The paradigm is shifting from using AI as a general chatbot to building a team of 'digital employees.' Claude Skills allow users to encapsulate a specific, repeatable workflow—like drafting a newsletter from tweets—into a tool that can be executed on demand, creating a specialized agent for that job.

Beyond using pre-made skills, users can simply prompt Claude to create a new skill for itself. The AI understands the required format and can generate the instructional text for a new capability, such as crafting marketing hooks that create FOMO. This democratizes the process of AI customization.

The process of building AI tools is becoming automated. Claude features a 'Skill Creator,' a skill that builds other skills from natural language prompts. This meta-capability allows users to generate custom AI workflows without writing code, essentially asking the AI to build the exact tool they need for a task.

Instead of guessing which skills to create, describe your business to Claude and ask it to recommend the 10 most valuable, custom skills you should build. This leverages the AI's understanding to bootstrap your own AI-powered workflow.

A key aspect of Claude's new feature is its ability to intelligently choose the right tool for the job. When a user makes a request, the AI automatically scans its library of uploaded skills and selects the most appropriate one without needing to be explicitly told, creating a seamless user experience.

Unlike Claude Projects where the LLM decides how to use tools, Skills execute predefined scripts. This gives users precise control over data analysis and repeatable tasks, ensuring consistent, accurate results and overcoming the common issue of non-deterministic AI outputs.

The implementation of custom skills in Claude has a specific, non-obvious technical workflow. Users must generate the skill, download the file, rename it precisely to 'skill.md', compress it into a zip archive, and then upload it. This exact process is crucial for the feature to function correctly.

The tangible asset for a Claude Skill is surprisingly low-tech: a folder containing a 'skills.md' file and other optional resources. This folder is either referenced by Claude in a local directory or zipped and uploaded to the web UI, demystifying the creation process for non-engineers.

Unlike Claude Projects or OpenAI's Custom GPTs which apply a general context to all chats, Claude Skills are task-specific instruction sets that can be dynamically called upon within any conversation. This allows for reusable, on-demand workflows without being locked into a specific project's context.