analytics-skills

analytics-skills

An agentic skills framework for analytical work. Methodology that keeps numbers rooted in truth.

A Claude Code plugin marketplace built in the spirit of Superpowers — but where Superpowers enforces software-development discipline (TDD, root-cause debugging, evidence over claims), analytics-skills enforces the analytical-work equivalents: framing the question, predicting before querying, reconciling to source, auditing confounds, walking the multiverse of analytical paths, and ensuring every number has a receipt.

Why this exists

Analysis without methodology is storytelling. The story can be true or false; without methodology, you don't know which. LLMs make this worse: they emit plausible-sounding numbers fast, with clean narratives, and rarely log the choices they made along the way.

This framework exists to enforce the gates that humans skip and LLMs skip even more enthusiastically.

The methodology shape

framing → discovery → planning → predict-then-query → execution
                                                          ↓
                              reconciling-to-source ← (when authoritative source exists)
                                                          ↓
                                          confound-audit + multiverse-analysis
                                                          ↓
                                                sensitivity-analysis
                                                          ↓
                                          analytical-self-review
                                                          ↓
                                                evidence-over-claims
                                                          ↓
                                                       writeup

Each arrow is a gate. You don't skip ahead. You don't parade ad-hoc work as rigorous.

The twelve skills

Skill	Role
getting-started	Bootstrap orchestrator
framing-the-question	Refuses to query until the question is operationalized, decision-anchored, falsifiable, and stakes-flagged
data-discovery	Schema, grain, freshness, provenance, hygiene before any plan
analytical-planning	Population, window, metric, segments, validation queries, confound list — written before SQL
predict-then-query	Keystone. Written prediction with reasoning before the headline query runs
reconciling-to-source	New query must tie out to authoritative source when one exists
confound-audit	Walk the confound checklist; rule each in or out with evidence
multiverse-analysis	Log every analyst choice; run plausible alternatives; flag fragile results
sensitivity-analysis	Identify which parameters move the answer enough to change the decision
analytical-self-review	Simpson's, base-rate, leakage, falsification, drift check
evidence-over-claims	Every number traces to a re-runnable artifact
writing-analytical-skills	Meta-skill for authoring new skills and vertical packs

Installation

# In Claude Code:
/plugin marketplace add samwedll/analytics-skills
/plugin install analytics-skills@analytics-skills

Then start any analytical conversation. The getting-started skill bootstraps automatically and routes you through the methodology.

Updating after editing skills locally

The Skill tool reads from the install cache, not your source repo. If you edit skill files in this repo and start a new Claude Code session, the running session will keep loading the previously installed version until you refresh:

/plugin update analytics-skills
/reload-plugins

/plugin install is not enough on its own — if it reports "already installed", nothing has been refreshed. You need update then reload.

To verify which version is actually loaded, check ~/.claude/plugins/installed_plugins.json. The installPath field for analytics-skills is the directory the Skill tool is reading from; compare it against marketplace.json's version to confirm.

The install cache at ~/.claude/plugins/cache/analytics-skills/analytics-skills/ accumulates one subdirectory per version installed over time (0.1.0/, 0.2.0/, 0.3.0/, …). The bootstrap in getting-started picks the highest version automatically, so stale cache dirs are harmless — but you can delete old version subdirs by hand if you want a clean slate.

The methodology DB

A local SQLite database at .analytics/methodology.db (created on first use, see plugins/analytics-skills/scripts/db.py) turns the framework from a checklist into a learning system. It logs: