Claude Skills. The repeatable unit of Claude expertise.
Moonlabs is the operator-led AI Academy in Derby. We run three live companies — Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk — and we teach twelve students per cohort to ship a real AI product, sell it to a real customer, and raise on it. Three pillars: Coding, Commercials, Investment. Twelve weeks. £6,000.
Moonlabs is what we are. Two operators — James Freestone and Louis O’Connell-Bristow — who run Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk. Claude is the default model behind most of our customer surfaces; Skills are how we package the repeatable parts of that work so the next person picking it up does not have to re-derive the prompt every time.
The Academy is what we do. A twelve-week, in-person, twelve-student cohort in Derby. You build a real AI product. You sign a paid pilot on it. You write a deck and a financial model. You leave with a deployed system, a paying customer reference and a live investor pipeline. Coding, Commercials, Investment — the three pillars taught in equal weight every week.
Why this page exists. Anthropic Skills are the part of the Claude ecosystem most quietly worth taking seriously — a packaged unit of Claude expertise (reproducible instructions, structured outputs, supporting files) that turns a one-off prompt into a durable, shareable, evaluable capability. They are the unit of leverage for teams running Claude at scale, and almost no course teaches authorship properly. You leave the Academy fluent in Skill authorship — or as the founder of a Skill-marketplace product before most of the market notices the format matters.
Coding · Claude Skills at production fluency
Skill design (what belongs and what does not), structured outputs at the Skill level, supporting-file authoring, eval suites tied to Skill behaviour, versioning, sharing, governance. Integration with Claude Code, the Anthropic API, and MCP. A library of deployed Skills by week twelve — the portfolio piece every Claude-shop hiring manager actually wants to see.
Commercials · Skills as a productised offer
Every team running Claude in production is one good Skill author away from a meaningful productivity step-change — and most of them have no-one in-house. Pricing a Skill-authorship engagement, the discovery call, a one-page pilot, the first paying customer. A paid pilot by week six — often a productised “your-Claude-stack, packaged as Skills” offer.
Investment · raising on Skill-shaped products
Anthropic itself ($61bn) is funding the surrounding ecosystem with the Anthropic Startup Program (credits + warm intros). ChatPRD, Granola, Mem, Read AI, Ghost AI all sit on the Skill-shaped surface. The marketplace and tooling layer (Aragon, Latitude, Helicone-adjacent infra) is still unbuilt. Cap table, ten-slide deck, financial model. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
Are Skills only for Claude?
Yes — the Skills format is an Anthropic concept and tooling. The underlying patterns (packaged, evaluable, structured prompts) transfer to OpenAI / open-weight contexts, but the literal Skills format is Claude-specific.
How do Skills compare to LangChain agents or MCP tools?
Different layers. Skills are the unit of Claude expertise; MCP is the protocol for tool integration; LangChain / LangGraph are orchestration frameworks for multi-step systems. Production stacks often use all three. We teach the composition, not the dogma.
Will I learn how to share Skills inside a team or with the public?
Yes. Distribution patterns — team-shared Skills, versioning, public publishing — are covered alongside the authoring work.
Do I need API experience first?
Helpful but not required. The Anthropic API page covers the lower layer; this page covers Skills as a higher-level unit of leverage. Most students learn both in parallel inside the cohort.
Will Skills go out of fashion?
The literal format may evolve — Anthropic ships fast. The underlying pattern (packaged, evaluable, structured Claude expertise) will not. We refresh the tooling each cohort.
More Academy entry points.
The Academy is one course with many doors. Each of these pages is a different entry point into the same twelve weeks.
Build it. Sell it. Raise on it. In twelve weeks.
Tell us what you would package as a Skill and what workflow it would compound. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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