7 Mistakes Economists Make With Claude Skills: Not Building Their Own and Making Too Few
aniketapanjwani · x · 2026-10-23
After giving a talk at USC's Econ department on "Skills in Economics Research," the author turned it into a YouTube video outlining the 7 mistakes he consistently sees economists make with skills:
- Not making their own skills: they hunt for libraries built by others that only partially fit their use case, even though skills are typically very easy to create.
- Making too few: often countable on one hand, while he maintains hundreds across projects. He suggests a "rule of 3" — if you repeat something three times, make a skill.
- Making unnecessary skills: people without significant pre-AI coding experience build skills where a deterministic script would be more appropriate.
The video covers the remaining mistakes, advocating for skills as lightweight, quickly iterable workflow components rather than scarce off-the-shelf assets.
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