Claude Skills Are All You Need

<p>The question we keep hearing: what actually is a skill? They’re everywhere right now, central to both ChatGPT and Claude, and increasingly to how serious AI agents get built.</p><p>A few months ago they were so complex that they probably weren’t worth your time. That’s no longer true. You can build a useful one in minutes, straight from a chat you’ve already had.</p><p>But we couldn’t find a single article that explains what they are, why they matter, and how to actually use them for real work, without assuming you’re technical. So we wrote this article.</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><img height="719.1346153846154" width="554" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GD8k!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7bf61236-8642-47c9-8119-15de8fe88e7c_2915x3784.png"><figcaption class="image-caption">A skills cheat sheet for you to save</figcaption></figure></div><h2>What a skill actually is</h2><p>OpenAI recently described <strong>agents</strong> as a <em>“system that carries out a task with three components: a trigger, a process, and tools or systems it can connect to.”</em></p><p>In today’s tools, a <strong>skill captures the process and the tools and systems it should use.</strong></p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><img height="202.93269230769232" width="670" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dvO1!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1253b19c-ce9e-484e-8893-43fa42c74587_3318x1006.png"></figure></div><p>In simple terms:</p><blockquote><p>A skill is a reusable <strong>playbook</strong> that teaches Claude or ChatGPT how to do a specific task instructions, reference material, and any tools or templates it needs, all bundled together so you don’t have to re-explain it every time.</p></blockquote><p>They can be as simple as writing in your tone of voice or as involved as a full workflow with its own documentation, references, and process for handling something complex.</p><p>Most guides describe skills as a way to automate small, repetitive tasks, but the real leverage is at the complex end, where the right skill can do work that no single prompt could.</p><h2>What makes skills different</h2><p><strong>A prompt captures an instruction. A skill captures an entire way of doing something</strong></p><p>Think of one of those long chats where you go back and forth with the AI until it finally gets the output right. A skill can capture that whole chat: the steps, the tools, the format. Ready to run in any new conversation, getting sharper every time you use it.</p><p>Three things make skills different:</p><ol><li><p><strong>They evolve.</strong> Every time you use one, you can refine it, until the AI does the task the way <em>you</em> do it, every time.</p></li><li><p><strong>They’re portable.</strong> skills are an open standard, not owned by ChatGPT or Claude, so the work you put in today moves with you.</p></li><li><p><strong>They’re agent-ready.</strong> As AI shifts from chat to autonomous agents working in the background, the skills you build today are exactly what those agents will run on.</p></li></ol><h2>When to build one</h2><p>If a task is worth doing well, and you do it more than a handful of times, it’s a candidate for a skill.</p><p>Here are a few common examples, from simple to complex:</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><img height="409.03914835164835" width="661" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cMQ8!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5ed84b9a-0ade-499c-884c-3d85871f596c_6170x3818.png"></figure></div><h2>Build your first skill in five minutes</h2><p><strong>Don’t write a skill from scratch.</strong></p><p>When people realise they have a repeatable workflow, they’ll often sit down to document every step themselves and turn it into a skill. This rarely works for anything complex. It’s the same reason you wouldn’t hire a new employee, hand them a manual on their first day, and say <em>“right, off you go, do this forever.”</em> They haven’t seen what good looks like. They haven’t made mistakes and been corrected.</p><p>The same is true for skills. If you write one from scratch, the AI is guessing at what you want rather than learning from what you actually did.</p><p>The approach instead is to <strong>do the task in a chat, get it right, then turn the chat into a skill.</strong></p><p>There are four ways to do this:</p><h3>1. Do the task in a chat, then turn it into a skill</h3><p>Say you regularly turn messy meeting notes into clean summaries. Start a normal chat:</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><img height="906" width="1456" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3ybK!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5bb713af-12ca-44e7-b9b8-9f605fbeef79_6078x3783.png"><figcaption class="image-caption">Start in a regular chat</figcaption></figure></div><p>Iterate the way you would in any chat:</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><img height="906" width="1456" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XY11!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F60e4b8b1-986b-41f1-a824-c4c8e7189fdd_6078x3783.png"></figure></div><p>Once you're getting the output you want, the chat contains everything the AI needed to learn: the structure, the priorities, how to handle gaps. <strong>Now you turn it into a skill:</strong></p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><img height="906" width="1456" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Rjsf!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fff47bbd4-db98-494d-901b-dfebaee14a66_6078x3783.png"></figure></div><p>Claude builds the skill from the conversation, you can save it, and it shows up in your skills list.</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><img height="906" width="1456" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XUWx!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff978d5ff-882f-4ae6-8f5e-fe946dc4ea4b_6078x3783.png"><figcaption class="image-caption">Claude automatically creates the skill and presents it to you to save</figcaption></figure></div><h3>2. Convert a chat you’ve already had</h3><p>You don’t even need to start fresh. Some of the best skills come from work you’ve already done. Open an existing chat and ask:</p><p><em>“Turn this whole conversation into a skill, so I don’t have to redo this work next time.”</em></p><p>That whole chat becomes the skill, including the corrections, the examples, and the format you settled on.</p><h3>3. Use the skill Creator</h3><p>If you’d rather build something fresh and skip the demonstration step, Claude has a built-in <strong>Skill Creator</strong> under <em>Customise → Skills → + → Create with Claude</em>.