Course Summary: Skills & MCPs

You have levelled up Claude Code here is everything you now know and what changes from here forward

What You Learned

What skills are

Instruction files that make Claude expert at a specific task. When activated Claude stops making generic choices and starts making deliberate professional-quality ones. Skills are markdown files with no code required to write or use them.

How to install official skills

Through the Claude Code Desktop App by going to Customize then Skills then Browse Skills then Add. The frontend design skill from Anthropic is the most important one to have installed for any web build.

The frontend design skill

A quality standard that separates vibe-coded output from professional output. Activate it in any web-related prompt. Run it as an audit before deploying anything. The difference in output quality is immediate and visible.

How to build a custom skill

A markdown file with a role, rules for what to always do, rules for what to never do, and a self-check list. Saved to ~/.claude/commands/ it encodes your personal standards, your domain knowledge, and your workflow into something Claude applies automatically.

What MCPs are

Plugins that give Claude access to capabilities it cannot access from files alone including real-time web search, visiting URLs, GitHub, databases, and browser automation. MCPs connect Claude to the rest of the internet.

The difference between skills and MCPs

Skills add expertise and make Claude smarter about a task. MCPs add access and give Claude new tools and data sources. Both can be active at the same time.

How to install the fetch MCP

A JSON configuration block in the Desktop App MCP settings. No API key needed. Lets Claude visit any public URL and read its content in full.

Other useful MCPs

Brave Search gives real-time web search. GitHub provides repository access. Filesystem unlocks files beyond the current project. Puppeteer enables browser control and screenshots. Memory provides persistent knowledge across sessions.

Skills and MCPs together

The combination enables compound workflows where Claude researches using the MCP and then produces expert-quality output using the skill in a single session that used to take hours manually.

What You Built

At least two official skills installed and active. A custom skill written specifically for your workflow. The fetch MCP installed and tested. And at least one compound prompt using both a skill and an MCP.

What Changes From Here Forward

Every web project runs through the frontend design skill before deployment. Every research task uses the fetch or search MCP instead of manual copy-paste. Every repeating workflow gets a custom skill that encodes the standards once.

The ceiling of what Claude Code can do just got higher and the floor of what it produces got more consistent.

What Is Coming Next

Course 08 is Automations.

Skills and MCPs extend what Claude can do. Automations extend when Claude works.

The next course teaches you how to build recurring workflows that run on a schedule, hooks that trigger automatically when something happens, and compound systems that operate with minimal input from you covering marketing pipelines, content batches, and project kickoffs all running in the background while you focus on other things.