π± Claude Skills
According to the Claude website, skills are
folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude loads dynamically to improve performance on specialized tasks. Skills teach Claude how to complete specific tasks in a repeatable way, whether that's creating documents with your company's brand guidelines, analyzing data using your organization's specific workflows, or automating personal tasks. Source
Skills are essentially targeted SOPs - a mini playbook that an agent or AI assistant can choose to load and follow when relevant.
A key factor of Claude skills is that they work through progressive disclosure - Claude determines which Skills are relevant and loads the information it needs to complete the task. This helps to prevent context window overload, representing an advantage over π± MCP (Model Context Protocol).
Note also the shift here from Claude simply giving advice to taking action. Whilst it is not a fully autonomous agent, Claude begins to use agent-like behaviour. A further shift of Claude from 'advice giver' / chat assistant is seen in π± Claude - general#Interactive tools. See also π± Claude Skills vs Agents.
Skills can be maintained by Anthropic, or can be Custom Skills. The Open Format for agent skills can be found at https://agentskills.io/home. As this is an open format, other platforms and tools can adopt the standard.
There are also partner skills from partners like Notion, Figma, Atlassian, etc.
Some users claim that agents may fail to select the right skill so automated evaluation should be considered.
Examples / Use Cases
https://github.com/Ronnie-Nutrition/last30days-skill?tab=readme-ov-file This skill researches your topic across Reddit, X, and the web from the last 30 days, finds what the community is actually upvoting and sharing, and writes you a prompt that works today, not six months ago. Source
Further examples of potential flows: (Source)
- Apply brand style guidelines to documents and presentations.
- Generate communications following company email templates.
- Structure meeting notes with company-specific formats.
- Create tasks in company tools (JIRA, Asana, Linear) following team conventions.
- Execute company-specific data analysis workflows.
- Automate personal workflows and customise Claude to match your work style.
This video practically demonstrated how a carefully selected set of marketing Skills can turn Claude Code into a full-stack marketing assistant capable of building, optimising and running growth functions. β° Review this video in more detail.