Skills for economic historians

...and anyone else using Claude Code

A fortnight ago, in The oldest tool in the book, I wrote about the knappers of Jojosi: the people who, for more than 100,000 years, walked back to the same hornfels outcrop above a KwaZulu-Natal river to chip blades from the same dark, fine-grained rock. I explained that they are a reminder that what makes us human is not our strength or speed, but a skill that can be taught, traded, and passed on. Skills produce the surplus that economists since Adam Smith have called the wealth of nations. Multiply that across millions of people, and you have the long walk out of subsistence.

The walk was, for most of human history, painfully slow. As Joel Mokyr – the 2025 Nobel laureate in economics – has been reminding us for forty years, growth before 1750 was ‘slow, intermittent, and reversible’. Then came the Industrial Revolution, the marriage of artisanal know-how and codified science. ‘Technology pulls itself up by the bootstraps,’ Mokyr writes, ‘by giving scientific researchers vastly more powerful tools to work with.’ We are, today, at another bootstrap moment. Artificial intelligence has not erased the value of skills: it has raised the premium on knowing what to do with the machine in front of you. The marginal product of a clever question, asked of a clever model, is enormous. The marginal product of someone who can only consume what the model spits out is, well, marginal. Skills, again, separate the best from the rest.

Machines augment rather than displace the skills of an economic historian. What are these skills? Anne McCants put it well in a 2020 essay in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. The economic historian, she wrote, lives in the ‘structural hole’ between two disciplines. From economics we borrow theory, the discipline of asking what would have happened otherwise, and the courage to put a number on a question. From history we borrow context, narrative, archival patience, and a humility about generalisation. The result, McCants argues, is a kind of social science that ‘disrupts inevitabilities’, ‘widens our horizons of empathy’, and shields us from a misguided nostalgia about the past.

Put differently: we are the people in the social sciences who are obliged to look at both the spreadsheet and the parish register, and to be suspicious of anyone who looks only at one.

That is a hard discipline to practise. Real archives are messy. Real datasets have holes. Real arguments must respect chronology and causation. And the bar for publishing in our field keeps rising: cleaner data, richer context, sharper identification, more robustness checks. All of that is expensive in time, the only resource a working academic truly cannot replenish.

Tools that ease the load

Which brings us to the point of this post. Over the past three months I have been building a set of tools – ‘skills’, in the language of Claude Code – that aim to give the economic historian back some of that time, without sacrificing rigour. Each was born of a small frustration in my own workflow. Each is named after someone whose own work cleared the path. You can find them all listed on my website and available for download on Github. Let me describe what each does, and why it matters.

/tyler is named after Tyler Cowen, the George Mason economist behind Marginal Revolution and the most voracious public reader of academic work I know of. Cowen’s habit is to read fast, write briefly, and synthesise widely. The skill borrows the spirit. /tyler turns a folder of academic PDFs into a token-efficient markdown wiki: a single 25-page paper costs an AI roughly 12,000 tokens, and a 100-paper literature review will not fit in a typical session. Tyler shrinks the lot to a 40,000-token index – titles, authors, abstracts, keywords, JEL codes – with the full text on demand. For almost every paper, or every set of papers, that lands on my desk now, I first ask Claude to /tyler them. I can then ask one question of a hundred papers at once: which of these find a positive coefficient on schooling? Which use a difference-in-differences? Which cite Mokyr? It is, in short, a research assistant who has read everything by lunchtime.

/janluiten is named for Jan Luiten van Zanden, Professor of Global Economic History at Utrecht and my own PhD advisor. Jan Luiten taught me to ask, before any new project: what is the big story, why is it relevant to the field, and why should anyone want to know? The skill is built on those three questions. It is the supervisor everyone needs, and the mentor that even senior researchers can benefit from. Have a new paper idea? First ask /janluiten. It will tell you, gently but firmly, when the idea is not yet worth a year of your life – and, just as usefully, when it is.

/diebolt is named for Claude Diebolt, the CNRS research professor and founding editor of Cliometrica, who has done more than almost anyone to keep cliometric standards alive in continental Europe. (Claude was also the first journal editor to give Dieter von Fintel and me a chance, with our 2010 Cliometrica paper on inequality at the Cape – the kind of editorial generosity that opens careers.) The skill mimics what Claude does as an editor every week: a managing-editor agent reads the paper, identifies the methods actually used – difference-in-differences, an instrumental variable, a structural model, a long-run wage series, an archival reconstruction – and assigns a panel of referee ‘gurus’ chosen to match those methods. Each guru reads the paper in isolation, the way the Economic History Review or the Journal of Economic History would send it out, and writes a full report. The editor synthesises. If you have Codex installed, a second model family (GPT-5.4) runs an independent audit of the methodology reports and even cross-verifies the R scripts against the statistics in the paper – two-model verification where it matters most. You decide which revisions to act on. The point is to find the weak spots in your argument before a real reviewer does, when there is still time to do something about them.

