Claude Skills: Build Your First AI Assistant (Never Repeat Prompts Again)

Every time you start a new chat with an AI, it starts from scratch. It doesn't remember your formatting preferences, your brand voice, your workflow, nothing. So, you end up reexplaining the same thing over and over again, copy pasting the same long prompt. It's tedious and honestly, it's the number one reason why people give up on using AI for real work. But what if you could teach Claude your exact process once, your rules, your tone, your reference files, and it just follows them every time you need it? That's what Claude's skill is. It's not a plug-in. It's not an app. It's a set of instructions that Claude reads whenever a task matches so you never have to reexplain yourself. Hi, I'm Jamie and welcome to Teachers Tech. Today, I'm going to show you Claude skills in two places. First, we're going to start right inside Cloud on the web, cla. ai, where you probably already use Claude. I'll show you the built-in skills, how to create your own, and how to use the skill creator to build one from just a conversation. Then, we're going to move over to Claude Co-work, the desktop app, where skills even get more powerful because Claude can access files and folders on your actual computer. No coding, no technical background needed. Let's get into it. Before we open anything, let's

understand what a skill actually is because it's simpler than you think. A skill is basically a standard operating procedure for clot. You know, in a workplace, you might have a document that says, "When a customer emails about pricing, here's exactly how we respond. " A skill is that, except Claude is the one reading the SOP and following it. At its core, a skill is a folder with a file called skill. md inside. That file has two parts. At the top is a short summary, just a name and a oneline description. Think of this as the label on the outside of a folder. Claude reads this first to decide, do I need to use this skill or not? This is called progressive disclosure. Claude doesn't load the full instructions for every single skill every time. It reads that tiny summary and only loads the detailed instructions when the task actually matches. So, if you have 10 skills available, Claude isn't reading all 10 in full, just the relevant ones. It keeps things fast and efficient. Below the summary is the body, the actual step-by-step instructions. What format to use, what tone to write in, what to include, what to avoid. The more specific you are here, the more consistent your results. Now, here's what makes skills really interesting. They work across Claude's different environments. You can use them on cloud. ai in your browser, in Cloud Code if you're a developer, in co-work on the desktop app, and even through the API. The same skill works everywhere, but each environment gives you different capabilities. Let me show you what I

mean. Starting with the web, if you're using Claude on the web right now with a paid plan, you already have access to skills. Let me show you where they live. This is the skills panel. You can see Claude comes with a set of example skills already loaded. There's one for creating canvas designs, one for building brand guidelines, one for internal communications, and a bunch more. These are examples anthropic build to show you what's possible. And they're actually useful on their own. And see the plus button in the top corner. This is how you add your own custom skills. We'll use that in a minute. Now, let me show you something really useful. I'm going to expand one of these skills so you can see what's inside. Let's take a look at the algorithmic art skill. Look at that. There's the skill. md file we talked about. That's the instructions file. There's templates folder with supporting files and a license file. That's the folder structure I showed you earlier, but now you're seeing it for real inside Claude. Every skill follows the same pattern. A skill MD file with optional sporting files alongside it. Something I want to point out, all these skills aren't on by default. I can see these top two are on just by the way they're highlighted. But if I click on this one, notice in the top right hand corner, we need to toggle this on. Right now, this is disabled. So, if I click it on, you can see how it's moved on the list and how it's bolded. This skill creator, see it listed right here in the panel. That's the one we're going to use next. It's the skill that builds other skills. You just describe what you need and it generates the whole thing for you. So, we're going to give that a try.

