skills/research/marketingskills.md

Research: coreyhaines31/marketingskills

A marketing-themed Agent Skills repo by Corey Haines. The infrastructure is genuinely interesting and notably minimal: zero npm dependencies, all codegen done with Node stdlib + bash.

Repo structure

.claude-plugin/        marketplace.json, plugin.json
.github/               workflows + sync script + issue/PR templates
skills/                40 skill dirs (flat, one level deep)
tools/                 clis/, integrations/, composio/, REGISTRY.md
AGENTS.md  CLAUDE.md  CONTRIBUTING.md  README.md  VERSIONS.md
validate-skills.sh  validate-skills-official.sh

CLAUDE.md is a one-line file: AGENTS.md (i.e. it points Claude at the cross-agent file, treating AGENTS.md as the source of truth).

Each skill directory is uniform:

skills/<name>/
├── SKILL.md
├── evals/evals.json        # eval prompts + assertions
└── references/*.md         # progressive-disclosure docs

No scripts/ or assets/. Skills are flat (no nesting / sub-skills). No plugins/ or dist/ directories — the repo is the plugin, served from root.

Plugin packaging

Ships as a Claude Code plugin marketplace via two manifests:

.claude-plugin/marketplace.json:

{
  "name": "marketingskills",
  "owner": { "name": "Corey Haines", "url": "https://corey.co" },
  "metadata": { "version": "1.9.0" },
  "plugins": [
    { "name": "marketing-skills",
      "description": "40 marketing skills...",
      "source": "./" }
  ]
}

.claude-plugin/plugin.json:

{ "name": "marketing-skills", "version": "1.9.0",
  "skills": "./skills", "license": "MIT" }

One marketplace, one plugin, all 40 skills bundled. No themed sub-grouping into multiple plugins — the README's "categories" exist only as headings, not separate installable units. (Relevant for Matt's multi-plugin goal: this repo doesn't actually demonstrate a multi-plugin marketplace.)

VERSIONS.md notes the plugin.json was added explicitly so Claude Code's loader recognizes the skills directory.

Build tooling

No package.json, no TypeScript, no bundler, no dist build. The only Node code is .github/scripts/sync-skills.js — a zero-dependency script (fs, path only) that:

1. Walks skills/*/SKILL.md
2. Parses YAML frontmatter with a hand-rolled regex (/^---\n([\s\S]*?)\n---/) — naïve key:value splitter, no real YAML lib
3. Rewrites the plugins[0].skills array in marketplace.json to a list of ./skills/<name> paths
4. Updates the skill count in the plugin description (/\d+ marketing skills/)
5. Replaces the <!-- SKILLS:START -->...<!-- SKILLS:END --> block in README.md with a regenerated table (description truncated to 120 chars at a word boundary)

That's the entire codegen story. validate-skills.sh and validate-skills-official.sh are bash-only frontmatter linters using sed/grep.

Installation story

Six options listed in the README, in priority order:

1. vercel-labs/skills CLI — npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills [--skill page-cro copywriting] [--list]. README claims this installs to .agents/skills/ and symlinks .claude/skills/ for Claude Code.
2. Claude Code plugins — /plugin marketplace add coreyhaines31/marketingskills then /plugin install marketing-skills.
3. Clone-and-copy.
4. Git submodule.
5. Fork.
6. SkillKit (npx skillkit install ...) for cross-agent install (Cursor/Copilot/etc).

Codex support is implicit: the repo ships AGENTS.md (the cross-agent spec file Codex reads) and the README claims compatibility with "Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, and any agent that supports the Agent Skills spec." There is no Codex-specific plugin manifest — Codex compatibility comes purely from being SKILL.md-spec-compliant + AGENTS.md at root.

Docs site

There is no embedded docs site. No docs/, no site/, no website/, no Docusaurus/Nextra/Astro config, has_pages: false. The README claims homepage: https://marketing-skills.com but it is not built from this repo.

The only generated docs artifact is the README skills table (built by sync-skills.js).

CI / release

Two workflows:

• .github/workflows/sync-skills.yml — on push to main touching skills/**, runs sync-skills.js and commits the result back via stefanzweifel/git-auto-commit-action@v7 as a bot user. This is the "build step" — it auto-rewrites marketplace.json and README.md whenever skills change.
• .github/workflows/validate-skill.yml — on push/PR touching **/SKILL.md. A detect-changes job computes the changed skill dirs via git diff and a jq-built JSON array, then a matrix validate job runs Flash-Brew-Digital/validate-skill@v1 on each. Skips drafts and dependabot.

