4 skills for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor: straight answers, video, books and ideas put to the test

If you use Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, four skills add very concrete capabilities to your coding agent: i-have-adhd, claude-video, book-to-skill and grill-me. The first makes replies short and actionable. The second lets the agent watch a video. The third turns a book into knowledge you can use in your projects. The fourth stress-tests an idea before you build it. In my view, the one with the most potential is book-to-skill.

What is a skill for a coding agent?

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file containing instructions and, when needed, scripts. The coding agent loads it when the task calls for it, or when you invoke it with a command like /grill-me. The format is open (Agent Skills), which is why the same skill often works in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other agents.

1. i-have-adhd: how do you get the agent to go straight to the point?

i-have-adhd removes one of the most annoying problems with coding agents: very long replies where you have to dig through the text to find what you actually need.

With i-have-adhd, the agent gets straight to the point:

• it gives you the action to take first;
• it splits tasks into clear, numbered steps;
• it drops everything you don’t need, including polite openers and closers.

The i-have-adhd repository collects these guidelines into 10 rules inside the SKILL.md file and ships configuration files for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor. The rules draw on a book about adult ADHD, and the skill helps anyone who wants more readable replies, diagnosis or not.

If the problem is a specific model’s verbosity, I also wrote about a single word in the system prompt that cuts verbosity.

2. claude-video: can a coding agent watch a video?

Yes, with claude-video. You give it a video, an mp4 file or a YouTube link, and the agent watches the whole thing. If the video is on YouTube, claude-video downloads it first and then analyzes it.

claude-video extracts the video’s frames and looks at them, and on top of that it reads the audio transcript. In practice, the agent sees the images and knows what is being said. According to the claude-video repository, frames are timestamped and the transcript comes from captions or, when there are none, from an optional speech-to-text model.

This opens up very practical uses. You can give claude-video:

• a tutorial, to have a specific step explained;
• a competitor’s video, to analyze its content;
• a screen recording, to show the agent a bug or a flow.

Then you ask direct questions about the video’s content, as you would with someone who has just watched it.

3. book-to-skill: how do you turn a book into a skill?

book-to-skill is the skill I like most. You take a book, turn it into a skill, and your agent uses that skill while it works.

Imagine taking the best books by the best authors on marketing, software development, psychology or any other subject. With book-to-skill, the ideas in those books get applied concretely inside your projects, instead of staying on the shelf.

The book-to-skill repository explains how it works. The book becomes a SKILL.md file with the core models and a chapter index, plus one file per chapter, a glossary and a cheatsheet. The agent loads only the chapters the task needs, so it doesn’t have to keep the whole book in context. book-to-skill accepts PDF, EPUB, DOCX and other formats, and supports Claude Code and Codex among others.

4. grill-me: how do you stress-test an idea before building it?

grill-me flips the order of things. You give it an idea that’s still fuzzy and, instead of starting to build right away, the agent starts asking you questions to test what you have in mind.

grill-me keeps going until it has surfaced assumptions, doubts and decisions you probably hadn’t considered yet. The most widely used version lives in Matt Pocock’s skills collection, which describes it as getting relentlessly interviewed about a plan or design until every branch of the design tree is resolved.

grill-me is especially useful at two moments:

• before writing a new feature for a project;
• before starting a whole project, a business idea or anything else.

It’s the same principle behind spec-driven development: be clear on what to build before asking the agent to build it.

Which skill should you install first?

It depends on the problem you have today:

• you get lost in the agent’s replies: i-have-adhd;
• you often work with tutorials and screen recordings: claude-video;
• you want your projects to follow a specific author’s method: book-to-skill;
• you’re about to start something new: grill-me.

Each of these skills makes your coding agent useful in a different way. Pick the one that solves today’s problem and try it on your next task.