Skills for Thrills.
Why context beats commands in AI development. A live-build session on Claude Skills. How to ship a Claude skill before the coffee gets cold.
Every team has a recipe in somebody's head. The work is getting it out of their head and into a place Claude can find. This talk is the story of a Fortune 500 healthcare team that had been fighting a fifteen-hour task for six weeks, and the forty-eight hours that turned it into a folder with four files.
Five ideas you can ship Monday.
No slides full of capabilities you'll never use. No AI influencer talk. Twenty years of UX and dev architecting, plus Claude Code, distilled into the five things a working team can put to work the next morning.
Commands vs. context
Commands are what you type. Context is what Claude already knows when you type it. Teams that lose to Claude are typing. Teams that win have already told it the rules, once, in writing, in a place Claude can find.
A skill is a recipe, not a model
Not training. Not a subscription your CFO has to approve. A folder. A name. A description. Instructions. If you can write a recipe, you can write a skill.
Naming is routing
Claude picks skills by name. Two skills with overlapping names will fight each other and the one Claude picks is not the one you wanted. One job per name. Always give the why, not just the what.
Skills belong in the repo, not your DMs
A skill in your Slack DMs is a skill nobody else has. Skills belong in version control. If a new hire clones the repo on day one, they inherit every skill your team has ever written. That is how you compound.
The math at the end
A fifteen-hour task. Fifteen seconds to run, fifteen minutes to verify. One Thursday Zoom. Forty-eight hours in a terminal. A folder with four files, running a thousand times, forever.
Chris Thomas. Founder, YNDR.
Fractional Chief AI Officer and AI Board Advisor. Anthropic-certified Claude specialist. Twenty years of UX and dev architecting before the AI wave, now advising mid-market through Fortune 100 companies on operational AI.
The AI didn't replace the craft. It compounded it. The talks Chris gives come straight from the work he ships, real production agents inside real companies, on Next.js, Supabase, Vercel, and the Claude Agent SDK.
Same operator advises and builds. One Fractional CAIO can cover multiple portfolio companies across a fund.
The room, the date,
the thirty minutes.
- Date
- Tue 04/21/2026
- Time
- 3:00 – 3:30 PM
- Stage
- Stage 1
ATV Main Stage
Bring me one task you've explained to Claude more than once this week. Three minutes at the YNDR booth and I'll build your first skill with you.
If this is the talk you want
in front of your team.
Chris speaks at conferences, leadership offsites, and portfolio company gatherings. One-day workshops, retreat-style builds, or a standing seat on your AI bench. Same operator who ships the agents writes the talks.