Skills

Skills is a feature that hands Claude a pre-written bundle of instructions and reference materials to follow when doing a certain job. It's like giving a chef a recipe card so the same dish comes out the same way every time — once you write down the steps for a task you repeat often, Claude follows that same procedure going forward.

The feature was built by a small internal team at Anthropic that experiments with new products. That team has shipped several tools that developers use daily with Claude, and Skills is one of them. Unlike Anthropic's larger divisions, which go through multiple layers of approval, this team's products tend to launch first to early users, then get refined based on their feedback.

What sets Skills apart from a prompt you type differently each time is that a procedure, once saved, can be called up and reused again and again. Instead of retyping the same instructions every time, you just invoke the saved Skill and Claude works through the steps in order.

The article mentions it in a line like: "Claude Code, MCP, Skills, and Cowork — the AI products developers use every day — all came out of this one internal incubator." It's worth noting Skills isn't a separate app you install; it's a feature you call up while already using Claude.

Pick a task you do repeatedly and ask Claude something like: "Create a Skill that follows this order and format every time I write a report," writing out the steps and asking Claude to save them. Then give Claude a similar task next time and check whether it actually follows the saved procedure.