/money-skillify — Codify a Working Pattern Into a Reusable Skill

Most successful workflows are discovered once, executed by hand, and forgotten. The next time the user faces the same problem, they re-discover it (or rebuild a worse version). /money-skillify solves this: it walks back through the most recent successful workflow, distills the steps, and writes a project-local SKILL.md.

The output is a custom skill stored at ~/.smtm/projects/{slug}/skills/{name}/SKILL.md. Future Claude Code sessions in this project can reference it.

Triggers

Natural-language equivalents:

• "This worked, save it", "Codify this", "Turn this into a skill", "Make this reusable"
• "把这个固化下来", "存成 skill", "保存这个流程"

What counts as "a successful workflow"

A workflow is /money-skillify-eligible if all three are true:

1. The user explicitly confirmed it worked (clear signal: "this worked", "this converted", "ship it", "much better than before", "我们就这么干")
2. There's a clear sequence of steps (not just a single insight — that's a /money-learn not a skill)
3. The pattern is reusable — it would help to do exactly the same thing again next time, in this project

Anti-patterns that should NOT be skillified:

• A one-off bug fix
• A pattern that's user-specific but not reusable across the user's products
• A pattern more naturally captured as a learning (single observation)
• A pattern already covered by an existing money-* skill

Workflow

Step 1 — Identify the workflow

Walk back through the conversation. Find the most recent sequence where:

1. The user described or asked for something to be done
2. A series of steps was executed
3. The user confirmed satisfaction

Quote the user's confirmation back to them so they can verify which workflow you're about to codify:

I'm about to codify the workflow that produced "{quoted confirmation}". The steps as I understood them:

1. {step 1}
2. {step 2} ...

Is this what you want to skillify? [y / edit / different workflow]

If the user wants a different workflow, ask which.

Step 2 — Choose a name

Default: {slug-of-the-workflow} (e.g., cold-email-saas-buyers, ad-creative-3x-baseline, weekly-ship-cadence).

If /money-skillify <name> was given, use that. Else propose 1-3 candidate names and ask the user to pick.

The skill name will become the file path:

~/.smtm/projects/{slug}/skills/{name}/SKILL.md

Step 3 — Distill the steps

Convert the workflow into a fixed format:

---
name: {project-slug}-{name}
description: "{One-line summary of what this skill does, when to invoke. Auto-derived but user can edit.}"
project: {project slug}
captured_at: {ISO 8601}
captured_from: {conversation-summary | snapshot-id}
trigger: {natural-language phrase or /command pattern that invokes this}
---

# {Title}

## When to use

{1-2 sentences describing the trigger condition. Specific. "Cold email to early-stage SaaS founders with under $10k MRR" not "cold email to people".}

## Inputs needed

- {Input 1, e.g., "Target ICP description"}
- {Input 2, e.g., "Sender's product URL"}
- ...

## Steps

1. {Step 1, including any specific commands, tools, or templates used}
2. {Step 2}
3. ...

## Success signal

How to know it worked. ("Reply rate ≥10%", "Conversion ≥1.5%", etc.)

## Failure mode + fallback

What goes wrong, and what to do instead. ("If reply rate <5%, the subject line is the issue — switch to {alternative}")

## Variables / templates

If the workflow uses a template (e.g., email body, ad creative), include the template literally. Mark variables in `{double-braces}`.

## Evidence this works

The original conversation context: who, what, when, what result. One paragraph.

## Limitations

When this skill should NOT be used. ("This works for B2B SaaS; do not use for B2C.")

Step 4 — Write to disk

Path: ~/.smtm/projects/{slug}/skills/{name}/SKILL.md

mkdir -p the directory tree first. If a file already exists at that path, ask:

• Append a version number (e.g., cold-email-v2/)?
• Overwrite?
• Cancel?

Default to "append a version" — preserves the prior skill in case the new one is worse.

Step 5 — Confirm + register

Print:

✅ Skill codified.

Path: ~/.smtm/projects/{slug}/skills/{name}/SKILL.md
Trigger: {trigger}

To re-run this skill in a future Claude Code session:
1. Open Claude Code in this project's directory
2. Type "{trigger}" or load the file directly: `read ~/.smtm/projects/{slug}/skills/{name}/SKILL.md`
3. The skill will execute the same steps with new inputs

Optionally suggest creating a learning to record that this workflow was successfully captured:

Want to also log a learning? E.g., "{name} converts at X% for {ICP}" — /money-learn add.

Auto-loading project-local skills

Other money-* skills should check ~/.smtm/projects/{slug}/skills/ at startup. If any project-local skills exist, surface them once per session:

📦 This project has 3 codified skills: cold-email-saas-buyers, ad-creative-3x-baseline, weekly-ship-cadence. Reference them by name or run /money-skillify list to see all.

This is how the user's accumulated craft becomes part of every future session, automatically.

List mode

/money-skillify list:

Project-local skills for `{project}`:

| Name | Captured | Trigger |
|---|---|---|
| cold-email-saas-buyers | 2026-04-22 | "cold email outreach for SaaS" |
| ad-creative-3x-baseline | 2026-04-15 | "generate ad creative" |
| ... | | |

/money-skillify show <name>: Cat the file. Print path at top.

Edge cases

• No clear successful workflow in conversation — Ask the user to describe the workflow and walk through Step 3 manually.
• Workflow uses external tools the user doesn't have configured — Note them in the SKILL.md as prerequisites; don't fail.
• Workflow contains sensitive data (customer names, internal URLs) — Strip them out, replace with {variable} placeholders, ask user to confirm sanitization.
• Project-local skill duplicates a global money- skill* — Warn: "This overlaps significantly with /money-content. Are you sure you want a project-local version, or should we update your /money-content workflow instead?"

Principles

• Codify only proven patterns — Failed or unconfirmed workflows get a /money-learn entry, not a skill.
• Specific over general — A skill named cold-email-saas-founders-under-10k-mrr is more useful than cold-email-template. Specificity drives retrieval and quality.
• Sanitize before saving — Project-local skills may end up in version control or shared. Strip secrets and PII as part of Step 3.
• Versions, not overwrites — cold-email/ then cold-email-v2/ then cold-email-v3/. The progression is itself useful institutional memory.
• Skill, not journal — A skill encodes a procedure. A journal records what happened. If there's no procedure to encode, log a learning instead.

Value Quantification (Required at End of Output)

After successful codification:

• 📦 Captured — One reusable skill at {path}
• ⏱ Time saved per future use — ~30-90 minutes — re-discovering the same sequence vs. running it from a SKILL.md
• ⚠️ Risk avoided — Re-doing the workflow worse next time — most founders re-build a degraded version of their own prior success because the original wasn't captured
• 🔁 Auto-surfaced — Every future Claude Code session in this project gets a one-line nudge listing project-local skills available

After /money-skillify list:

• 📋 Surfaced — {N} project-local skills, each with its trigger
• ✅ What you got — A complete list of your codified workflows for this project, with file paths and triggers