09ideaAug 2026

The five skills to install before anything else

Memory across sessions, a brake on over-engineering, your notes as a knowledge base, and an image-to-video pipeline

Most people run Claude with zero skills installed, which is the difference between a chatbot and a system. These five are the ones worth setting up first — and the order matters, because each one makes the next more useful.

Claude CodeSkillsPluginsMemoryObsidianImage to video

The five, and what each actually does

01·THE BRAKE

Ponytail

Forces the minimal code that works instead of over-engineering. Reported to cut code written by up to 54%, and around 20% of tokens and cost with it.

02·THE MEMORY

Claude Mem

Captures what happens in a session, compresses it, and feeds the relevant parts into later ones. Stored locally in SQLite. The big one.

03·THE KNOWLEDGE

Obsidian vault

Point Claude Code at a folder of markdown notes and it answers from what you actually know rather than from the void.

04·THE IMAGES

Banana Pro Director

Character sheets, outfit references, scene layouts. The difference between “make an image” and a repeatable visual pipeline.

05·THE VIDEO

Cinema World Builder

Takes those images and writes cinematic video prompts — camera moves, lens settings, shooting styles. The partner to the one above.

The order

Each one pays off before the next

1

Claude Mem first

So that everything you set up after it is actually remembered between sessions.

2

Then Ponytail

Output gets leaner and cheaper from that point on, including everything the other skills produce.

3

Then Obsidian

Your own knowledge becomes something it can read and navigate.

4

The two visual skills last

Add them when you actually need media, not before.

The one with a real trap

Installing Claude Mem

The npm package is not the plugin. Installing it globally pulls the library without wiring the hooks, so it looks installed and remembers nothing.

claude-mem.sh9 lines

# run these inside a Claude Code session
/plugin marketplace add thedotmack/claude-mem
/plugin install claude-mem

# then restart Claude Code

# NOT this — it pulls the library without wiring the hooks,
# so nothing is ever actually remembered
npm install -g claude-mem

The Obsidian vault

Three folders, and that is the whole structure

One folder of markdown notes is all the skill needs. The split is what keeps its output separate from your input.

✓Raw — notes going in✓Wiki — the organised knowledge✓Output — what it produces

When a skill will not load

Four failures and their fixes

SymptomThe fix

Claude Mem is not rememberingYou installed the npm package instead of the plugin. Reinstall with the /plugin commands and restart.

A skill never triggersName it explicitly, and check the folder sits in .claude/skills/ with a clear “use this when” line.

Too many skills, it gets confusedIt only loads what it needs, but keep each skill small and single-purpose so triggering stays clean.

Characters come out inconsistentLock one reference in the image skill and reuse it across every scene.

Rule of thumb

Install Claude Mem first so every other skill compounds, then add the rest one at a time.

Do this in the next 10 minutes

The smallest version that proves it

✓install Claude Mem with the two /plugin commands and restart✓add Ponytail so the next build is leaner✓point Claude Code at a vault with Raw, Wiki and Output

← previous

100 mean-reversion strategies, as a working catalog

next →

The free agent web access setup

← all experiments