The Free Claude Skill I Promised. The Broken First Draft Is the Part Worth Reading.

A few weeks ago I promised to release one of my fourteen Claude skills for free. Here it is — and the embarrassing first draft that taught me more than the finished one ever will.

The most common reply to my last article was three words. Send the skill.

Some people were polite about it, some less so, but the request underneath was always the same: skip the story, give me the file, let me paste it into Claude and get the result you got. I understand the instinct. I would have asked for the same thing two years ago.

So I am going to do it. The skill is below, free, exactly as I said it would be. But before you copy it, I want to show you the first version I wrote — the one that did not work — because the finished skill is the least useful thing I can hand you, and the broken draft is the part that actually matters.

The number that got all the attention

The skill is my eBay listing generator. In the last piece I mentioned it lifted my sales close to 88% above where they were before it went live, and that was the number everyone latched onto. Fair enough — it is the measurable one. A listing that used to take me an hour now takes about ten minutes, and the listings are more consistent than anything I produced by hand.

But I have been writing eBay listings since 2008. By hand, with a half-remembered template, filling in item specifics differently depending on how tired I was that day. Seventeen years of that. So when I sat down to write the skill, I assumed it would be easy. I already knew how to do this. I just had to write it down.

That assumption is where the whole thing nearly fell apart.

The first version was a fortune cookie

Here, more or less, is what my first draft told the model to do:

Write a clear, keyword-rich title. Fill in the item specifics accurately. Use professional condition descriptions. Arrange the photos well.

That is not a skill. That is a fortune cookie. Every line sounds correct and means nothing.

I tested it the way I test all of them now — on a real product I already had a live listing for, one I knew the right answer for. The output came back clean, grammatical, confident. And useless. It produced exactly what a free one-line prompt produces, because that is all I had given it. “Write a clear title” is advice I could get from anyone who has never sold a thing in their life.

I sat there slightly annoyed, because the output was not wrong. It just was not mine. And I could not immediately say why.

The gap I had been hiding from myself

So I made myself answer one question: what does a good eBay title actually mean? Not in theory. In the specific way I had been doing it for seventeen years without thinking.

The answer turned out to be a set of rules I had never said out loud. The first forty or so characters carry almost all the search weight on eBay, so the exact words a buyer types go at the front — not the brand, not an adjective, not a clever phrase. The brand goes later. Marketing language (“amazing,” “premium,” “must-have”) gets cut entirely, because nobody searches for it and it costs me character space I need for terms that actually match. I had been applying this on every listing for years and had never written a word of it down.

Same story with the item specifics. My first draft said “fill them in accurately.” When I went back to make that line mean something, three rules fell out of it.

First — fill every applicable item specific, including the optional ones, because eBay’s search reads those fields as direct match signals and an empty field is a missed match. Second — when eBay offers a dropdown value, use it; the dropdown values feed buyer-side filters, free-text variants do not. Third — if a field genuinely doesn’t apply, flag it as NEEDS CONFIRMATION rather than guess a value to look complete, because a wrong specific produces returns and disputes that cost more than the missing match would have.

None of that was instinct. All of it was a rule I had been applying for years without ever writing a word of it down.

I went through the whole skill like that, one hand-waving line at a time, forcing each one to become a number or a threshold or a flat instruction. The first version was thin. The second version showed me what I had forgotten. By the third, I trusted it.

What I am keeping, and why

I am not going to pretend the free version below is the complete skill. It is not. There are a dozen more rules in mine that are specific to the categories I sell in — condition language tuned to the disputes I actually get, photo-order logic tied to how my buyers scroll, conventions that only make sense if you have sourced these exact products from Shenzhen. Those stay with me, because that is the real edge, and I would be a poor trader to give it away.

What I am giving you is the scaffold. The structure, the title logic, the item-specifics discipline — the bones that any seller can hang their own categories on.

And here is the uncomfortable part, the reason I keep insisting the finished skill is the least valuable thing in this article. You can copy my rules. You cannot copy the seventeen years that produced them. If you paste my skill into Claude, you will get my judgment applied to your products, and the fit will be loose, because your categories are not mine and your buyers are not mine. It will be better than a generic prompt. It will not be better than the skill you would write for yourself.

The value was never in the rules. It was in being forced to name what I had been doing by feel. And that only happens to the person doing the writing.

What to actually do today

Take one task you do over and over — listings, supplier checks, replies to a certain kind of email, whatever your version of this is. Write the laziest possible one-line skill for it. “Do this task well.” Then run it on a real piece of work you already know the right answer for.

It will fail. The output will be clean and generic and not yours. Sit with that failure for a minute, because the gap between what the model produced and what you would have done is the thing you have been carrying in your head for years without ever writing down. Name that gap. That is your skill. That is also, it turns out, the most honest description of your own expertise you will ever write.

So yes — here is the skill. But the version that helped me was never the one I am sending you. It was the broken one I had to fix.

If you want the free scaffold — the eBay listing skill, stripped to the bones, ready to adapt to your own categories — it’s at ebay-scaffold. Take it apart, rewrite it for what you sell, and let it break a few times before you trust it.