I've been doing webinars on Prompting, Claude Code and Skills, this one by far is the best. Take a look if you are starting out with AI x Marketing, Claude Code, Skills and Writing Emails.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8StY-XrG_E

The official MCP server for Humanic — an AI-native email marketing platform built for product-led growth teams.

Connect Humanic directly to your AI tools and agents to create campaigns, manage audiences, and trigger email workflows programmatically from any MCP-compatible environment.

What You Can Do

Once connected, AI agents in your environment can interact with Humanic programmatically. Example capabilities include:

• Campaigns — Create, activate, pause, and monitor email campaigns
• Audiences — Query and segment users based on product behavior and cohort data
• Email generation — Prompt-based email creation with AI-driven personalization
• Analytics — Retrieve campaign performance data (open rates, click rates, deliverability)
• Contacts — Create and manage contact records and lifecycle stages
• Domains — Inspect sending domain configuration and deliverability status

Here is the link for the humanic-mcp server

https://github.com/Humanic-ai/humanic-mcp-server

I just ran a live session with a small group of marketers using Claude, and I realized a bunch of their questions are probably what many others are wondering too.

Here are the exact questions people asked me:

1. “Do you need to upgrade to Claude Cowork to use Skills & instructions?”
2. “Where do you get the skills from? So I could get a skill that creates/uses that connector to create a new newsletter campaign or campaign for my Shopify store or similar.”
3. “What is ‘vibe coding’ and is it something done in Claude Code?”
4. “Will we get a recording of this session please?” (i.e., people already expect async learning here.)
5. “Do you connect GitHub with API or plugin?”

For context, my current understanding (please correct/add detail):

• Plan type: You need to be on a paid Claude plan (Pro/Max, not Free) to get full access to Skills and Cowork; free users don’t get Skills, and Cowork is tied to the paid tiers
• Where Skills “come from” -- Anthropic provides some built‑in skills, and you can also create your own by defining a folder with a SKILL.md plus scripts/resources, or use partner/organization skills depending on your setup.
• Using Skills for marketing/Shopify -- In theory you can build a custom skill that talks to your email tool or Shopify (via their APIs or a connector) and have Claude generate and launch campaigns, but you’d still need to wire up the actual API credentials/flows
• “Vibe coding” in Claude Code -- Vibe coding is when you describe what you want in natural language and let the AI generate most of the code, then you iterate with prompts instead of hand‑writing everything; Claude Code is one of the tools you can do this in
• GitHub: API vs plugin It looks like right now you generally connect via API (PAT, webhooks, etc.) or external tools, rather than a magical first‑party “GitHub plugin” button inside Claude itself

If you’re deep into Claude Cowork/Skills, I’d love concrete answers or corrections on:

• The cleanest explanation of “when exactly do I need Cowork vs just regular Claude + Skills?”
• Best practices for building skills that talk to external SaaS (e.g., GitHub, Shopify, email platforms).
• Any good public examples/templates of “campaign‑launcher” type skills.

I’m especially interested in answers that a non‑developer marketer could follow (click‑by‑click or file‑by‑file), since that’s who’s asking me these questions in the first place.

Same model, different context overhead

Both the VS Code extension and a direct API call hit the same Claude API with the same per-token pricing. The model, capability, and cost-per-token are identical.

Where they diverge is what gets loaded into context automatically:

Net effect

The VS Code extension uses more tokens upfront because it automatically pulls in project context, memory files, git state, and tool schemas — things you'd have to explicitly include if calling the API yourself.

On the flip side, that automatic context often means fewer back-and-forth turns to get the right answer, so total session token usage can be comparable.

Prompt caching

Claude Code does leverage prompt caching on the system prompt and stable context — so repeated turns in the same session get cache read rates (much cheaper than full input tokens). If you're calling the API directly, you need to implement prompt caching yourself using the cache_control parameter.

Bottom line

• Same price per token — no surcharge for the IDE extension
• More tokens auto-loaded in VS Code vs. a bare API call
• Caching is handled for you in Claude Code; manual in the API
• Direct API gives you full token control — useful if you're optimizing aggressively