Most AI companies have a track record of shipping features incredibly fast, and Anthropic's no exception. It only makes sense, though. Their flagship product currently making headlines is Claude Code, and it's aimed at speeding up how software gets built. The creator of Claude Code has shared on numerous occasions that the feature does all the heavy lifting of writing the code itself. In fact, the company has said that around 90% of Claude Code is written by Claude Code itself!

That said, in the past few days, Anthropic has shipped Code Review, Claude Marketplace, Connectors, Scheduled Tasks within Claude Cowork, Remote Control in Claude Code, and more. So missing a feature or two among all this noise is pretty much inevitable. One Claude feature that's completely transformed the way I use Claude on a daily basis is Skills, and it just so happens to be a feature most people are sleeping on.

What are Claude Skills?

Most underrated Claude feature

Skills are essentially a set of instructions structured as portable files that teach Claude how to complete certain tasks in a repeatable way. This means that instead of explaining the same set of instructions every single time, you can simply store them in a Skill and pull them up whenever you need them. The best part about Skills within Claude is that you don't need to explicitly tell it to pull up a Skill you've created (or one that comes built in) when you ask it to perform a task. Instead, Claude automatically analyzes existing Skills to find one relevant to the task at hand and loads it when needed.

In addition to saving you from the hassle of repeating the same set of instructions every single time, Skills also help improve the consistency and quality of Claude's output and prevent context window overload. There are two types of Skills that concern the average user: Anthropic Skills and Custom Skills. The former are built-in Skills created and maintained by Anthropic that are designed for specific tasks like creating complex HTML artifacts, document creation for Excel and Word, creating high-quality MCP servers, and more. Custom Skills, on the other hand, are ones you create yourself, tailored to your own workflows and tasks.

If there's ever a task where you find yourself giving Claude the same instructions over and over, that's a sign it should be a Skill. You can also download professionally built Skills from platforms like Notion, Figma, Asana, Atlassian, etc. Anthropic explains that these Skills are optimized to work with the respective platforms' MCP connectors. And given that Skills are folders led by a SKILL.md Markdown file, creating and sharing them is as simple as passing along a folder. Claude users constantly upload Skills they've created to GitHub repositories, and you can simply download and upload them to your Claude account to begin using them right away.

There's a Skill that...helps you build Skills too

A bit ironic, isn't it?

While I definitely think using a Skill created by Anthropic or one created by the community is useful, you're leaving a lot on the table if you stop there. The real power of the feature comes in when you start building your own.

The best part (which slightly makes me laugh, too) is that one of Anthropic's default Skills is literally a Skill that helps you build Skills. It's called Skill Creator, and it's designed to help you create new Skills, modify existing ones, test them, and optimize their descriptions.

As mentioned above, Claude can automatically recognize when a Skill is relevant to your task. So when I said, "Hey, I want to create a Study Plan Builder Skill," Claude immediately pulled up the Skill Creator on its own. It read through the documentation of the Skill and then asked me a few targeted questions to nail down the scope. For instance, it asked me:

  • What format should the study plan be delivered in?
  • What inputs should the skill handle?
  • Should the study plan include resource suggestions?

My answer to the first question was an Interactive React Artifact, so it even referred to one of Anthropic's Skills, frontend-design, to check the best practices for React artifacts. It then looked at the existing Skill structure and began to draft it. The final Skill it generated included two files: a Skill.MD file containing the main instructions and an artifact-guidelines.md file within a references folder containing specific best practices for building React artifacts.

Claude also gave me three test cases I could run to test out the Skill. One of the examples was: I have a chemistry final in 2 weeks and can study about 2 hours a day. I took the class but I'm shaky on a few chapters — probably intermediate level.

When I tested the Skill out, I realized that I needed the Skill to be updated slightly. I wanted Claude to explicitly ask me what I'll be tested on before generating anything. Previously, it generated topics based on the subject name. Once I told Claude what I wanted, it tweaked the instructions to use the user's provided topics as the foundation and build the schedule around it.

As someone who is a huge advocate for using AI to improve the learning process, devising a solid study plan is something I've turned to. With this Skill in place, I no longer have to explain my preferences, format, or study style every single time.

Some of the Skills I've been using since discovering this feature

The list goes on and on

Most of the Skills I use are Custom ones that I created specific to my workflow. For instance, I've been dabbling in some tech content creation. Given that I'm relatively new to this, consistently coming up with Reel ideas that would resonate with my audience is a different challenge. So, I built a Skill that essentially acts as my personal content strategist. It knows my audience, knows which angles have previously performed well for me, and knows the style of videos I enjoy creating.

Given that I write about tech daily, I've also included instructions where I'd like it to factor in my production ease by flagging ideas I can base on articles I've already written. Every day, it generates 10 Reel ideas based on my instructions. Since you can also pair Skills with the Scheduled Task feature within Cowork, I've set this task to automatically run at 8 AM every morning. Without this Skill, I'd have to explain all of this context every single time I sat down for content ideation.

I have a bunch of other Skills that are more specific to my daily workflow, but some of the other Skills I've been using that I haven't created include:

These are just a few I've played around with so far, but they give you a good idea of how flexible the feature really is.

The initial setup is absolutely worth it

While the initial setup takes a few minutes, and you might need to spend some additional time refining the Skills you create, you'll thank your past self every time Claude handles a task exactly the way you want it to without needing the same instructions all over again.