‘Technology pulls itself up by the bootstraps by giving scientific researchers vastly more powerful tools to work with’

For millennia, humans have sought tools to make ourselves more productive. That is no different today, as Joel Mokyr, the 2025 Nobel Prize winner, suggested in a 2018 paper. Artificial intelligence – Claude Code, Codex, and there’ll probably be many other alternatives soon – has accelerated this to a new level. In the process of using Claude Code, I’ve developed several tools that might be useful for others. Most live on my GitHub page; the LEAP house-style skill sits in a separate repository.

Claude skills

Diebolt

Diebolt is a simulated peer review system for economics working papers. It creates a panel of independent referee agents – each with a distinct subspecialisation, personality, and fictitious university affiliation – who review your paper in isolation, with strict information barriers that mirror real peer review. An editor then synthesises their feedback into a prioritised briefing, weighting senior referees more heavily. You choose which revisions to implement, and Diebolt updates your LaTeX files accordingly. Grounded in the refereeing principles of Berk, Harvey, and Hirshleifer (2017). Named after Claude Diebolt, the CNRS research professor and founding editor of Cliometrica.

Janluiten

Janluiten is a lifelong sounding board for research ideas, modelled on Jan Luiten van Zanden – Professor of Global Economic History at Utrecht and a scholar famous for an intuition that kept him a few years ahead of his field, from environmental economics to gender to inequality. The skill helps you decide whether the idea on your desk is the right one to spend your next year on: it listens first, then asks. The deliverables are mentorship on three questions – what to work on, with whom, and why – with one axiom underneath it all: interest is the best predictor of success.

LEAPstyle

LEAPstyle applies the LEAP Economics house style to any academic output – LaTeX working papers, beamer slide decks, R graphs, or writing and editing. It handles preambles, the LEAP colour palette, the ggplot2 graph theme, and a comprehensive set of writing guidelines that match how LEAP publishes. Built for LEAP (Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past) faculty and students who want their essays, papers, and presentations to carry a consistent visual and written identity. Lives in a separate repository from the other skills.

TannieDi

A LaTeX-to-Word round-trip tool for language editing. Many economics papers are written in LaTeX, but professional copy-editors typically work in Word. TannieDi automates the conversion: pack converts your LaTeX project into a clean Word manuscript (with figures and tables in a separate file), and unpack applies the editor’s tracked changes back into your original .tex files – preserving all LaTeX formatting, equations, and cross-references. Named after Di Kilpert, a language editor who has copy-edited many LEAP papers.

Tyler

Tyler converts a folder of academic PDFs into a token-efficient markdown wiki for literature review. Point it at a directory of papers and it produces one lightweight .md file per paper, plus an index, so Claude Code can load an entire literature into context without burning tokens on raw PDF parsing. Useful when you’re starting a new project and want to absorb fifty papers before writing a word yourself. Named in honour of Tyler Cowen, the economist behind Marginal Revolution and a famously voracious reader whose blog pioneered rapid, generous synthesis across fields.

Download

The general-purpose skills (Diebolt, Janluiten, TannieDi, Tyler) are available at github.com/johanfourieza/econtools. The LEAP house-style skill lives separately at github.com/johanfourieza/leap. To install a skill in Claude Code, download the relevant skill.md (or SKILL.md) file and place it in your .claude/skills/{skillname}/ directory (e.g., .claude/skills/diebolt/skill.md). Each skill’s folder contains any additional files it needs to run.