Zero to Claude Certified Architect — Complete Exam Prep Series - Zero to Claude Certified Architect — Complete Beginner's Guide | Part 15: Commands & Skills

Welcome to Part 15 of the Zero to Claude Certified Architect series! We continue Domain 3 with Task 3.2 — creating custom slash commands and skills to standardize team workflows. In this video, you'll learn how slash commands and skills differ, how to create team-shared commands, how to configure skills with YAML frontmatter (context:fork, allowed-tools, argument-hint), when to use skills vs CLAUDE.md, and five anti-patterns to avoid. Timestamps: 00:00 Quick Recap — Part 14 (CLAUDE.md Hierarchy) 01:45 Slash Commands vs Skills Overview 03:30 Creating Custom Slash Commands 05:20 Project vs User Scope for Commands 07:10 Skills with YAML Frontmatter 09:00 context:fork — Why Isolation Matters 10:50 allowed-tools — Least Privilege 12:30 Skills vs CLAUDE.md — The Decision Rule 14:10 Five Anti-Patterns to Avoid 15:30 Six Exam Takeaways 16:50 Part 16 Preview — Path-Specific Rules What you'll learn: - Slash commands in .claude/commands/ are shared team shortcuts committed to git - ~/.claude/commands/ is for personal commands not shared with teammates - Skills use SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter: context:fork, allowed-tools, argument-hint - context:fork runs the skill in an isolated sub-agent — keeps the main conversation clean - allowed-tools enforces least privilege — read-only skills should not have Write or Bash - Decision rule: CLAUDE.md for universal standards (always loaded), skills for task-specific workflows (on-demand) - Personal skill variants must use different names to avoid overriding team skills - Five anti-patterns that appear as wrong answer choices on the exam This is Part 15 of the Zero to Claude Certified Architect series. In Part 14, we covered Task 3.1 — the CLAUDE.md configuration hierarchy. Now we extend that foundation with custom commands and skills that let teams standardize repeatable workflows. Coming up in Part 16: Task 3.3 — path-specific rules for conditional convention loading using YAML frontmatter globs fields in .claude/rules/ files. Keywords: Claude API, Anthropic, Claude Certified Architect, slash commands, Claude skills, YAML frontmatter, context fork, allowed-tools, least privilege, team workflows, Claude Code extensions, agentic AI, certification exam, AI engineering #ClaudeCertifiedArchitect #AnthropicClaude #SlashCommands #ClaudeSkills #ClaudeCode #AIAgents #AgenticAI #CertificationExam #AIEngineering #ClaudeAPI