Claude Code Skills Just Killed The $400/hr Analyst

Show Notes

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiT41LzuV6g

Some guy wrote 235 lines of markdown at the weekend and Claude Code Skills turned it into a chess coach that beats the $30/month app. The same four-part shape replaces the $400/hr analyst you already pay.
Playbooks + my answers, free - Church of SEO Jesus: https://www.skool.com/church-of-seo-jesus

What you get in this video:
- What a Claude Code Skill actually is (a markdown file in ~/.claude/skills, no API, no server, no engineer)
- The 4-part pattern that replaces any recurring analyst: role, checklist, tool wrappers, output format
- Live build: a 17-line Facebook ad audit skill fed a fake account and returned a senior-auditor verdict
- How brumar/chess-postmortem-skills wraps Stockfish + whisper.cpp inside one SKILL.md
- Where the $5,000/month of rented analyst work actually lives on your P&L

Sources:
- brumar/chess-postmortem-skills: https://github.com/brumar/chess-postmortem-skills
- HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857528

Chapters:
00:00 Claude Code Skills killed the $400/hr analyst
00:28 What a Claude Code Skill actually is
01:00 The chess-analysis skill, Stockfish, and whisper.cpp
02:12 Grab the business skill files (free)
02:35 Live build: a 17-line Facebook ad audit skill
04:10 Verify the 235 lines yourself on GitHub
04:40 How the four chess skills compose into a department
05:20 The $5,000/month of rented analyst work
05:55 Caveats: local tools, trigger loading, judgment vs checklist
06:45 What Anthropic dropped this week that changes the cost curve

Audio edition of the Stewart Vickers AI YouTube video of the same name. Full transcript on this episode page.

What is Stewart Vickers AI?

The audio edition of the Stewart Vickers AI YouTube channel. Each episode takes one AI release - a model, a tool, a price cut - and translates it into money for business owners: what got cheaper, who got undercut, and what to do about it this week. Operator credibility over theory, specific numbers over vibes. Every episode links the original video and the free Church of SEO Jesus community where the prompts and workflows live.

Some guy on github wrote a markdown file at the weekend, 235 lines. It turned Claude Code into a chess coach that beats the $30 a month app I was paying for. And it hit Hacker News with almost nobody noticing what it actually was, a single text file. The exact four part shape of the recurring expensive analysis anyone with a laptop currently defers, dodges or pays someone else to do. The file has a name, Claude Code skill. Here is what one actually is, a single markdown file in a folder on your machine.

Claude reads it only when the trigger fires. No API, no server, no engineer. You copy the folder to tilde slash dot Claude slash skills. Claude behaves like a specialist the moment you ask. And the analyst skills that replace the recurring stuff, the lease you should read before signing, the invoice you should question, the ad account somebody else audits for you. 17 lines each, not 200.

I built one in the last 20 minutes and pointed it at a fake ad account. The chess one is called Chess Analysis. The author fed Claude a Lichess URL and an audio recording of himself thinking out loud in French during the game. Claude transcribed the audio locally with Whisper. It matched every sentence to the exact move he was deciding on using the clock times in the notation. It ran a Stockfish sweep over every move.

Then it dispatched parallel subagents to interrogate the engine with naive questions until every mistake was explained. Every claim verified against Stockfish. The whole thing runs in about an hour and spits out an annotated game plus a narrated video with subtitles. Two evenings on a laptop produced that. Not an app, not a startup, not a funding round. A text file.

Here is the number that matters. The same four-part pattern, role, checklist, tool wrappers, output format is the exact shape of any recurring analysis that has a right answer and a wrong answer. Reviewing a contract, auditing a subscription, prepping for a meeting, walking through an ad account or a P&L. If you can write the checklist a specialist actually follows, you already have the source code for their replacement. If you want ready-to-paste skill files for the recurring analyses you would rather not build from scratch, contract review, subscription audit, meeting prep, plus the four business examples I am about to show, ad audit, sales call review, P&L walkthrough, contract redline. They live in the church of SEO Jesus, my free school community.

Link below and in the pinned comment. The pinned comment also has every command from this video, copy paste, no typing. Subscribe if you want the next Claude Code release covered the day it ships, not two weeks later on somebody else's invoice. Now watch. I grabbed the real chess skill first. One command, invoke rest method, straight from the raw GitHub URL onto my machine.

235 lines of plain markdown, name, description, procedure, output format, the entire coach. Then I wrote my own, a Facebook ad account auditor, 17 lines, not 200, 17, role, senior Facebook ads auditor, 10 years running $50 million plus accounts, procedure, four steps, flag any ad set with CPM over twice the account average, flag any ad with CTR under half a percent, flag any campaign with ROAS under one and spend over 500, compute the account level totals, output format, verdict on one line, bleeders to pause today, fixes for this week, what is actually working, no preamble, no hedging. I fed it a fake account, six ad sets, 30 grand of spend, Twenty-nine grand of revenue. 96 on $30,620 of spend, running at a loss before cost of goods. Then it did something the human consultant would take an hour to do. It computed the metrics I did not send, cost PR click, click volume, revenue PR click, all derived from the CPM and CTR columns.

The account's actual story lived in columns I did not think to include. A senior auditor's move from 17 lines. skills yourself right now. md. Count the lines, 235. The whole analyst, not me telling you.

And here is where it gets stupid. Skills compose. The chess repo ships four of them. One analyzes the game. One turns the analysis into a narrated video. One studies specific positions.

One plays through them. Each one calls the others. What one guy built at the weekend is not one tool. It is a department. Four markdown files, four folders, one command to install. A working chess coaching business in a text editor.

Now run the math. Anyone with a has recurring decisions they defer or pay somebody else to walk them through. A lease before signing. A spec on a purchase over 500 bucks. Whether the subscription that renews next Tuesday is actually earning its keep. Every one of those is a checklist somebody knows and most of us do not.

And every one is now a text file you write once and stop paying for. And one tier up for the founders paying the full stack. Fractional CFO, two grand a month. Ad Auditor, 300 an hour, three hours a month, 900. Sales Call Coach, 500 a review, four reviews, two grand. Contract Redlines, 600 a month, 5,000 plus a month of repeatable analysis they are renting.

Every one of them following a checklist that lives in a Word doc on their laptop. Two things to watch before you replace anyone. The chess demo needs Stockfish and Whisper installed locally, which sounds like work. A skill that reads a CSV and thinks does not need any of that. The business use case is simpler than the chess demo, not harder. Do not talk yourself out of building one because the chess repo mentions tools you have never heard of.

Second, skills load only when their trigger matches. So you can install 10 of them and they do not collide. Ad Audit fires when you type audit this ad account. Contract Review fires on this contract. The skill you do not need stays silent. And the point is not that Claude replaces a CFO.

The point is that the 70% of what a CFO actually does, the part that is a checklist any of us could watch them run for three years, is now a text file. The other 30%, the judgment call on whether to raise the negotiation with the bank, is what people still pay for. The rest just got cheap. One more time on where to grab the skills. md files. Contract Review, Subscription Audit, Meeting Prep, plus the four business examples, Ad Audit, Sales Call Review, P&L Walkthrough, Contract Redline, alongside every command from this video and the operator threads showing what the room is already replacing with them.

Link in the description, free, one click. Get the checklist, copy it into a folder, point Claude at your data on a Sunday night, because the release and throw pick dropped this week does something to skills that changes what running one costs at scale. And it is the video I recorded next.