Packaging team conventions into a Claude skill

Or how a simple shared config file signals a coming shift in platform engineering.

Translated from the original French article: Packager les conventions d’équipe dans un skill Claude

It hit me while I was putting my team’s git conventions into my CLAUDE.md. Branches, tags, commit message format — everything Claude needs to create the right issues with the right labels. Then I pictured every team member doing the exact same thing on their side. Not exactly efficient. After spending my days in Claude Code, the obvious next step was to package our team conventions as a shared skill.

But looking closer, this mundane task was revealing a much larger shift. By encoding team conventions into a skill, I was doing at a small scale the same thing we’re doing at a larger scale for all our devs. We’re moving away from the classic pattern: docs + portal + tools. Here’s what that looks like:

Before AI

Until now, devs directly consumed docs, portals, CLI tools and APIs provided by the platform team.

With LLM assistants

Today, devs read the docs, paste them into a prompt — “Claude, follow these instructions” — and copy-paste screenshots of web UIs. Some use MCPs — when they exist. But in every case, the dev is just a middleman between the platform and the agent. Completely pointless.

I’m working from the assumption that devs will collaborate with Claude Code all the time. The most effective thing is to talk to Claude directly. Give it conventions, context and tools in a form it can natively consume: skills, CLIs and APIs.

Back to our conventions

Nothing fancy about this team-platform skill — you can spin one up quickly with Claude’s skill-creator from your existing docs. I also tried reverse-engineering it from my own workstation to bootstrap the content, but I had to intervene a lot to separate team conventions from my personal preferences. Wouldn’t recommend it. The resulting skill lets you do things like checking your setup:

❯ Tell me if my PC is properly configured for the platform

● I'll use the team-platform skill to check your setup.

● Skill(team-platform)
  ⎿  Successfully loaded skill

● Here's the summary:

  CLI tools - all good

  ┌──────────────────┬────────┬─────────┐
  │      Tool        │ Status │ Version │
  ├──────────────────┼────────┼─────────┤
  │ gcloud           │ OK     │ 559.0.0 │
  ├──────────────────┼────────┼─────────┤
  │ platool          │ OK     │ 0.21.0  │
  ├──────────────────┼────────┼─────────┤
  │ kubectl          │ OK     │ v1.35.2 │
  ├──────────────────┼────────┼─────────┤
  │ flux             │ OK     │ 2.8.2   │
...
  └──────────────────┴────────┴─────────┘

  GPG - all good

  ┌───────────────────────┬─────────────┐
  │        Item           │   Status    │
  ├───────────────────────┼─────────────┤
  │ GPG key ed25519       │ OK          │
  ├───────────────────────┼─────────────┤
  │ commit.gpgsign = true │ OK          │
  └───────────────────────┴─────────────┘

  Claude Code - 2 missing

  ┌─────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │       Item          │                 Status                 │
  ├─────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Marketplace Evaneos │ OK                                     │
  ├─────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ platform-context    │ OK                                     │
  ├─────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ check-updates       │ Missing                                │
  ├─────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Context7            │ OK (installed under a different name)  │
  ├─────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Notion              │ OK                                     │
  ├─────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ Datadog MCP         │ OK (active in available tools)         │
  └─────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────────────┘

  To do: install check-updates:
  /plugin install check-updates@evaneos-claude-marketplace

But also enforcing our conventions:

❯ Analyze these scripts against platform conventions

● Here's the analysis against team-platform conventions (coding-standards):

  ...
  Summary

  Scripts in this repo comply with platform conventions:
  - Shareable git scripts (gf*, gupdate*): portable Linux/macOS, shellcheck clean
  - No Python in this repo, so uv/ruff/ty rules don't apply

  Nothing to fix.

OK but how do you bootstrap this?

Sure, for onboarding someone into the team, the skill needs to land on their workstation in sync. Not a problem — that’s not the point. We prefer onboarding people face to face, walking them through things. “Here’s a skill, good luck” is no more welcoming than “here’s the docs, good luck.” The real goal is to stop everyone from reinventing the wheel: pool the work of feeding context to LLMs, and keep it up to date with a simple skill update.

We still do peer reviews, by the way. It’s just that it’s no longer Python code review — it’s Markdown prose review.