All right. Exploring example skills is great, but the real power is building your own, and the skill creator makes it ridiculously easy. You literally just describe what you want and have a conversation. The skill creator by itself, you can see it right here in the panel. It walks you through building a new skill by asking you questions. You describe what you need. Claude asks clarifying questions and then it generates the whole skill. mmd file for you. So, we're going to give this a try. Let's say every week I write YouTube video descriptions. It's always following the same format, kind of a hook, a summary, timestamps, links, and a call to action. I'm tired of writing that format from memory every time. Let's turn it into a skill. So, I'm going to go up top right here and notice that we can create with Claude. So, I'm going to click on this and let's create a skill together using the skill creator skill. First, ask me the skill what we should do. So, this is what I wanted to do. Help me build a skill for writing YouTube video descriptions. It's what I just said. I kind of gave it more specifics, a two sentence hook, short summary, timestamps. And so, I'm going to send this off now. See how it's asking me questions? It's not guessing. It's asking me smart questions to understand exactly how I work. All right, let's go through and answer a few of these. And you can always adjust this later in the skill, but I'm going to say number three for this one. one for this one. And we're going to bake in my standard links every time. So now it's asking a little bit more my call to action, my standard links, and I'm just going to give it this. So here's going to be my call to action. I have my different links from Instagram to LinkedIn and I'm just going to submit. So, it ran through a few test cases because it knows different videos I use for doing this type of thing, but I just haven't created a skill for it. So, it did one for Cloud Skills. I can see now there's the hook. Here's my uh timestamps in here. And there is my social links. Now, the one thing I notice on each of these, I kind of want to make sure these are separated by line. So, what I'm going to say is make sure timestamps are separated by line. And the same with the social links. Okay. So, now I can see they updated the skill. And this is what I wanted here. Kind of just separated by the line. Same thing with the timestamps. Now, it's just asked me, do I want anything else before it packages everything out? You know, I in the future maybe I might put my entire transcript to the video in so it can do the exact time of the timestamps for me. But I'm going to say it looks good and continue on. Okay. So, they've packaged it. I can look over here. This is going to be the title, YouTube description, skill. md. We have our complete description that it created for us. And it just walked through. I can see how they're putting everything in. We have the timestamp examples. We have the social media. Now, I'm just going to go copy to your skills. I just went back over to my skills list. So, here it is, the one that we just created. We can see the description and the information in it toggled on. I want to make sure that it was on. And if we wanted to delete it, I can delete it right here or edit with Claude. So, let's go test this out. I'm just going to go to a new chat here. And what I'm

going to ask it to do is just write a YouTube description for this video, how to build Claude skills, and I'm giving it some fictional timestamps. I think I know there might be an error in this. Uh, we'll see when I test this out because I might have to go and fix something. So, at this point, it's just clarifying. Do I need does it need any more information? Is there any links or documentation? And so in this case, I'm just going to say no. But again, it's asking me to make sure it doesn't forget anything. I'm going to say no. Okay. See this right here, the timestamps and the social links? That is something I thought might have been a problem. And I can go ahead and get it fixed by just telling it, but I feel like I need to go back to the skill and modify this. But if I say I want each time stamp on its own line and social links. So I want to see what it does. Now this is what I wanted. Timestamps are here the different social links. So it needed to output it in a text message. But I'm wondering can I fix that in the skill so I don't have to go and do that extra step. Not that was a big deal. But we're going to go

back to the skill or and see if we can modify this. So making sure it works. Right. Let's go back to our skills here. And under this one, we're going to go and edit with Claude. And I'm just going to give it this information. Output to text file. Uh, so timestamps and social link line break stay intact. So I can copy paste it into YouTube. I want to see if this is a quick way to fix it. Now it's asking for some information. What kind of edits are you looking at? Update the standard links or CTA uh text. I'm going to go and put in something else. I'm just going to put the same thing that I just told it. So hopefully they understand this. Okay, I think it understood everything. They have an updated one. I'm going to copy to skills. Update and replace. Let's go uh back over to our skills. I don't have to do anything to it. It should still be on and everything. I'm just going to go give it another test with the exact same uh prompt that I gave it before. I'm going to say no for this again. So, there we go. Right here. All I need to do is copy and paste this over to my YouTube description. And like I said, I might change this a little bit more. So, I put my entire transcript in maybe with the all timestamps and then they can go ahead and do automatically everything, even the timestamps for me where I don't have to give it to them. So, just remember skills are just text files. If something isn't working or you need to tweak it, this you just do it the same way to edit a document. You don't need to start over. Just adjust, rerun. The more specific your instructions, the more consistent the output. If you want to edit something in line, you can just go back to it. And I used claude before, but if we go edit in line, you can see here that you can go through and make the edits that you need right here. And then hit save. Before we

move on, I want to give you a quick framework that will save you a lot of time as you build more skills. There's basically two types. First, capability skills. These teach Claude how to do something it can't do well on its own, like producing a properly formatted Word document or filling out a complex PDF form. The built-in skills we looked at earlier are mostly that type. Now, here's the thing about capability skills. As clause models get smarter, some of these become unnecessary. If a future model can create perfect spreadsheets without instructions, that skill retires. Second, workflow skills. These capture how you work, your specific process, your preference, your brand rules. The YouTube description skill that we just built, that's a workflow skill. These don't become obsolete because they're not about Claude's ability. They're about your standards. Even if Claude gets 10 times smarter, it still needs to know your format, your tone, and your rules. When you're deciding what to build a skill for, focus on workflow skills first. That's where the lasting value is. Everything we just did works great on the web. You can build skills, use skills, and get consistent results right

