☀️ AI Morning Minute: Skills
Teaching Claude how to do your specific job, not just any job
Dear reader, this week is all about Claude from Anthropic. It has been in the news a fair amount this year, so I wanted to help get everyone up to speed. Plus, it’s fun to do a theme!
A general-purpose AI is good at many things and great at none of them. It can write a passable email, build a rough spreadsheet, and draft an okay presentation. But it doesn’t know your company’s brand guidelines, your team’s sprint process, or the way your CFO likes her quarterly reports formatted. Skills are how you close that gap.
What it means
Skills are reusable, modular instruction sets that teach Claude how to perform specific tasks. Think of them as playbooks. Each Skill packages step-by-step instructions, templates, and sometimes executable code into a file that Claude loads automatically when it detects a relevant request.
Anthropic ships built-in Skills for common tasks like creating Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and PDFs. But anyone can create a custom Skill by writing instructions in Markdown (no coding required) and uploading it to Claude. Skills are available on Free, Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans.
Why it matters
They use progressive disclosure, a design concept we covered earlier this week. Instead of loading every instruction into memory at once (which clutters the context window and slows the model down), Claude reads the available Skills, picks only the ones relevant to your request, and loads just those. The rest stay out of the way. That keeps responses faster and more focused.
The format is an open standard, published at agentskills.io. That means a Skill you write for Claude also works in other AI tools that adopt the standard, like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Gemini CLI. You’re not locked into one platform. Write once, use everywhere.
Companies are already using them to capture institutional knowledge. Rakuten built Skills to automate finance workflows that used to require coordination across multiple departments. Box built Skills so employees can turn stored files into branded presentations and reports in minutes. The Skill doesn’t replace the employee. It packages what the best employee knows so everyone on the team can perform at that level.
Simple example
You run a bakery, and your best decorator knows exactly how to pipe roses, mix custom colors, and adjust frosting consistency for different weather. When she’s off, the cakes suffer. So she writes down her process: step one through step fifteen, with photos, ingredient ratios, and tips for humid days. Now any decorator on staff can follow the guide and produce work that’s close to hers.
A Skill is that guide for Claude. It captures the best way to do a specific task so the AI performs it consistently, every time, without someone having to explain it from scratch.