Hands-on guides to AI tools, Claude skills and MCP servers, newest first.
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We installed five popular Claude skills in Claude Code and ran each on a real task. grill-me and the pptx skill changed the result most; xlsx was already built in; frontend-design waited to be named.
Illustration, not the real interfaceThe grill-me skill makes Claude interview you in rounds before it writes anything. How to install it in Claude Code, answer fast, and what a real run produced: a 317-line plan in under 6 minutes.
Illustration, not the real interfaceWe gave Claude Code the same café landing-page prompt three times. With the frontend-design skill installed, Claude ignored it; only naming the skill changed the design.
Illustration, not the real interfaceWe asked Claude Code to build an Excel report with formulas and a chart, then add a new month, with nothing installed and with Anthropic's document-skills. The built-in xlsx skill did the job.
Illustration, not the real interfaceWe used skill-creator to build a custom Claude skill that turns messy meeting notes into Word minutes. It wrote a 106-line SKILL.md in about 1 minute 15 seconds, then triggered on its own.
Illustration, not the real interfaceClaude skills are instruction folders Claude loads when a task matches. We installed Anthropic's skills from GitHub in Claude Code and had the pptx skill build a 6-slide deck with a native chart in about 2 minutes 10 seconds.
Illustration, not the real interfaceWe gave Gemini 4 Argon and Gemini 3.8 Flash the same three office tasks via the API. Argon was faster and cheaper ($0.00687 vs $0.01135) despite a 2.7× token price, but scored 14/15 to Flash's 15/15.
Illustration, not the real interfaceWe gave Claude Haiku 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 the same three office tasks through the API and graded them with code. Both scored 15/15, but Haiku was faster and cost 18 times less.
Illustration, not the real interfaceClaude Max includes $100–$200 a month in Claude API credits, but you must claim them by linking a Console organization. Here are the 3 steps and the organization mistake we made.
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