Your Claude Starter Kit: The Skills and Tools Worth Installing

Hook

You have had your first hour with Claude. You have briefed it on real work and seen the difference between a lazy one-line question and a proper brief. Now you hit the natural next question, the one nobody answers cleanly: what do I actually add to this thing?

The internet has thousands of "awesome AI tools" lists. They are almost all noise, written for engineers, sorted by hype, and impossible for a busy executive to act on. This lesson is the opposite. It is a short, opinionated menu of skills and free tools that are genuinely worth installing, each described in one plain sentence, with a gold star on the handful you should start with.

The one trick that makes this easy

Almost every tool below lives on a site called GitHub, and every one of them installs the same way. You do not read the instructions. You do not touch code. You open Claude Code and paste this, with the tool's link on the end:

Please install this for me and set it up, step by step:
https://github.com/OWNER/NAME

Claude reads the project, figures out how it installs, and walks through it. If it needs something from you, it will ask in plain language. That is the whole method. Learn it once and the entire menu below is available to you.

Part 1: Three skills to start with

A "skill" is a packaged set of instructions that teaches Claude to do one job really well. Cohort members get a small starter pack of three, installed in one step from a single download:

• book-engine turns the process of writing a nonfiction book into a repeatable system.
• autonomous-company-builder takes a blank page to a validated, sellable business.
• fable-mode makes Claude plan harder and check its own work before it calls anything done.

If you are in the cohort, use the one-step installer you were sent. Everyone else can build the same habit with the tools below.

Part 2: The tools worth installing

Install these with the trick above. A gold star marks where to begin. Do not try to install everything at once. The fastest way to get overwhelmed is to add ten tools in a day and use none of them.

Start here (the three that make everything else better)

• Claude Mem ★ gives Claude a memory that persists across sessions, and cuts your token use at the same time. github.com/thedotmack/claude-mem
• Superpowers ★ automatically finds and switches on the right skill for whatever you are doing. github.com/obra/superpowers
• Claude Doctor ★ checks that your whole setup is healthy and tells you what is missing. github.com/millionco/claude-doctor

Do more, faster

• Data Formulator ★ turns a spreadsheet into charts just by asking (built by Microsoft). github.com/microsoft/data-formulator
• PptxGenJS ★ builds slide decks for free, a genuine alternative to Gamma. github.com/gitbrent/PptxGenJS
• STORM ★ turns any topic into a sourced, written research report (built at Stanford). github.com/stanford-oval/storm
• Book to Skill ★ turns any book you own into a skill Claude can apply to your work. github.com/virgiliojr94/book-to-skill

Power user, worth it early

• Headroom ★ compresses what Claude reads for 60 to 95 percent fewer tokens, same answers. github.com/chopratejas/headroom
• Personal AI Infrastructure ★ a complete personal AI setup that sits on top of Claude. github.com/danielmiessler/Personal_AI_Infrastructure
• GStack ★ lets you ship a real website or app straight from Claude (built by Garry Tan). github.com/garrytan/gstack

Please install this for me and set it up, step by step. Explain what you are doing in plain language as you go, and tell me if you need anything from me:

https://github.com/thedotmack/claude-mem

Go deeper when a real need comes up

You do not need these on day one. Come back when a specific job calls for one.

• Skills and skill-building: Skill finder (vercel-labs/skills), Agent Skills (addyosmani/agent-skills), SkillOpt (microsoft/SkillOpt).
• Making Claude a disciplined engineer: Claude Code Harness (Chachamaru127/claude-code-harness), Archon (coleam00/archon), Spec Kit (github/spec-kit).
• Research and documents: HyperResearch (jordan-gibbs/hyperresearch), PageIndex for long documents (VectifyAI/PageIndex), MinerU (opendatalab/mineru).
• Content and media: OpenCut video editor (OpenCut-app/OpenCut), Supertonic free text-to-speech (supertone-inc/supertonic).
• Web and integrations: Scrapling web scraper (D4Vinci/Scrapling), Nango integrations (NangoHQ/nango).
• Cost and health: RTK token savings (rtk-ai/rtk), Token Dashboard (nateherkai/token-dashboard).

Why this matters

The gap is not access. Every tool on this page is free and a paste away. The gap is the habit of reaching for the right one. Executives who pull ahead are not the ones who installed the most tools. They are the ones who, when they hit a real job, think "there is probably a tool for this," paste a link, and let Claude set it up. That reflex is worth more than any single item on the menu.