Your use is maybe more vanilla than you think. I think you are just getting shit done. Which is good.

Claude and an mcp and skill is plain to me. Writing your own agent connecting to LLMs to try to be better than Claude code, using Ralph loops and so on is the rabbit hole.

That's what you should be doing. Start from plain Claude, then add on to it for your specific use cases where needed. Skills are fantastic if used this way. The problem is people adding hundreds or thousands of skills that they download and will never use, but just bloat the entire system and drown out a useful system.

What exactly does it do that a professional would charge you thousands for?

(I'm genuinely asking)