Before I explain a single term, let me show you why these four things matter.
The plugin that moved a stock market
LegalZoom sells legal documents and services to people who don’t want to hire a traditional law firm.
On January 30, 2026, Anthropic released a legal plugin for Claude. A bundle of skills that covers a lot of what a company like LegalZoom does, now in the hands of every Claude subscriber who installs it.
A few days later, on February 3, LegalZoom’s stock dropped from $9.12 to $7.33. That’s about a 20% loss in a single day. And it wasn’t just one company. Across software, data and finance stocks, roughly $285 billion in market value disappeared in that selloff. LegalZoom still hasn’t climbed back.
Why show you this? Because a plugin is just skills packaged together. The same building blocks that rattled Wall Street are the ones you can use to run your coaching business. That should speak for itself.
So let’s break them down in plain English.
Command: a saved prompt
A command is the simplest of the four. It’s a saved prompt.
If you give Claude the same instructions over and over, stop copying and pasting them from a notes app. Tell Claude, “I want to save this as a command,” and it saves it as one text file. Then you type / and the name, and Claude reads that file and does what it says in light of what you’re asking right then.
Example: /weekly-recap writes this week’s client recap in your format.
Rule of thumb: if you keep pasting the same prompt, make it a command.
Skill: a process Claude can run
A skill is like a command that grew up. Instead of one file, it gets a whole folder. Inside is the step-by-step instructions for the job, plus anything the job needs: scripts, templates, reference notes.
Here’s a real one. I use a free command-line tool that exports all my past Claude conversations. The tool can do it, but it doesn’t know how I want it done. So I have a skill called Sync Conversations that runs the tool my way: which conversations to grab, how to label them, where to store them, and to leave the old ones alone and only pull the new ones.
In Video 1, the skill I showed handled intake forms and macro calculations with a human in the loop. Multi-step work across multiple apps. That’s skill territory.
How Claude decides to use a skill
Every skill has a name and a short description. Claude reads those at the start of every session. When what you ask matches a description, it opens that skill and follows it. You can also call one yourself by typing / and its name, or just say “use my ClickUp task skill.”
It’s not 100%, so write the description in the words you’d actually say.
Connector vs skill
I love ClickUp, and I have it connected to Claude. The connector has a tool called create task. So why do I need a skill?
Because the tool gives Claude the ability to create a task. It doesn’t tell Claude which list it goes in, which custom fields to fill, how I like my descriptions, which template to apply, or whether to comment as it works. Without a skill, Claude uses the connector however it sees fit, and your tasks land somewhere different every time.
The connector gives Claude the keys. The skill tells it how you want things done.
Hook: a rule that always fires
A hook is “when this happens, do that.” Every time. No exceptions.
Here’s the difference that matters. A rule in your CLAUDE.md file is something Claude usually follows. A hook runs no matter what. If something can never be missed, make it a hook.
These are the moments you can hook into:
- A session starts. Load today’s context, like who has a check-in today.
- You send a message. Add a reminder, or catch something you shouldn’t have pasted, like a password.
- Right before Claude uses a tool. This is where guardrails live.
- Right after Claude uses a tool. Clean up after it, like formatting a file it just wrote.
- Claude finishes answering. “Did we decide anything that isn’t written down?”
- Before a long chat gets summarized. Save your place.
- A session ends. Wrap up, like syncing your conversations.
Hook ideas for a coaching business
My favorite is the unread-message guard. Say you’re sending a Trainerize message to a client through Claude. What if Marcus already messaged you and you haven’t read it? Now you’re sending him something that looks like you ignored him. Awkward. A hook that checks for unread messages before Claude sends anything fixes that forever.
A few more:
- Look before you leap. Before Claude changes anything in an app, it searches your past conversations and your notes for that software, so it doesn’t undo work you already did or ignore a decision you already made.
- Ask before deleting. Anything, anywhere.
- Confirm before offboarding. Before a client gets removed anywhere, check with me: did their payment come in, did the contract run out, are they renewing?
- Key scan before GitHub. Block anything shaped like a password or API key from being backed up.
- Formatting before posting. Check your style rules before a comment, email or post goes out.
Layered together: the extractor tool exports my conversations, the skill runs it my way, and the look-before-you-leap hook makes Claude check that history before it touches my apps.
Plugin: a bundle you install
A plugin is a bundle. Skills, commands, hooks and even connectors packaged together, so one install gives Claude a whole new ability. You can browse them right inside the Claude desktop app.
Two I want you to know about:
Hookify. Made by Anthropic. You don’t have to write hooks yourself. You say the rule out loud in plain English and Hookify turns it into a hook. It comes with a skill for writing rules, a few commands, hooks of its own, and an agent that reads your conversations and suggests where you need hooks. Piggyback off their work.
Superpowers. This one isn’t from Anthropic. It’s a community library, and it’s fantastic. Brainstorming, writing plans, executing plans, dispatching parallel agents. It’s what I was using when I planned a whole coaching offer on camera with plan mode.
Do this today
Crawl before you walk. One of each:
- Make one command. Find the prompt you paste most often. Paste it into Claude and say, “Save this as a command called weekly-recap.”
- Install Hookify. Browse plugins in the app, search “hookify” and install it.
- Make one hook. Try
/hookify warn me before deleting any file. Plain English in, guardrail out. - Before you install any skill you found online, run it through the Skill Cleaner prompt in the Skills Kit. It gives you a safety verdict and a version reworked for your own tools. Not every skill on the internet deserves the keys to your business.
Get the skills and the cheat sheet
Everything in this post is in the free guide at thefmm.click/guide. The Coach Packet has the full skills, commands, hooks and plugins cheat sheet. The Skills Kit comes with three ready-made skills (FMM Learn Claude, Coach Credentials and Sync Conversations), a pack of six hooks including the unread-message guard and the key scan, and the Skill Cleaner prompt. Hand the folder to Claude and it installs them for you.
Watch the full video: Claude Code for Trainerize Coaches, the complete walkthrough
New here? Start with Trainerize AI: what it does and what it still can’t do, then come back to this one.
AI that amplifies you. Always authentic, never generic.
