7 min · +90 XP
What Are “Skills”?
The buzzword, in plain language.
By the end of this lesson
You'll understand Skills well enough to use them when you're ready.
Everyone's suddenly talking about 'Skills'. Here's the plain version, no jargon.
Imagine teaching a new assistant 'this is exactly how we make our weekly report' — once. After that, you just say 'do the report' and they follow your playbook. A Skill is that: a saved set of instructions you teach Claude once, so it does a repeated task your way every time. (Seen 'custom GPTs' in ChatGPT? Same idea — but for your builder, not your chatbot.)
You can build dozens of tools without ever touching Skills. Just know they exist: the moment you find yourself explaining the same process to Claude over and over, that's when you save it as a Skill — and ask Claude to set it up.
When that day comes — it's one sentence
- 1After any repeated task, say: 'turn what we just did into a Skill, so next time I can just say: do the report'. That's the whole 'installation' — a Skill is just a small instructions file Claude writes for itself.
- 2Next time: 'do the report'. It follows your playbook.
- 3Ready-made Skills exist too — ask Claude: 'find me a skill for X and set it up'.
A Skill is best described as:
Author
Evgeny Arsentyev
PhD · Chief Product Officer at a healthtech company