App Reviews
What using Claude’s skills and plugins for client work actually looks like
Most of what gets written about AI tools for freelancers describes them in the abstract: assistants that draft, summarise, automate. What that misses is the more mundane, more useful thing that happens once you’ve used the same tool on the same kind of client work often enough. You stop explaining the same thing every time and start writing the explanation down once, in a form the tool can reuse.
The clearest example I have is a skill I built for one specific client. The industrial controls distributor I’ve mentioned before publishes on a schedule, and every article needs the same shape: a particular HTML structure, the brand’s own styling carried inside the file because the platform applies none of its own, comparison tables laid out a certain way, FAQs marked up so they’re legible to a search engine. Explaining that from scratch, in a fresh conversation, every time an article was ready, was its own small tax on the work. So I wrote it down once, as a skill, and now producing an article for that client means saying the article is ready and getting back a file in the exact structure the client’s platform expects, without re-explaining the format, the brand rules, or the publishing quirks each time.
Narrow examples are the honest ones.
That’s a narrow example, and I think narrow examples are the honest ones. The plugin and connector side of this is less about any single dramatic capability and more about reach: being able to pull a real client report out of Google Drive, check an inbox for a fact I half remembered, or read a website’s own settings, inside the same conversation where I’m writing the thing that depends on that fact. It replaces a particular kind of friction, tabbing between six places to gather the details a piece of work actually needs, rather than replacing the work itself.
I don’t think that’s a small thing, but I also don’t think it’s the thing the marketing around these tools usually describes. Nothing here writes a client’s website for them, or thinks up a strategy unprompted. What it does is take the parts of the job that are exact and repeatable, an article structure that must not vary, a fact that lives in an old email, and make retrieving or repeating them nearly free. The judgement in between is still mine to supply.