No release/publish workflow — versioning is tracked manually in VERSIONS.md (per-skill semver + dates) and in marketplace.json/plugin.json's top-level version.

SKILL.md format

Frontmatter is minimal:

---
name: page-cro
description: When the user wants to optimize... [trigger phrases and "For X, see other-skill" cross-refs]
metadata:
  version: 1.1.0
---

Conventions documented in AGENTS.md:

• name: 1-64 chars, lowercase a-z + digits + hyphens, must match dir
• description: 1-1024 chars, must include trigger phrases AND scope-boundary cross-references to sibling skills
• metadata.version only (no author/license per-skill)
• SKILL.md kept under 500 lines; details pushed into references/

Distinctive description style: every skill enumerates trigger-phrase-laden quotes ("CRO," "this page isn't converting," "my landing page sucks") plus explicit For X, see other-skill boundaries — clearly tuned for the Skill-tool dispatcher's keyword matching.

Distinctive / novel patterns

1. Per-skill evals/evals.json — every skill has structured eval prompts with expected_output summary + a list of assertions strings. Not wired into CI but provides a dataset for offline eval runs.

2. Auto-update protocol baked into AGENTS.md — instructs the agent to fetch VERSIONS.md from raw.githubusercontent once per session, compare local versions, and surface a non-blocking notification if 2+ skills are stale or any has a major bump. Includes a "say 'update skills'" trigger that runs git pull. This is a memory-less, network-fetched update channel.

3. product-marketing-context as a hub skill — every other skill is documented to read .agents/product-marketing-context.md (with .claude/ fallback) before doing anything. README diagram shows it as the root of a star topology.

4. Claude Code-only escape hatch in AGENTS.md — explicitly calls out that !`command` shell-injection syntax is Claude Code-only and must not be in the cross-agent SKILL.md files. Suggests local override in .claude/skills/ if you want it. Clean pattern: keep skills cross-agent, document Claude-Code-only enhancements separately.

5. tools/ registry — orthogonal to skills, not part of the plugin. 60+ zero-dep Node CLIs (tools/clis/<vendor>.js) plus 80+ markdown integration guides plus a Composio mapping. AGENTS.md tells the agent: skills reference tools by name, agent reads tools/REGISTRY.md and tools/integrations/<tool>.md on demand. Effectively a second progressive-disclosure layer beyond references/.

6. No package.json / no JS deps — the entire codegen + validation pipeline is node (stdlib only) + bash. Maximally portable.

7. No agents, no hooks, no slash-commands — README hints at /page-cro invocations, but no commands/ directory exists. These are skill-name invocations the Claude Code plugin loader produces automatically.

Takeaways for Matt's infra goals

• Multi-plugin marketplace (goal 2): this repo is not a model for that — single-plugin marketplace. The marketplace.json schema does support multiple plugins[] entries pointing to different source paths, so for themed groups Matt would want each plugin to live in its own subdir (e.g. plugins/architecture/, plugins/typescript/) each with their own skills/. coreyhaines31 doesn't demonstrate this.
• Codex (goal 3): cheap — drop AGENTS.md at root, keep SKILL.md spec-compliant, claim compatibility. No separate manifest needed.
• vercel-labs CLI (goal 1): zero work — once skills/<name>/SKILL.md exists with valid frontmatter, the CLI picks it up. coreyhaines31 added nothing extra.
• Docs site (goal 4): not modeled here; this repo opts out and links to a separately-hosted marketing site.
• Worth copying: the sync-skills.js + GitHub Action pattern (auto-rewrite README table and marketplace skill list on push), the VERSIONS.md + auto-update protocol, the evals/evals.json per skill, and the AGENTS.md note about keeping !`command` out of cross-agent SKILL.md.

Key file paths

(all on main branch of coreyhaines31/marketingskills)

• /.claude-plugin/marketplace.json, /.claude-plugin/plugin.json
• /.github/scripts/sync-skills.js
• /.github/workflows/sync-skills.yml, /.github/workflows/validate-skill.yml
• /AGENTS.md (the canonical agent guide; CLAUDE.md just points to it)
• /VERSIONS.md
• /skills/<name>/SKILL.md + /skills/<name>/evals/evals.json + /skills/<name>/references/*.md
• /validate-skills.sh, /validate-skills-official.sh