Using with Claude skills
The MCP tools are building blocks. A skill composes them into a repeatable ritual the assistant can run on request — “do my daily orientation,” “walk me through the weekly review.” Cuaderno ships worked examples you can adapt.
Where the examples live
The repo’s examples/skills/
directory contains three reference skills:
quick-capture— capture a thought into the inbox with minimal friction.daily-orientation— read your orientation and help set the day’s intention.weekly-review— celebrate the week’s wins first, scan stewardship habits, walk the projects, look two weeks ahead, and pick one goal for next week, written to the weekly notes.
Each is a directory with a SKILL.md (YAML frontmatter + a Markdown body of steps), plus shared
references/. The README there documents the authoring pattern.
The pattern
A skill typically:
- Surfaces context with a read tool — e.g.
get_orientationorget_weekly_context. - Talks it through with you, deciding what to do.
- Writes with the matching tool — e.g.
append_to_log,upsert_daily_section,update_project_state.
For example, a daily orientation skill calls get_orientation, presents the commitments and the
suggested start, asks for your intention, and writes it with
upsert_daily_section(section="Intention", ...).
A weekly review skill calls get_weekly_context, whose projects carry the
review fields, and asks each project the question its relationship
implies rather than one question of all of them:
| The project | The question |
|---|---|
Yours (counts: true) | Did it move? |
Handed off, and changed_this_week | What came back, and what is waiting on your decision? |
Handed off over an empty Waiting On (waiting_on_empty) | A name over an empty Waiting On is a parked map wearing a name: park it, or take it back? |
Handed off, with focus_days_while_held of two or more | Offered as evidence: take it back, or change the name to whoever really has it? |
The skill asks and never concludes: the fields are evidence, and the person decides. It never offers a hand-off as a way to make room at the cap. See Weekly review.
Graceful degradation
Because each step maps to a discrete tool, a skill can degrade gracefully — if a write tool isn’t available or you decline it, the read half still gives you the briefing. The example skills show how to bind steps to tools and reference shared material.
Build your own
Start from an example, swap in the tools your ritual needs (see reads, writes, creation & lifecycle), and keep each step mapped to one tool so the flow stays inspectable. Then install it like any other Claude skill.
See also
- Connect to Claude — register the server.
- MCP server reference — the full tool surface.