You Can Now Let Claude Code Build Workflows For You Using Conductor Skills

If you're already using Agent Skills with Claude Code, you can now add Conductor Skills to build, deploy, and run entire workflows directly from your Claude terminal.

You can just "chat" with the Claude Code terminal and let it build your workflows directly in your Conductor clusters. Pretty cool!

What is Conductor and What are Conductor Skills?

Conductor is a workflow orchestration engine where you define a workflow as a series of tasks like API calls, custom code, conditionals, parallel branches, and human approvals. From there, Conductor runs them, tracks their state, handles retries, and gives you full visibility into what happened.

Conductor Skills is the plugin that lets Claude Code create and manage these workflows for you so this gives you another way to create workflows. I like using it when I am getting started with workflows the most because it provides me with a really solid start and then I can iterate from there.

A very quick note on prerequisites for a project like this

Before you start, you'll need:

• Claude Code installed and configured
• Java 21 or later installed — the local Conductor server I am using here is a JAR file and won't start without it. Run java -version to check. If you don’t want to use Conductor’s local server you can just point Claude Code to Orkes Conductor Developer Edition and you don’t need to have Java installed.
• Conductor Skills plugin installed (instructions below)

How to Install Conductor Skills in Claude Code

Open up your Claude Code terminal and type in the following:

/plugin marketplace add conductor-oss/conductor-skills
/plugin install conductor@conductor-skills

To verify you have it, you can type this in your Claude Code session:

 /plugin list

If you see conductor in the output, you're good to go. If you don’t see it under the Plugins tab (because there are a lot there by default), you will if you go to Installed.

Claude now knows how to talk to a Conductor server, register your workflows, start them, monitor their status, manage failures, and write workers (your own custom code/services). I also like using Claude Code because it just helps with planning and brainstorming too.

Part 1: Build Your First Workflow with Claude Code and Conductor Skills

Let's start with something simple. A workflow that takes a URL, fetches its contents, and returns them. The point here is to see how the pattern works and get a feel for the build-run-iterate cycle of this process and way of building workflows using Claude Code.

Step 1: Start Your Local Conductor Server

First you need a Conductor server running so that Claude Code can connect to it to register the workflows in. You have two options (the local one I am showing here, and also the Orkes hosted version which I will show later), but let’s start with a local build. In Claude Code, type:

/conductor:conductor

Claude will ask what you want to do. Tell it:

Start a local Conductor server for development

Claude runs conductor server start behind the scenes. Once it's healthy, you'll have:

• API: http://localhost:8080/api
• UI: http://localhost:8080

You can open the UI in your browser to see your workflows visually as you build them. Keep the server running and move on. You can also just ask Claude Code to explain what it builds and how the workflow is doing. So you can just say things like “Is my server up and running? How many workflows do I have in my Conductor server? What are those workflows? Which Conductor cluster is it pointing to?” It'll query the API and answer you.

Now just write something like build me a very simple workflow or "Build me a workflow that takes a URL, fetches its contents, and returns them" and see it working.

And then you can just check it out by going to localhost:8080 (if you want to see the OSS UI), but you don’t have to. Anything you want to know about the workflow you can also ask Claude.

If I do go to the UI to see the workflow visualized, here is what I see:

Just one task, but I can use Claude to run it and then I can build on top of this one and iterate.

From here Claude also suggests some improvements and in this case I agree with the suggestion. So now I can iterate on this and ask Claude to add a task to get all the blog titles from the page.

You can also connect it to an Orkes Hosted Cluster Instead

If you don't want to run a local server, point Claude Code at an Orkes cluster. The Orkes Developer Edition is a free hosted service where you can build workflows and experiment without installing anything locally.

Just tell Claude:

Connect to my Conductor server at https://developer.orkescloud.com/api and create the same workflow there instead

https://developer.orkescloud.com/api is the url for the Developer Edition cluster.

Claude will ask for your authentication details like your Key ID and Key Secret. You can generate these from the Applications page in your Orkes dashboard. Create an application (or use an existing one), generate a key pair, and paste the values when Claude asks for them.

If you'd rather not type credentials into Claude, set them as environment variables in a separate terminal session first:

export CONDUCTOR_SERVER_URL=https://developer.orkescloud.com/api
export CONDUCTOR_AUTH_KEY=<your_key_id>
export CONDUCTOR_AUTH_SECRET=<your_key_secret>

Once connected, Claude gives you a summary of everything on the cluster. So your output will look something like this:

This works with any Orkes cluster: Developer Edition, your team's staging environment, production, whatever. Just swap the URL and credentials. From here, you can create new workflows, run existing ones, or explore what's already there.

Now you can just tell Claude Code something like:

Check that you are connected to the Developer Edition of Orkes Conductor and build the same workflow there instead.

Step 2: Run your new Conductor workflow from Claude Code

Let's test with a simple HTML page first. Go ahead and tell Claude Code:

Run the new workflow with https://orkes.io/blog/

https://orkes.io/blog/ is just the link to the Orkes Conductor blog page.

From there your Claude Code session might differ than mine depending on what Claude "decides" to do, but it's likely to ask you questions like it did with me.

It asked me if I would like to create a new task to grab specific information from the page. I said "Yes, please create a task in the workflow to return all the blog post title from the url". And then Claude continues from there.

At the end of this short session I got a working workflow in my Conductor cluster and then I could just communicate with it through Claude using plain English to describe what I want.

Here is the final small workflow in the Developer Edition of Orkes Conductor after a successful run of the workflow:

In another article I am going to use Claude Code to create a Content Refresh workflow from a spec. In this one I wanted to show you how you can use Claude Code to build a simple workflow and have it run, but for anything close to a durable workflow I find that the best thing is to approach it the way you would any software project, starting with a good document outlining requirements and other things.

-- Author: Maria Shimkovska