Claude Code: Up and Running

Chapter 6. Skills and Hooks

A Note for Early Release Readers

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This will be the 6th chapter of the final book. The GitHub repo is active.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

The weather app is a finished cabin now: tested, loaded into project memory, permission-guarded, secrets handled, sandboxed. The rest of the book works at a larger scale, where the question stops being “how do I do this once?” and becomes “how do I do this repeatably, across a system I cannot hold in my head all at once?” Skills and hooks are the first move in that direction.

Over the last couple of years, prompt engineering has become a thing.¹ Strip away the hype and there is a real practice underneath. Instead of typing a one-line request and hoping for the best, you write a structured prompt. A good one names a role, spells out the context the work needs, states the conditions it assumes going in, and describes what counts as done when it finishes. We lean on prompts like that all through this chapter, and we come back to the idea more formally in Chapter 9.

All that effort feels wasted, though, if you only use a prompt once. A skill is an easy way to make a good prompt reusable. You save it, ...