inside claude. ai. But there's a whole other level, and that's Claude Co-work. If you're not familiar with co-work, I have a full beginner's walkthrough. I'll link it in the description and up here in the cart. But let me give you the quick version. Co-work is a tab inside Claude desktop app. It's available on Mac and Windows, and you need a paid plan, Pro, Max, Team, or Enterprise. The big difference from regular claw chat is that co-work can access files and folders on your computer. It can read them, create new ones, organize them, and work across multiple files at the same time. If you have the correct subscription and want to download it, just from your web app, just look for the get apps and extensions and you're going to see co-work right here. Since I'm on a Windows, that's what's coming up. If you're on a Mac, it would come up. So you can go download it and install it on your computer and then you can follow along with me with skills on it. In co-work can reach beyond the chat. A skill can tell Claude to open a PDF in a specific folder, read the data, use the data to produce a response and save the output as a new file on your machine. That's a fundamentally different thing. The skills themselves use the same format, same skill. md files, same summary at the top, same instructions in the body, but what they can do expands because Claude now has access to local files. If you create any kind of content, blog posts, videos

newsletters, social media, you know the pain of repurposing. You finish a video and then you have to manually rewrite it for every platform. Different lengths, different tones, different structures. Here's the thing. If you have a YouTube channel, you already have the raw materials sitting there waiting. Every video you've ever uploaded has a subtitle file. YouTube generates them automatically. And we're going to use those files to build a content machine. We're going to build a skill that takes a YouTube subtitle file and turns it into three pieces of content. A blog post, a Twitter thread, and an email newsletter, each in the right voice for its platform. And because we're using co-work, Claude can read the file directly from the folder. No copying and pasting. I just want to show you what the material is that I'm going to be getting Claude to look at. And so I'm in my YouTube studio here just on a different video that I published last week. And I'm going to go to the subtitles. And here they are right here. So I'm just going to go ahead and download these subtitles. And I'm going to do this to a few videos, maybe like three or four. And I'm going to put them into a folder just on my desktop. And that's the folder I'm going to get Claude to look at. All right. Now, let's build the skill. We're going to use the same skill creator we saw earlier, but this time inside co-work. Now, you could open up Notepad or any text editor and write a skill. md file from scratch, and that's totally valid, and some people prefer it. But if you're new to this, the skill creator is probably your best option. You describe what you want. It asks you the right question, and it builds you the file that you want. Let's do that. If I open the file that I downloaded from YouTube, it looks like this. you know, timestamps, then the text you actually said, then a blank, then the next chunk. It looks messy, but Claude has no problem reading it. We just need to tell it to ignore the timestamps and focus on the spoken words. Okay, let's go to our skills here. And they're in the same place. You can see where we can create new skills here. I'm just going to click on in the same. I want to point out this is the one that we made from the web. It carried over here. I can use it here perfectly as well. All right, let's go up and we're going to create with Claude. Let me explain a bit to it. And this is what I said right here. I want to take it from a YouTube subtitle file, an SBV file, turn it into three pieces of content, a blog post, a Twitter thread, and an email newsletter. Each one should be formatted for its own platform. And I'm just going to say, let's go. And what you're going to notice, it's going to ask me a series of questions just to make sure that it understands what I want. All right. For tone, I'm going to keep this educational. What file format should the three outputs be saved as? I'm going to actually say put it in a word document with all three. How long is a typical video would you run on this? I'm going to say medium 10 to 30. All right, let's run a few uh run a test case here. I'm going to pick this first one. I'm going to say a mix of both. I'm going to go with the first one. Now, they suggested these three as a test run, but I'm going to say I want to give you a SVB file to test this out. I'm just going to grab this one right here and drop it in and submit. Okay, we have the outputs and I just clicked on this one, the notebook LMGI, because this is the one I actually uploaded. These ones were just other examples they kind of randomly made. Uh what I noticed right away, you can see that there's some formatting issues with the text. That's the M dash here. So, I would probably update uh this if I didn't want there just to be uh use plain text characters in all outputs and that would clean that up. But we get an idea of the information here. I could download this as a word document and we have some bulleted points uh taken out and we have the Twitter different ones that I can go through here. And we have the email newsletter. So then they also show without the skill. And if I take a look at this, I'll just go through. I noticed it doesn't have uh it's kind of just like taking it out in chunks. the flow isn't as good as the other one that when I use this skill. We do have the tweets here at the end. I like how you can compare things back and forth. But what I want to do now is add something more to this skill. And this is what I'm going to say.

