Skills that stack
Skills are how Claude actually does work for you, not just talks about it. The trick that makes them compound, rather than pile up into a mess of one-off prompts, is building them in layers.
Build the boring foundations once
Before you build a single "useful" skill, lock your house style once, in a small set of foundational skills. These are the plain building blocks: what a deck from your company looks like, what a document looks like, what a page of HTML looks like. Nothing clever, just correct, and built exactly once.
The way we think about it is two kinds — foundational skills and workflow skills. That is our own way of organising them, not an official Claude tier, but it is a useful split once you have more than a couple of skills in play.
Every slide, in your fonts, your layout, your logo. Built once.
Every proposal or memo reads like it came from the same company.
A clean page shape, built from the two habits above.
Everything else inherits it for free
Once the foundations exist, every workflow skill you build on top of them inherits the house style automatically and gets to focus on doing one real job well, instead of also having to figure out what "on brand" means every single time.
Assembles a client proposal from your own knowledge, already on brand.
Turns a scope of work into a consistent, correctly priced quote.
Turns a recording into clean notes and a real action list.
The standout of the set is Monthly 1:1: it pulls everything relevant from the prior month and hands back a genuinely balanced view, wins and misses both, instead of whatever the loudest recent memory happens to be.
They combine
Here is the part that is not just riivo's framing: Skills can be composed for multi-step tasks. That is a real Claude capability, and it is exactly why layering matters. A single workflow skill can lean on several foundational skills at once, pulling in your document style, your deck style, and your data conventions in one pass, instead of you assembling each piece by hand.
Fix the house style once, in one guarded place, and every skill built on top of it gets better the moment you improve it. That is the actual payoff of building this way, rather than starting from scratch each time.