Recursive self-improvement (of Claude Skills)

13 October 2026

Claude Skills are markdown files that instruct Claude how to perform a task. They are often bundled with tools, such as command-line scripts, that Claude uses to carry out the task. Claude can debug and improve these scripts and instructions when it uses them, so that each time the Skill is used, it gets a little bit better.

I have a Claude Skill that builds me a podcast feed of videos and articles that I’d prefer to listen to, rather than watch or read. I can send a link to Claude and a new episode will appear in my podcast app with the contents of the link read aloud. One of the tools bundled in this Skill is a Python script that parses an article’s web page and extracts the readable content. Every time Claude runs this parser, it reviews the output and often it will spot problems like missing images, repeated sentences and misattributed authors. These types of errors are expected. Each web page has edge cases and a parser won’t catch them all. When Claude spots these mistakes, it will update the parser script to correct the output. Then it will open a pull request with the fixes. Voilà: recursive self improvement!

Aggregating personal software

On a related note, I just spotted a post, We need RSS for sharing abundant vibe-coded apps, that Matt Webb published back in April, and which kindly linked to my collection of tools. In his post, Matt was asking for ways to keep up with all the personal software that people are publishing and suggested using RSS to aggregate it all. In response, Simon Willison added an RSS feed for his collection of tools. And now I have also added an RSS feed to mine, which updates when I add new tools or make changes to existing ones.

So now I’ll at least be able to keep up with the daily improvements that Claude makes to that podcast Skill.