Build Process
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616 Downloads, Claude Skills, and Why Showing Up Every Week Is the Whole Point
PRetty crossed 616 downloads, upSKILLed became the Week 4 build, and the weekly cadence is proving that the practice is the point.
I didn't expect PRetty to land the way it did.
The name was a compromise. I almost didn't ship it. The week it launched I was genuinely debating whether a tool that generates PR descriptions was interesting enough to write about, let alone build in public. Then the downloads started coming in. As of this week: 616.
That number doesn't make me famous. But it tells me someone opened a terminal, typed npm install -g @alexandrakay/pretty-pr, and decided it was worth the 30 seconds. Multiply that by 616 and apparently there are a lot of developers out there who hate writing PR descriptions as much as I do.
That's the whole premise of this series. Build something useful. Ship it. See what happens.
What PRetty actually does
PRetty is a CLI tool that takes a GitHub PR URL and generates a complete PR description using the Anthropic API. Title, summary, what changed, why it matters — all of it, in seconds, from the diff.
You run npm install -g @alexandrakay/pretty-pr, then prettypr --full, and get back something you'd actually be willing to put in front of a team. The GitHub API does the heavy lifting on the diff, Claude does the writing, and you stop staring at a blank PR description box at 11pm wondering how to explain what you did.
The technical writeup is on Medium if you want the full breakdown. But the short version is: it's the kind of tool that shouldn't have been missing, and somehow was.
Week 4: Claude skills
This week I'm building something I've been thinking about since Week 1.
Claude skills are markdown files that teach Claude how to use a specific tool, API, or service. You write the skill, Claude reads it, and suddenly it's not just a smart assistant — it's a smart assistant that knows your stack. Your GitHub setup. Your Stripe integration. Your internal CLI. It stops guessing and starts knowing.
The problem is that writing a good skill file is genuinely tedious. You're starting from a blank markdown document, figuring out the structure, the auth patterns, the right prompts — all from scratch. No tooling. No templates. No examples. Most developers give up and just re-explain their tools to Claude every time instead.
Security engineers have it worse. Tools like ffuf and nmap don't just have flags — they have flag philosophies. Writing a Claude skill that actually captures how to use ffuf during a recon pipeline requires being both a security engineer and a prompt engineer. Those two people are almost never the same person.
So Week 4 is about fixing that. The tool is called upSKILLed. You give it a service name, a CLI tool, or paste in a --help output, and it generates a full skill package — a markdown skill file, a config, and a set of example prompts. npm package and web app. It supports GitHub, Notion, Slack, Stripe, ffuf, nmap, gobuster, and a dozen others out of the box. And it supports anything else through the custom path.
The meta part is not lost on me. I'm using Claude to write instructions for Claude. That's either very clever or very recursive. Possibly both.
The consistency thing
Four weeks in and I want to say something about the consistency piece because it's not what I expected.
I thought shipping every week would feel like pressure. It does, a little. But mostly it feels like permission. Permission to build something imperfect and ship it anyway. Permission to write about the messy parts. Permission to start Monday knowing exactly what the week is for.
Before this series I had ideas that sat in Notion for months. I'd open them, move things around, close the tab. The weekly cadence broke that. The deadline isn't motivating because it's scary — it's motivating because it makes the decision for you. You're shipping Friday. Everything else is just figuring out what you're shipping.
PRetty has 616 downloads because I shipped it on a Friday when I wasn't sure it was good enough. upSKILLed will ship this Friday too. Whether it has 616 downloads six weeks from now is a separate question.
The practice is the point.
What's next
Week 4 drops this week — the full technical writeup will be on Medium. If you want to follow along, I'm posting updates on LinkedIn and Medium as I build.
The series is 12 weeks. We're a third of the way through. There are nine more tools sitting in a Notion database waiting for their Friday.
See you there.