Building Repeatables in Claude: Skills, CLI vs MCP and Token Discipline | Go With The Flow

Building Repeatables in Claude: Skills, CLI vs MCP and Token Discipline | Go With The Flow

Claude Skills, CLI vs MCP and Token Discipline with Ritu Java | Seller Sessions

SEO Description

Ritu Java and Danny McMillan on building agentic skills, choosing CLI over MCP, plan mode discipline and the short window to ship before token costs reset.

Episode Summary

Week 4 of the month, Go With The Flow, and Ritu Java is back from her travels. The world has shipped fast since the last episode: Codex 5.5, Claude 4.7, an Amazon Ads MCP and a fresh round of panic over the rumoured removal of Claude Code from the $20 plan (it was a 2% AB test, not a rollout). Ritu and Danny use the noise to make a sharper point: this is the moment to stop chasing models and start building repeatable systems on the platform you have already chosen.

Ritu walks through the three eras of PPC Ninja's automation stack. Apps Script bulk file generators three years ago, Netlify hosted UI apps last year, and now agentic skills that her team chats with in plain English to produce upload ready Amazon bulk files. The same shift applies to data: BigQuery accessed through the Google Cloud CLI rather than through MCP, because CLI is leaner on tokens and works better when the job is heavy on data rather than tool surface. Danny mirrors the move with his event-ops CLI for WordPress, WooCommerce, Stripe and FooEvents reconciliation, and his four tier ExtractFlow cascade (HTTP, headless, stealth, agentic) that bypasses the limits of any single browser tool.

The second half is a discipline talk. Plan mode every time. Push back on the first plan because Claude over engineers by default. 30% of your time on workflow scaffolding so the other 70% can be real building. The 21 day Claude rule: when a shiny new tool fires the dopamine, wait 21 days before refactoring around it. Left brain tasks (counting, SQL, deterministic logic) belong in scripts. Right brain tasks (judgment, creativity, hypotheses) belong in the model. Mix them inside a single skill. Skills are micro pieces of your workflow, not magic, and Claude can write them for you from an existing SOP.

Key Topics

• The three eras of PPC Ninja automation: Apps Script, Netlify UI apps, agentic skills
• CLI vs MCP: when to choose each and why CLI is more token efficient for data heavy work
• Token economics, the rumoured $20 plan change and why it was a 2% AB test
• The short window before subsidised tokens get repriced
• Plan mode discipline and the "push back on plan one" rule
• Danny's 30 / 70 framework: workflow scaffolding vs building
• The 21 day Claude rule for resisting tool churn
• Left brain vs right brain task design inside a single skill
• The PPC Ninja "5 Whys" skill: deterministic SQL plus non deterministic hypotheses
• Claude.md, Gemini.md, Skills.yaml and the emerging Agents.md standard
• Skills for beginners: let Claude write them from your SOP
• Skill cascading: research, article, LinkedIn post, tweets, slide deck in one chain

Timestamps

• [00:01] Welcome back, Week 4 Go With The Flow, Ritu returns from travels