Show HN: The System Skill Pattern
11 points| jakedahn | 4 months ago |shruggingface.com
I’ve been playing with Claude Skills and stumbled on a simple pattern for tiny, durable personal data systems:
* CLI: a small, self-contained executable
* SKILL.md: the operator guide (what to run, how to parse output, how to think about the system)
* SQLite: a local DB for persistent state
It’s nothing mind-blowing, but the ergonomics of this combo feel great.
If you define a process/flow, Claude can "turn the crank" by running the CLI, accumulating context, and animating the system to life over time.
They’re also easy to share: you can distribute System Skills via Claude Code’s `/plugin marketplace add <repo>`.
More details in the blog post and the toy Pomodoro System Skill reference implementation here:
Blog: https://www.shruggingface.com/blog/the-system-skill-pattern
Repo: https://github.com/jakedahn/pomodoro
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Curious whether any of this resonates. Also excited to hear any interesting System Skill ideas worth exploring!
EdNutting|4 months ago
jakedahn|4 months ago
I’m excited to play with their memory stuff. I’m curious if they will add any hooks for allowing skills to store things intentionally.
The system skill idea is a little different in that you can store and query structured data out of your own SQLite db.