"Skills to pay the bills!"
How you can utilize Claude Skills to add efficiency to your AI workflow.
By now, you’ve seen me talk all about different prompts and how you can use them in your own writing. Proper prompting leads to some of the best assistance around, when it comes to how you use AI. But there’s an even better way to take prompts and use them in a repeatable way. If you’re specifically a Claude user, what I’m talking about is Skills (and I don’t mean the One Tree Hill character, although this is almost as cool as him.)
What are Skills?
Simply put, it’s your full methodology for how you would like AI to handle something (but not have to constantly copy and paste prompts). Why are Skills helpful?
For one, let’s say that you’ve created a bunch of beautiful prompts for your writing workflow. One gives writing ideas, another checks for reliable sources to back up any cited info, while yet another proofreads spelling and grammar. You’ve done an awesome job creating these prompts. But since you have multiple prompts you want to use while writing, you’re now having to constantly copy and paste them into your chats. Once or twice might not be so bad. But if, for instance, you have a heavy volume of writing, things can start feeling quite repetitive.
Another thing might be that you’re constantly just using the same chat that you created the prompts in. While this is okay to do in theory, there are a couple of reasons you might not want to. At least in my experience, filling up one chat with a bunch of requests and whatnot eventually starts to slow down your user experience, chipping away at your precious time. Another reason is that if you’re uploading files as part of your writing process, do know that there is a file number limit. Once you hit it, you’re done-zo*.
But not to worry, it’s Skills to the rescue.
*A Skill gets your prompt files out of that count permanently, though any research documents you upload for a specific piece will still count against it.
First thing’s first
Skills lean on Claude’s ability to run code, so there’s a toggle you’ll want on before any of this works. Head to Settings > Capabilities and scroll to the section called “Code execution and file creation.” The toggle sits right underneath and carries nearly the same name (the desktop app puts “Cloud” in front of it, the browser doesn’t). Either way, you’ll know you’ve got the right one, because its description flat out says “Required for skills.” On Team and Enterprise plans, an organization owner has to enable it, along with Skills itself, in the organization settings. If your Skills section looks greyed out, or you can’t find it at all, that toggle is almost always the culprit. Moving along…
How to do it (create and use Skills)
Let’s say that you already have some great prompts that you want to automate. That’s awesome! Now it’s time to add those to a new Skill. Let’s say we have prompts for the things I mentioned above: one to help with writing ideas, another to check sources, and another that proofreads. Here’s how you could tackle that, using Skills:
Create text files with each of those detailed prompts. In this example, you should end up with three text files.
Upload those to a new Claude chat.
Tell Claude: I want to use these three files to create a new Skill called “my-writing” (with “my-writing” being any name you want, though keep it simple and skip the special characters; slashes and the like will get your Skill rejected on upload.)
Tell Claude what the Skill’s description should say. This is the part most people skip, and it’s the part that decides whether your Skill ever gets used. Claude reads that one short description (200 characters, max) to figure out when to pull the Skill in, so “drafts, sources, and proofreads my articles” is going to serve you far better than “writing helper”.
After Claude does its thing (which may take up to a few minutes), it should give you a summary of the new Skill.
Once Claude is all done creating the Skill, save it.
Your Skill is now ready to use in any new Claude chat (even in different Project folders).
Create a new chat and type something like: “Use /my-writing to help me create, source, and format a new article.” Typing “/” in the message box will also pull up a list of your available Skills so you can pick one. And if you wrote that description well, Claude will often reach for the Skill on its own, without you asking.
Watch as Claude then uses your prompts in one big, beautiful process.
One word of caution while you’re building. Anthropic’s own guidance is to keep each Skill pointed at a single workflow, because a handful of focused Skills compose together far better than one giant Skill that tries to do everything. The three prompts in my example belong together because they’re all steps in the same pipeline (idea, sources, proofread). If you catch yourself stuffing your video editing process and your client invoicing process into the same Skill, you’re likely to have a bad time.
Sky’s the limit with Skills
Now that you have an understanding of how Skills work, the sky truly is the limit. Got a complicated programming process that you want to duplicate? Have a process that you want to put into place for creating graphics? Want to create a time-waster of an AI game show? Skills are gonna be your best AI friend for the foreseeable future.
And what you build isn’t trapped in one chat window, either. Skills are built on the open Agent Skills standard, which means the same Skill you write today runs in Claude chat, in Cowork, in Claude Code, and through the API without you having to rewrite it for each one.
But don’t take my word for it. Give this guide a go and see if you don’t streamline your multi-prompt/query process. You, like myself, may find that Skills are the way to help you generate darn near anything in Claude.
How have you used Skills (or other AI features) to optimize AI workflow? Let me know in the comments, I read them all!