Create a folder called content repurposer. When I tell you I've added new files to the folder, I want you to process every SP file, SPB file in it for each one. Create a blog post, Twitter thread, and email newsletter. Save the outputs as Word documents. Create a new subfolder with the uh today's date and all the finished files in there. Name each file using the original SPV file uh name. So, I'm just going to go ahead and uh submit this. I'm going to say on demand. Should we use the skill they just built? I say I'm going to say yes. Remember, we can go back and change. I'd probably tweak this after using it and seeing what the output would be for the blog post and everything and I would adapt it to get my own feel. I'm just going to choose the folder. I'm going to put it on my desktop. I'm going to hit select. I can see that the folder is created. It just created that automatically. I can go and schedule this task. I have my three SBB files that I downloaded here. And all I'm going to do is drag it into the folder. I'll check that they're there. So, they're there. And I'm just going to tell it that I have the SPV files there. So I'm going to say they are there. So I can see it found the three SBV files. And if I look over on the right, I can see the progress uh creating today's date subfolder. It's processing these three different SPV files. I can see the names are there. I'm just going to open the folder real quickly. And I can see the subfolder is already there that it created. All right, it's telling me that it's done for each of these three. And I'm going to go ahead and just open this up. And we'll go into the folder created. And I'll just open up one of them. Let's open up this one, the JSON in Gemini. So, here we go. The blog post. And as I go through it, it kind of has a nice uh structure. I like how it pulled out the process and the points of it. And if I keep moving down, let's go. Oh, here's the Twitter point that they have and they have the uh emojis that I can just copy paste this. So, lets me know how many characters that kind of shows me uh the number and the format of it of all those ones. And then I have the email newsletter. So, once I had this skill created, all I had to do was put my SP file into that one and then it took care of the rest. Now, remember, you can adjust all this even right now. I so I've taken a look at it. Is there any adjustments? I could go and ask it to maybe change the tone of it. But this is what I mean. You can go back and forth and adjust your uh adjust your skills. So I'm just going to say looks good and we'll go on. All right. So now all I have to do is this. So the scheduled task is all set up. So I went through and picked that. So next time you have the SPV files to process, just drop them in the content repurpose folder on your desktop and trigger the task from the scheduled. So, we'll give it one more try here now that we have it all built. And I'll just add one more file. Now, I want to point something out. You might think that this skill is going to be listed in our skills. So, if I just go up top and I go to customize and skills, notice it's not here. That's because it's on locally on our computer because we're using co-work. So, if I go ahead and open a file and I'm just in my documents, you can see if I'm on my documents, I have claude here. We have schedule and then we have this content repurpose that what we just made. And there's the skill MD file. This is on my computer. Now, if I wanted to uh upload it, I could rightclick and zip it. And when I'm under skills, notice that we can go upload a skill. So I could drag and drop. Notice it has to be a zip or skill file and I could upload and add it. But the thing to know is that particular skill is made to work on this computer with those files. So even uploading it to the web, it wouldn't serve any purpose uh for it. So just to let you know why you're not seeing it in this part here. But moving on, I did upload just one. I deleted the other stuff out of it right here. So, I just uploaded one more uh SBV file and I'm going to go over to schedule this time and look at this. We have content repurposer. So, all I have to do is click on this and run now. All right, it told me it was done. Got a little popup. And if I go back into the folder here, and I'll just make this larger. Go back into here. Claude co-work. And now I have a blog post. And as I go through, so I could copy paste this where I would like. And think about again the style that you want. Here's my Twitter ones. And then I have my newsletter at the end. So just think about the amount of time this workflow that we have from this specific skill that we created on Claude Co-work. Now

