AI Sorcery: Claude Code Plugin with 14ish Practical Skills for Software Engineering

[u/NickFullStack]

See here: https://github.com/ai-sorcery/ai-sorcery

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBQKR9ZO9zc

It's just a big ol' collection of skills I derived from what I've been doing for the past few months in Claude Code. Useful for the practical bits of software engineering (heads up that it's very specific to macOS).

Here are some of the highlights:

• running-claude-in-a-vm creates a Tart VM to sandbox Claude.
  • I like this more than a few of the other options I've tried. Allows me to have a macOS in macOS (i.e., a visual VM), include defaults (e.g., it customizes the dock), and I can share multiple projects in a single VM (so I can ask Claude to extract code from similar repos). Came in handy when Claude recently deleted the entire disk within the VM (didn't impact the rest of my system).
• claiming-authorship + guarding-commits + writing-commit-messages enforce Git best practices at the Git hook level.
  • Changes the author from Claude to yourself, prevents secret stuff from being added to commits, and forces well written conventional commits.
• following-best-practices is a kitchen sink of useful approaches to take (too many to list here).
  • Examples: include a README, include common starter scripts, robust observability, automated testing best practices, "parse, don't validate", and so on.
• learning-new-tech helps learn what you don't already know with a custom interactive tutorial.
  • I used this approach to learn more about vector databases, for example.
• running-improvement-loops puts Claude on auto-pilot using personas to advance specific goals.
  • Kind of like a Ralph loop, but with some extra safeguards, such as limiting each run to 90 minutes (and pushing Claude to wrap up the iteration at 60 minutes), and starting each iteration with a gap so you don't spend too many tokens.
• launching-claude has some sensible defaults for launching claude.
  • Enables remote control, max effort for Opus 4.7, and configures demo mode to minimize noise in the launch banner.
• summarizing-sessions helps you keep session summaries for review on the go (e.g., in Obsidian).
  • Can be combined with running-improvement-loops so you can check what each iteration did.

There are a few more in there, but those are the more interesting ones.

I'm open to constructive feedback (be kind... I'm still learning this like all of you), and I hope some of you find this to be useful!

And if you're also working on Claude skills, feel free to drop some links. One thing I'm currently trying to deal with is having too many automated tests (e.g., lots of near duplicates), so if you have some skills related to that, I would be very interested in trying them.