I Built a Skill That Sets Up a Personal Workbench with One Click — Now Open Source

Hi everyone, I'm Xiaofeichang, a former programmer now running a one-person company. Personal workbenches have been getting a lot of attention lately. I tried building one and found it genuinely useful, so I spent a day creating a skill that can build a personal workbench for you. Now you just tell it what you want, and it will build a beautiful workflow interface tailored to your personal needs. I'll split this personal workbench series into two parts: the first covers a local personal workbench, and the second covers deploying workflows in the cloud and using them as a mobile app. The skill is open source — feel free to reference it for your own build.

1. I Built a Skill That Can Set Up a Workbench

This skill is very simple to use. Just tell it who you are, what tasks you want to manage with the workbench, what style you prefer, and so on. It will interact with you step by step to confirm details, and eventually complete the setup of your personal workbench. It also supports integrating your existing skills into the workbench.

I've built in several styles; I personally use the XFC style.

Building the workbench just requires following the skill's guidance.

2. My Understanding of a One-Person Workbench

My original intention for the personal workbench was to make it an Agent control center — essentially, to integrate and schedule my skills while also managing my routine tasks. I've integrated a Douyin operations skill, a Xiaohongshu full-stack notes skill, a public account topic knowledge base, and a skill map skill.

Previous articles on corresponding Skills:

I Fully Automated the Two Most Time-Consuming Tasks of Running a Public Account with One Skill

Every Xiaohongshu Post Gets Five-Digit Reads! I Self-Developed a Full-Stack Viral Notes Skills Suite

The First Video I Made with It Got 3x Organic Traffic Compared to Paid Promotion — I Built a Douyin Full-Stack Operations Skill

Got a Pile of Skills but Can't Use Them? I Wrote an Organizer Tool with Codex

2.1. Douyin Intelligence && Xiaohongshu Intelligence

The Douyin Intelligence module integrates the Douyin operations skill I developed a while ago. My integration approach was to connect the skill's interface so that when a user clicks [Analyze Viral Content], the workbench calls the Douyin skill's viral content breakdown function. When the user clicks [Author Analysis], the workbench performs a comprehensive breakdown of the target account. Both buttons generate a complete report, as shown below:

Clicking [Open Report] brings up the relevant interface. The image below shows materials I collected in the MBTI niche:

Xiaohongshu Intelligence works the same way as Douyin Intelligence, integrating the Xiaohongshu viral notes skill I built earlier.

2.2. Public Account Topics

For public account topics, I directly render data from my Obsidian knowledge base, including my own information and the topic library I've been curating over the past few days. Rendering the knowledge base in a visual interface also makes decision-making and browsing more convenient — similar to the old dashboard screens.

2.3 Skill Summary

This workbench provides a unified summary and management of all my local Skills, making everything clear at a glance. Nowadays, you can generate a skill with just one sentence. Honestly, as skills gradually pile up, apart from the few I use regularly, I completely forget how to use the others... The [Skill Map] module also organizes my previous skill-collection tool, allowing one-click sorting of basic information about local Skills for summary and categorization.

2.4. Daily Tasks

In addition to self-media related features, I also added some daily task modules, including water-drinking check-ins, cat feeding, step counting, and daily reviews. My workbench is more of an information aggregation and skill scheduling platform. For now, I've only built the local desktop version. I originally wanted to do both desktop and mobile versions together, but the mobile version wasn't as easy as I thought — data storage and security need to be considered. I'll talk about that in the next installment.

This skill is now open source — feel free to reference and learn from it if you need it:

3. A Few Thoughts on Building a Personal Workbench

Building the personal workbench made me realize how much lower the barrier to programming has become. In the past, developing a system like this would have taken at least three months — UI design, feature planning, interface coding, and debugging. Now it only takes a few sentences. To some extent, this forces us technical people to move toward market insight. Yesterday, I was chatting with a programmer friend, and he said he'd recently built over a dozen apps, none of which landed, and he was anxious about monetization. He's actually making the mistake many technical people make — getting stuck in a rabbit hole. The biggest taboo in closing a business loop is getting stuck in a rabbit hole. I've said this many times: many projects should first close the monetization loop, then strengthen the technical support, rather than starting with all kinds of architecture and tech stacks.

For technical people to monetize, they must move toward the market and listen more to what the market is saying. Where is the demand? Where are the pain points? What products can I make to solve which pain points? Once you figure out these three points, you're very close to closing the loop. That's all for today. In the next installment, I'll talk about how to deploy the personal workbench in the cloud and use it on your phone.