
You change your mind, and v1.3 of you should too. Semver for judgment, release notes for humans, and why personas ship releases.
4 min#personas#product
>The Founder's Second Brain Should Talk Back
Notes are storage. Personas are retrieval plus synthesis in your voice. The jump from personal knowledge management to a knowledge agent.
4 min#ideas#personas
>From Google Drive to Claude: Piping Your Docs Into a Persona
Pipe Google Drive docs into a Claude persona: export to markdown, extract evidence, and the privacy boundary between source and output.
4 min#personas#how-to
>marketplace.json: A Field Guide
Every marketplace.json field and every source type: git, git-subdir, url, github, with the failure mode for each.
5 min#marketplace#reference
>How to Share Claude Code Skills Across a Whole Team
Share Claude Code skills across a team with a private git-backed marketplace, versioning, and how updates propagate to installed users.
4 min#skills#marketplace#how-to
>Second Brains Are Where Notes Go to Die
Capture is worthless without an interface that answers. The case against hoarding-as-productivity and the graveyard of note apps.
5 min#ideas#opinion
>Your Advice Doesn't Scale. Your Persona Does.
The time math of advising: 30-minute calls versus an installable persona that answers at 3am in your actual frameworks.
5 min#ideas#personas
>Claude Code Skills: 12 Patterns That Separate Good From Slop
Twelve concrete patterns that separate good Claude Code skills from slop: trigger phrasing, reference files over bloated prompts, testing that it fires.
4 min#skills#how-to
>Why Skills Beat Long System Prompts
Progressive disclosure beats an 8K-token system prompt wall. The context economics of why Claude Code skills win.
4 min#skills#explainer
>What's in a Persona File, and What Never Leaves Your Drive
The synthesized persona is public and installable. Your source corpus is not. Where installs.me draws the privacy line.
4 min#personas#product
>Turn Your Writing Into a Claude Skill That Sounds Like You
The manual version of what installs.me automates: turn your corpus into voice rules, named frameworks, and a SKILL.md that sounds like you.
5 min#skills#personas#how-to
>You Need a Personal API
Calendars gave us a scheduling endpoint. Personas are the judgment endpoint. The personal API metaphor, taken seriously.
4 min#ideas
>Claude Code Plugins vs Custom GPTs: Portability Is the Whole Point
Claude Code plugins are files in a git repo you own. Custom GPTs are a walled garden. Portability is the whole difference.
4 min#explainer#personas
>Build an MCP Server in an Afternoon
A minimal stdio MCP server, one tool, wired into Claude Code, and an honest take on when you need MCP versus a plain skill.
4 min#mcp#how-to
>Most "AI Twins" Are Parrots. Here's the Bar.
Style transfer is not judgment transfer. The test for an AI twin: does it give the advice you would give, or the advice anyone would give in your accent?
4 min#ideas#opinion
>What's Actually Inside a Persona Plugin
An annotated file tree of a real persona plugin: SKILL.md, frameworks, voice, and bio references, and what each file does.
4 min#personas#explainer
>Your Claude Marketplace Can Live on Any URL (the Content-Negotiation Trick)
The Claude Code CLI fetches whatever marketplace URL you give it verbatim. Content-negotiate one path to serve humans a page and the CLI a manifest.
4 min#marketplace#how-to
>Delegate Yourself First
Before you hire a chief of staff, install yourself. Delegation as the compilation of your decision rules into something that answers.
5 min#ideas#personas
>Skills vs Agents vs MCP: What Each One Is Actually For
Knowledge versus autonomy versus connectivity. A decision table for when to reach for a Claude Code skill, an agent, or an MCP server.
5 min#explainer#mcp#skills
>How installs.me Synthesizes a Person: the Pipeline
The real installs.me pipeline, honestly: sync sources, extract evidence in chunks, synthesize a SKILL.md, package a versioned release.
4 min#personas#product
>Run Your Own Claude Code Plugin Marketplace With One JSON File
Publish a Claude Code plugin marketplace from one marketplace.json, and the git-subdir source gotcha that makes URL marketplaces fail silently.
4 min#marketplace#how-to
>Claude Code Plugins, Explained: Skills, Commands, Hooks, MCP
Skills, commands, hooks, and MCP servers are four trigger models, not four features. The mental model Claude Code's docs assume but never state.
4 min#plugins#explainer
>How to Write a Claude Code Skill: SKILL.md From Scratch
Build a Claude Code skill from scratch: the SKILL.md frontmatter that decides whether it fires, the body that does the work, and the references dir for progressive disclosure.
5 min#skills#how-to
>The Installable Person
Software ate documentation, then workflows, and now it eats mentorship. What it means to make your judgment installable.
4 min#ideas#personas