You build an orchestrator the same way you build any skill — with a SKILL.md file written in plain English. The orchestrator skill lists your specialist skills, says when to invoke each one, defines what information passes between them, and specifies the output format. No coding. No APIs. Just structured instructions Claude reads and follows.
Start with Your Existing Skills
You can’t orchestrate skills you haven’t built yet. The right sequence is: build individual skills first, get them working reliably, then build the orchestrator that coordinates them. If you try to design the orchestrator before you understand how the individual skills perform, you’ll build coordination logic around assumptions that don’t hold up in practice.
Once you have three or more skills running reliably for a common workflow — say, session recap, community post, and email draft — you have the raw material for an orchestrator. Those three skills, run in that order, with those outputs, can be wrapped into a single orchestrator skill.
Writing the Orchestrator Skill
An orchestrator SKILL.md has the same structure as any skill, with one key addition: a routing and sequencing section. This section lists the specialist skills by name, specifies when each is invoked, and defines what information passes from one to the next. In plain language, it might read: “Step 1: Invoke the session-recap skill using the provided transcript. Step 2: Pass the session recap to the community-post skill. Step 3: Pass the session recap and the community post to the email-draft skill. Step 4: Present all three outputs for review.”
That’s it. Claude reads those instructions, invokes each skill in sequence, handles the handoffs, and presents the combined result. The technical complexity is invisible — you’re writing instructions, not code.
What This Means for Educators
The non-technical barrier to orchestration is real but smaller than it looks. If you can write a clear process document — “first do this, then take that output and do this, then combine and present” — you can write an orchestrator skill. The skill-creator tool in Claude or Cowork can help you format it correctly if you provide the process description in plain language.
The Simple Rule
Write the orchestrator as a process document first, in plain English. “Step 1: X. Step 2: take the output and do Y. Step 3: combine and present.” Then convert that document into a SKILL.md using the skill-creator tool. Three steps, no coding, working orchestrator.