let's build something that makes you money or at least saves you from losing it. In business, speed matters. When a potential client asks, "How much for a website? " The first person that responds with a clear, professional answer usually wins the job. We're going to build a skill that reads a client inquiry, looks up the right pricing from your actual rate sheet, and drafts a polished reply. So, this skill really shines in co-work because it needs to open a reference file, your pricing PDF, to do its job. I'm going to show you this in two ways. First, the simple way, copy and paste the client's email into Co-work. That works right now. No setup needed. Then I'm going to show you the next level version connecting your Gmail so Claude can read the email directly from your inbox and draft the reply right there. Same skill, two different ways to trigger it. All right, let's go back to skill creator and we're going to quickly build this here. So what's the skill we want to create? So we want to build me a pricing reply skill. That's pricing tiers that there's a pricing tiers PDF in this folder. So I need to match the folder. So, I'm going to choose a different folder and I have it on my desktop again and it's just called pricing. So, I just need to go to that one right here. So, I'm going to select this folder and I'm going to allow it to have access. So, when I paste in a client email asking about pricing, I want Claude to read the PDF, find the right price tier, and draft a professional reply that greets the client by name if available, states the price, what's included, and I kind of go through the details. At the end though, if the service isn't in the PDF, flag it and tell me to handle it directly. So, I'm going to go and add that. Since I gave it very specific detail, it didn't really ask me any questions to clarify. Uh, it's just showing me here's the output. Lets me click through all test cases, but we're just going to go through and I'm going to say looks good again so we can go test it out. So, this is all done. And now I can copy to my skills. And I'm going to go ahead and do that. Now, you notice with the other one, that's not how I accessed it. It was going to go through myuler because that's how I wanted to run it with uh finding with going through that certain task. Let's give it a test. I am going to just copy this and I'm going to go back here. So, here was the first one we created and now the new one, the pricing responder is in the ski skills and this one is in the schedule. As I mentioned before, we're going to go new task. And I'm just going to paste that email right in here. And we'll see if it picks up. I can see right now it's running a skill. It's going to match the client to the right tier. So I know it's accessing going through the information that it needs to. It's giving me some notes. And now here's the draft. I'm just going to click on it right here. And we have, "Hi Sarah, thanks so much for reaching out. " You can see it went through that PDF, found the exact pricing. I can copy paste this back over to my email. But what happens if it's not on there? Like I mentioned in that last part of this skill, I want to know what it'll do. So, let's send it another email. So, here's the second email. And this is going to be about something that I don't offer in this pretend situation. Now, look at this response that I could just copy paste back over. Hi, David. Thanks for reaching out. Glad your friend pointed at you to our way. All right, let's look at this response. Glad your friend pointed you our way. We definitely work with clients on improving their search visibility. So, you're in the right place. The specific SEO retainer you're describing ongoing keyword research, content updates, and link building falls outside our standard packages. So, then it goes on and talks about a custom package and gives some information here, but it's asking at the end uh maybe that they'd want to do a call. So, just like that, you can put those emails in to match it to your PDF. Copy paste this over and you get this quick, accurate email. But always check over things first before you hit send. Here's where it gets really good. Claude has a built-in Gmail connector. You

connect your Google account and Claude can search and read your emails directly. No copying, no pasting, no switching between tabs. And this can be done really quickly. Let's go ahead and we're going to click on this go to connectors manage connectors. Let's drop down here and browse our connectors. And we're just going to go to this first one with Gmail. And I'm just going to go ahead and click connect. And make sure you uh agree to all of this before you hit continue. Now, if I hit the plus, look at the connectors and I have Gmail and it's toggled on. The Gmail connector can read your emails and create drafts in your Gmail account, but it cannot send emails on your behalf. You always review and hit send yourself. That's a deliberate safety choice, and honestly, I think it's the right one. You don't want AI sending emails without you checking them first. Second, you get granular control over what Claude can do. You can set each action to allow, ask, or block. So, you could let Claude search your emails automatically, but required to ask permission before reading any specific email. or you could allow everything and just let it work. It's up to you. I'd recommend starting with ask for reading emails so you can see exactly what Claude is accessing. Once you're comfortable, you can switch it to allow. All right, let's go give this a test. I'm going to say I've got a new pricing inquiry from a client in my email. Can you handle it? And I'm going to click let's go. Okay, so it looked like it found it. I can see that it uh picked up the Gmail and it picked up the right skills. Make sure that you allow permission for it to go into that folder that we have the pricing PDF all the time. So, make sure it's just not allowed once or else it's not going to uh continue. But, I went through and found all the information draft reply here. So, it's asking me would I like to go ahead and create this in a draft and I'm going to say yes. Now, it's asking Claude wants to use create Gmail draft. So you can see allow once, always allow. And I'm just going to say once for this one. Let's click on the draft reply. I'm going to open the link. And here it is right here. So it went through, wrote the whole thing, and all I have to do is hit send now. But again, make sure you double check everything before you do that. Think about one task you do every week that follows that same basic steps. Maybe it's writing video

descriptions. Maybe it's responding to client emails. Maybe it's formatting content for social media. Whatever it is, open up Claude and build a skill for it. If you're on the web, start there. If you have the desktop app, try it in co-work. Start with the skill creator. If you're not sure where to begin, just describe what you need and let Claude do the heavy lifting. And remember, skills are just text files. If the first version isn't perfect, you tweak it. That's the whole point. If you want to learn more about coowwork itself, I have a full beginners video linked in the description. If you want to go deeper with skills, Anthropic just recently added the ability to test and benchmark your skills with built-in evaluations, which is incredible for making sure they actually work the way you expect. That might be a v video on its own. Thanks for watching this time on Teachers Tech. We'll see you next week with more tech tips and tutorials.