Claude Skills: teach Claude your procedures.

What a skill is.

A skill is a packaged capability Claude uses when it is relevant. In practice, it is a folder containing a SKILL.md file: at the top, a name and a description saying what the skill does and when to use it; then the instructions to follow; and if needed, reference files and scripts.

Anthropic's documentation sums up the benefit in three points: specialize Claude for your tasks, stop repeating the same instructions, and combine several skills for multi-step tasks.

The right reflex, as the Claude Code documentation puts it: create a skill when you catch yourself pasting the same instructions, checklist or procedure into the conversation again.

How Claude loads a skill.

The key principle is called progressive disclosure: Claude loads only what it needs, when it needs it.

Two practical consequences. First, the description is decisive: it is what Claude matches your request against to decide whether to use the skill, so it must say both what it does and when to use it. Second, you can install many skills without weighing down every conversation, since only their descriptions are always loaded.

Scripts have a distinct advantage: Claude runs them without loading their code into the conversation. That is what makes a skill reliable for operations that must always produce the same result.

The skills Anthropic provides.

Anthropic provides ready-made skills for everyday documents: PowerPoint, Excel, Word and PDF. They are available on claude.ai and through the API.

Claude Code also ships its own skills, such as /code-review or /debug, which you call by typing / followed by their name.

For everything else, especially your internal procedures, you create your own skills. They work everywhere: created in Claude Code, uploaded through the API or added in claude.ai settings.

Create your first skill in Claude Code.

A skill takes two minutes to create. Create a folder in your personal skills directory:

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/meeting-summary

Then a SKILL.md file in that folder:

---
name: meeting-summary
description: Turns raw meeting notes into a structured summary. Use when the user pastes meeting notes or asks for meeting minutes.
---

# Meeting summary

1. List the decisions made, one per line.
2. List the actions with their owner and due date.
3. End with the points still open.
Plain tone, short sentences, never invent information.

That is it. Claude will use it when you paste meeting notes, or you can call it directly with /meeting-summary.

Where you put the folder decides who benefits:

Claude Code skills follow the open Agent Skills standard (agentskills.io), designed to work across several AI tools.

What businesses do with them.

The most useful skills capture a procedure your team repeats and that must be done right every time:

• Write by your rules: editorial guidelines, brand voice, banned words, the standard structure of a quote or a proposal.
• Prepare prospecting: at AUTOMATE ALL, a skill reads a prospect's profile and recent activity, then drafts a tailored first message, reviewed before sending. We use it every day.
• Produce recurring documents: minutes, monthly reports, standard replies, from your templates.
• Check before sending: a quality checklist applied every time, with scripts for checks that tolerate no error.

To go further: Claude Code, the guide for the tool that runs these skills on your files, and Claude Pricing 2026 for the right plan.

Claude Skills: what people ask us.