5 Free Claude Skills That Make Your AI Actually Good

A skill is a folder of instructions Claude loads only when it needs it. That one change turns the AI from a generalist guessing its way through a task into an expert that knows the rules of the job. All five below are free. Paste each command into the terminal where Claude Code runs, or grab the file straight from GitHub.

Prefer this as a download? The full one-page cheat sheet with every install command is attached as a PDF. Download the PDF →

1. grill-me

Stops Claude from building your bad idea perfectly. It interrogates your plan first, one sharp question at a time, until the architecture actually holds up.

• Marketplace: claude plugin marketplace add mattpocock/skills
• GitHub (store-decisions variant, logs every decision): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vbalasu/grill-me-store-decisions/main/SKILL.md

2. karpathy-guidelines

Kills over-engineering. Forces simple, surgical edits and real tests instead of 200 lines where 50 would do.

• GitHub: https://github.com/multica-ai/andrej-karpathy-skills/blob/main/skills/karpathy-guidelines/SKILL.md

3. frontend-design

Gets Claude out of generic AI defaults and into bold type, opinionated color and real layout. Anthropic's own design skill.

• Marketplace: claude plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills
• GitHub: https://github.com/anthropics/skills

4. paper-search

No more fake citations. Pulls real papers from OpenAlex, 250M+ works, no API key needed.

• Marketplace: claude plugin marketplace add ykdojo/paper-search then claude plugin install paper-search@paper-search

5. docx & pdf core

Turns Claude into a real document engine, proper Word and PDF files instead of markdown with a renamed extension. Same Anthropic bundle as frontend-design (install the document-skills bundle).

• Marketplace: claude plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills
• GitHub: https://github.com/anthropics/skills

Bonus: give Claude live data

Context7 feeds it up-to-date library docs so it stops writing code against deprecated APIs.

claude mcp add context7 -- npx -y @upstash/context7-mcp

Firecrawl gives it the live web, search, scrape and crawl.

claude mcp add firecrawl -- npx -y firecrawl-mcp

One rule before you install anything: skills can run code on your machine. Only add ones you have read, keep them sandboxed, and never let a skill near your API keys.