Claude Clue #14: Skills Focus, Hooks Enforce
Skills are reusable prompts, hooks are code you can run to stop or alter the model's behavior.
This kicks off a three-part series on building your own skills and hooks in Claude Code. Skills are reusable prompts that help focus the model on specific guidelines, examples, or methods. The model can choose to use them, or you can ask it to. Hooks are actions that run outside the model's reasoning entirely. They fire on specific events and can act as guardrails, trigger automation, or keep the model working within limits it can't override. Type /skills or /hooks to see what you've got set up.
One of AI's superpowers is that it gives you different answers to the same question. That variability is often where the magic happens. So we're not trying to turn Claude into a deterministic script. We want trust and consistency without killing capability. Skills help by narrowing focus when you need it. Hooks handle the stuff that absolutely must happen regardless of what the model decides. Want to block destructive commands? A hook can stop anything with an `rm` before it runs. Different tools for different problems, and together they help make reliability achievable without sacrificing the creative upside.
AI-assisted. Tim "Roscoe" Rawson Approved.