</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><img height="904" width="1456" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!G2ZO!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8dc7a8d9-940b-42e4-bdfd-9983e01b80ed_6096x3783.png"></figure></div><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><img height="905" width="1456" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CFIa!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fde8c69d6-e823-4068-bcef-4e8314e683c3_6087x3783.png"></figure></div><p>This creates a prompt in a fresh chat that interviews you about the task and generates a first version. Same rule applies: that first version won't be perfect. Use it, refine it, update it.</p><h3>4. Start from a pre-built skill or plugin</h3><p>There are also pre-built skills available. Anthropic and OpenAI publish them, and there are growing libraries online. They’re great as starting points for general tasks or for understanding what a good skill looks like, but for anything specific to your work, you’re better off building your own and shaping it through use. Every job, every team, every workflow is slightly different, and a skill that knows yours is worth more than a generic one that doesn’t.</p><p>Plugins have also grown in popularity recently in Claude. Where a skill captures one workflow, a plugin bundles several skills together with the connectors they need (your inbox, your CRM, your project tool) for a specific role or function. The well-built ones are excellent and worth a look. They probably won't fit your work exactly out of the box, but the same rule applies: install one, use it on real tasks, and shape it from there.</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><img height="905" width="1456" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9mzC!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F83090e31-9e83-459f-b463-050f7bc8cecc_6093x3789.png"></figure></div><h2>Using your skill</h2><p>Once a skill exists, you can mostly forget about it. You don’t open it, you don’t paste it in, you don’t even mention it by name. Just start a fresh chat and ask for the thing it does.</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><img height="905" width="1456" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FIdk!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1e5e7ebb-8bbb-4d23-aa7f-32f600c57a10_6093x3789.png"></figure></div><p>and Claude pulls in the right skill automatically.</p><p>Every skill has a title and a description, and Claude scans them whenever you send a message to find the one that fits. A Meeting Summaries skill described as <em>“This skill turns raw meeting notes into a structured summary with decisions, action items, and owners”</em> will get pulled in any time you ask something that matches.</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><img height="905" width="1456" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!eMZ9!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd4cb7ffd-0c40-45e4-a151-f46566abef69_6093x3789.png"></figure></div><p>You can also invoke a skill explicitly with a slash command. Type <code>“/”</code> and pick from the list. Useful when you want to trigger a specific skill or override the auto-load.</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><img height="905" width="1456" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TIES!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F92899187-9f4b-4ee0-9186-40bb74ee9973_6093x3789.png"></figure></div><p>If a skill isn’t triggering when you’d expect it to, the description usually isn’t quite right. The simplest fix is to ask Claude to update it:</p><p><em>“I expected the Meeting Summaries skill to load just now and it didn’t. Can you update its description so it gets used for this kind of task?”</em></p><p>Claude will rewrite the description and update the skill. The same works in reverse if a skill keeps loading when you don’t want it to.</p><h2>Iterating a skill</h2><p>The first version of a skill is rarely the final one. You use it, see what’s missing, and update it. That iteration is necessary.</p><p>A skill on day one is like that new hire on day one. They’re working from the manual you gave them, but they haven’t seen real cases yet, and they haven’t been corrected. The first time they try, you’ll spot things you forgot to mention.</p><p>Say you’ve built that meeting summary skill. You run it on a real set of notes, and the output is mostly right, but the action items are listed together when you’d prefer them grouped by team. So you tell Claude:</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><img height="905" width="1456" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MdM9!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcf758c29-1fa9-4f17-971a-bdaff116c5c4_6093x3789.png"></figure></div><p>Claude updates the skill, you save the new version, and from then on it groups by team automatically. Repeat that over weeks and months of small refinements, and you end up with a skill that does the work the way you do it, without you having to think about it.</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><img height="905" width="1456" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rMS8!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3497a58f-38ee-46ff-b39e-a7faa88a969f_6093x3789.png"></figure></div><p>This is why starting today matters more than starting later. A skill you’ve used for a few months becomes something a new skill can’t compete with. It’s been corrected, refined, and fitted to how your team actually works. And as the underlying models keep getting better, the skill gets better with them. The work you put in compounds.</p><h2>Why this is worth doing now</h2><p>The hardest part of using AI well isn’t writing better prompts. It’s getting it to do real work consistently, without you having to babysit every output. That’s what skills are for. They’re how you turn a one-off chat that worked into a process you can rely on.</p><p>So don’t sit down to write one. Open a chat where you got the AI to produce something genuinely useful, and turn that conversation into a skill. You’ll have something working by the end of the next five minutes, and every time you use it from then on, it gets a little better.</p><p>Skills are evolving fast, and they look more and more like a core part of how serious AI work gets done. As autonomous agents get more capable and start handling work end-to-end (Workspace Agents in ChatGPT, for example), they’ll run on the same skills you build today. The work you put in now isn’t just paying off in your current workflow. It’s the foundation for everything those agents will do for you.</p><p>Go build one.</p><p><em>If you want to chat about AI in your workforce or workflows, <a href="http://solaris.buildclub.ai">contact us</a>.</em></p>