/kris is named for Kris Inwood, the Guelph economic historian whose long collaboration with South African scholarship – and whose extraordinary 2020 donation of his personal library to LEAP – made many of the citations this skill is designed to verify reachable in the first place. /kris hunts hallucinated references. Two model families work in parallel: one cascades through CrossRef, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, and arXiv; the other resolves DOIs, monitors retractions, validates ORCIDs, and cross-checks the Internet Archive. Disagreements trigger an adversarial round. If a citation in your bibliography does not exist – or has been retracted, or has the wrong year, or attributes a paper to the wrong scholar – /kris will catch it before your reviewer does.

/EHRstyle encodes the Economic History Review’s submission rules into a LaTeX template. The good news is that EHR now accepts LaTeX manuscripts; the less good news is that the journal’s house style is exacting – UK spelling, anonymity protocols, the journal’s peculiar footnote citation form, the pre-1992 ‘second series’ convention. /EHRstyle handles the lot. (You will still want to look carefully at the shortened titles in the footnotes – the skill is good but not infallible there.)

/tanniedi is named for Di Kilpert, the language editor who has copy-edited many of LEAP’s papers over the years and, in the process, taught a generation of LEAP students what an em-dash is for and what a comma is not. The skill packs a LaTeX project into a clean Word document for editing – the format Di prefers – and then unpacks the tracked changes back into the original `.tex`. No more retyping equations. No more lost cross-references. Just text out, edits in.

Skills for a research lab

Claude Code skills are also wonderful for standardising team work. I direct LEAP, the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past, and over the past month I have built a small family of LEAP skills that let us apply our brand consistently across everything we publish – papers, slides, letters, replication packages, public-facing data. If you run a team, academic or corporate, and you have not yet codified your house style as a set of skills, this should be high on your priority list. The cost of doing it once is low. The cost of not doing it – every postdoc reinventing your colour palette, every RA exporting a slightly different version of the logo, every reference letter laid out by hand – is hours that nobody gets back.

A few examples. /LEAPstyle is the master file: colour palette, ggplot2 theme, beamer template, LaTeX preamble, writing voice. Anyone in the lab can ask Claude to apply it and get output that looks unmistakably LEAP. /LEAPstructure scaffolds a new research project from scratch – the canonical `submission/`, `release/`, and `archive/` layout, with a manuscript skeleton, a `pipeline.R` stub, a CC BY 4.0 licence, and a project-level CLAUDE.md, all wired together so that a co-author or a future replicator can find their way around without asking. /LEAPdata turns the messy reality of a research folder – a tangle of xlsx files, training labels, PII, intermediate joins – into a clean, public, CSV-only GitHub data release with a README, a CODEBOOK, machine-readable variable definitions, and an R loader. /LEAPletter generates reference letters and formal correspondence on the official LEAP–Stellenbosch University letterhead, with the four-colour accent strip and the right signature block in the right place; what used to be a fortnightly act of fiddling with margins is now a single prompt.

I also use this approach for my blog. /OLWsocial is the one worth describing here, because it is the kind of skill any team with a public-facing channel could build for themselves. Given a finished blog post, /OLWsocial reads the text, identifies the core argument and the most provocative claims, and assembles a complete social media package: platform-specific posts for LinkedIn, X, Substack Notes, and Instagram, each with a different hook and the right length and tone for the platform; quote cards rendered as images, with the right font and colour palette; and any graphs from the post adapted for social – resized, retitled, with the chart junk stripped out so that a small phone screen can still read them. The output is a single folder that the social media manager can work from directly. What used to be half a day of cropping, retyping, and second-guessing is now a five-minute review.

Kabbo and the long walk

Most of these skills are aimed at economic historians. One is not – or not exclusively. Kabbo – available at kabbo.app – is a publication-pipeline manager for scholars. List, search, create, update, analyse. Spot stalled drafts. Set reminders. Export BibTeX. See, at a glance, what your team is up to this quarter.

For years I kept track of my own work in a Microsoft Publisher document: little coloured boxes for ideas, drafts, papers under submission, revise-and-resubmits, accepted, published. Every time something moved – a referee report arrived, an editor said yes, a paper went out the door – I had to drag the tiny box one column to the right. By hand. Over Christmas, watching how quickly the new AI tools could do this kind of thing, I realised the manual dragging was finished. I opened a Lovable account and began to play. Kabbo.app is one consequence of those fun hours. I have since moved the codebase from Lovable to Claude Code, and I expect to make a lot of additions over the coming months. I know of at least one academic department who have started to use it, which is fantastic. Closer integration with Claude Code and Codex is on the way, as are tools for team leaders. I am very eager for more feedback on how to make it better. (It is free, by the way.) Sign up on this blog and stay updated.

I named it Kabbo for a reason. //Kabbo – the name means ‘dream’ in |Xam – was a Bushman storyteller from the northern Cape who, in the 1870s, was force-marched in chains to Cape Town’s Breakwater Prison for stock theft. There the German linguist Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd took him into their Mowbray home and, over many months, recorded his stories. The notebooks they filled together preserved a |Xam world that would otherwise have vanished entirely. Kabbo spoke often of the journey he longed to make: the long walk back to his land, to his family, to the work of telling stories. He died before he could complete it. But the pipeline of his stories survived – and it survives still.

Like Kabbo, every scholar walks a long road carrying a bag of half-told stories, hoping to get them home before the light goes. The right tools, used well, help more of them home.