Last month, I had to process 16 YouTube Shorts.

Trim intros. Normalize audio. Add watermarks. Export multiple formats. Generate thumbnails.

Doing that manually in Premiere would have taken me most of an afternoon.

So I built a CLI skill instead.

It took about 2 hours to put together. On my machine, the batch itself finished in under 3 minutes once everything was set up.

This is the kind of repeatable workflow I think of as a Terminal Skill: small, documented, reusable automation that turns a messy manual task into one command.

Here’s the exact structure I used.

What I mean by a CLI skill

For me, a CLI skill is a reusable shell workflow with:

input validation

sensible defaults

predictable output

error handling

lightweight docs

Instead of retyping a long FFmpeg command every time, I run one script and get the same result every time.

# Instead of this: ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 00:00:02 -to 00:00:35 -vf "scale=1080:1920" -af "loudnorm=I=-14" -c :v libx264 -preset fast output.mp4

# I run this:…