AI skills for notes and writing

Free skills that teach your assistant to take notes and write the way an expert would, where to get them, and how to make good use of them with Scratchpad.

An AI skill is a short instruction file that your assistant loads when it's relevant. We've written 90 of them for notes and writing, and they're free and open source on GitHub. The skills page lists them all.

Each one teaches a single job the way someone who really knows it would do it: Cornell notes with real questions in the cue column, meeting notes that never turn a maybe into a decision, a recipe card that keeps every doneness cue. And none of them invents a fact. Anything your source didn't say is marked [?] for you to fill in.

The skills work with any notes app, or none. With Scratchpad connected to your assistant, they save what they make straight into your notes.

Getting them

With the skills command

This works for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, and other assistants that read skills. It asks which assistants you use and which skills you want.

npx skills add scratchpad-sh/skills

To install only some, name each one with --skill:

npx skills add scratchpad-sh/skills --skill cornell-notes --skill study-guide

In Claude Code, as plugins

The skills come in four collections, and each one is a plugin you can install on its own.

/plugin marketplace add scratchpad-sh/skills
/plugin install note-taking-methods@scratchpad-skills
/plugin install notes-by-interest@scratchpad-skills
/plugin install everyday-notes@scratchpad-skills
/plugin install writing@scratchpad-skills

In the Claude apps

Every skill is a zip file on the latest release. Download the ones you want, then add them in Claude's Settings, under Skills. They're then there on the web, the desktop, and your phone.

Anywhere else

Each skill is one SKILL.md file. If your assistant doesn't support skills, paste one into the chat and ask it to follow it.

Using them well

You don't call a skill by name. Ask the way you normally would, and your assistant picks the skill that fits. A few habits make the results better.

Give it the source. A skill works from what you hand it: the transcript, the photo of the whiteboard, the article, your scribbles. The more of the real material it has, the less it has to mark [?].

Say where it goes. With Scratchpad connected, name the note or folder: "Save it in Recipes", "Add it to today's note", "Append it to the Product sync note". Otherwise the skill offers to make a new note with a clear title.

Name the skill when it matters. If you want a particular method, say so: "Use the cornell-notes skill", or "Make a Zettelkasten note from this".

Chain them. Skills hand off to each other. Clean up a voice memo with voice-memo-cleanup, then pull the tasks out with action-items. Turn a pile of notes into a draft with notes-to-draft, then tighten it with tighten-prose.

Fill in the gaps. A [?] is a question, not a mistake. Answer it in the chat and ask for the note again, or fill it in yourself later.

Some things to try

Ask	The skill it uses
Turn this transcript into meeting notes and save them in Meetings	`meeting-notes`
Make a recipe card from this blog post	`recipe-card`
Do my weekly review from this week's notes	`weekly-review`
Make flash cards from my Biology notes	`spaced-repetition-cards`
What links my notes on the Romantics?	`connect-notes`
What did we decide about the venue?	`answer-from-notes`
Make this draft sound less like AI wrote it	`remove-ai-tells`

With Scratchpad connected

Every skill ends by offering to save its result in a connected notes app. With Scratchpad, that means:

A new note is made with a title you'll find again, in the folder you name.
Adding to a note you already have goes on the end of it, so nothing that's there can be lost.
A rewrite of a note comes as a change for you to accept or reject, and the version before it stays in the note's history.

Skills that reorganise your notes, like inbox-triage, tidy-up-notes, and note-titles-and-tags, show you the plan and wait for your yes before moving or renaming anything. None of them deletes a note, and in Scratchpad no assistant can.

What a skill can do is still limited by the permission you gave your assistant when you connected it. With Capture it can save new notes but can't read yours, so a weekly review or connect-notes needs Read or Full. What each permission allows.

When a skill isn't used

Check it's installed where your assistant looks. The skills command tells you where it put each one. In Claude Code, /plugin lists installed plugins.
Name it. "Use the recipe-card skill" settles it.
Start a new chat after installing. Most assistants read the list of skills when a conversation starts.

Making your own

Every skill is plain Markdown, so you can change one to suit you: add the field your hobby needs, or change a template. Keep your copy in your assistant's skills folder. To write a new one, the style guide explains how ours are built, and pull requests are welcome.

Last updated 27 October 2026