Hey there,

For all their incredible power, there’s a fundamental flaw with today’s AI models: they’re too generic. They’ve been made to help everyone, which means they’ve been optimized for no one. They don’t know your specific workflow, your company's unique style, or your personal preferences. That’s why Anthropic’s Claude Skills are so important. It's a simple method that allows you to teach Claude to work the way you do.

What Exactly are Claude Skills?

Claude Skills are detailed instruction manuals that allow Claude to complete complex tasks in a totally custom way. The best way to think about this is to imagine you are creating a detailed recipe or blueprint that Claude can reference to complete specific tasks. 

The Core Components:

• Description: The description of a Skill is vital. When interacting with Claude, your Skill descriptions are always within reach and can be called upon if they seem applicable to the conversation. In other words, if I was using Claude to find the latest AI news and tools, it would read the description of my “brainstorming” Skill and ask if I wanted to use it. 

• The Instructions: The instructions are the core of any Skill. Here you can detail what you want Claude to do, how it should go about doing it, as well as what the output should be. You can manually write these instructions or you can allow Claude to generate them through conversation. Claude does a great job asking clarifying questions as well as asking you to review a portion of the instructions before moving on to the next step. 

• Examples: To get the best results, you should upload examples for your Skills to learn from. In this example, the Skill includes an example file that showcases a series of outputs that I’m looking for. As mentioned above, this Skill is meant to find and share AI news for that week. The example-output .md file includes a series of topic ideas that were generated by Claude or pulled from past newsletters.  

Why This Matters

Creating and using Skills effectively is much more powerful than a one-off prompt. It delivers four key benefits:

• Reusability: Once a Skill has been created, it can be referenced in any future Chat, Cowork, or Claude Code session. So instead of creating a one-off prompt, you can teach Claude a concrete method to complete tasks you do everyday. 

• Expert-Level Understanding: When creating a Skill, you can ensure that Claude has enough relevant knowledge to perform with higher reliability and precision. You are effectively turning a model with lots of general knowledge into a subject matter expert. 

• Total Customization: You get to dictate how the task is completed when creating a new Skill. This means that you can make a skill that follows your specific workflow. So if you have a personal preference for tools, style, or output, your Skill can use those same preferences.

• Easier Collaboration: After you’ve created a Skill that works well, you can easily share it with others. Because the instructions are in plain English, it’s easy for anyone (non technical included) to understand, implement, and improve a Skill.

Enabling and Managing Skills

By default users don’t have Skills enabled. To enable skills, head to Settings → Capabilities → Skills. From here you can enable, add, remove, and manage all your Skills. Anthropic has a series of default Skills that you can experiment with as well as a “Create Skills” skill. As the name suggests, “Create Skills” offers a step-by-step guide to generate your first unique Skill. 

My Thoughts:

Frameworks like Claude’s Skills are the future of AI. Having the ability to teach your AI how you think, plan, and complete a task allows you to hand off parts of your everyday duties. While I don’t think that Skills necessarily replace entire people or positions, I do think that it helps take away some of the most repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Imagine if you could create quick mock-ups of new web pages to share with developers to better show what you're looking for. With a library of skills, you could streamline not only your personal workflows but also the workflows of your team. 

You can start building with this powerful new feature by heading to Claude and using the free “skill-creator” to get started today!