While Claude's built-in 'create skill' tool is clunky, its output reveals a highly structured template for effective prompts. It includes decision trees, clarifying questions for the user, and keywords for invocation, serving as an invaluable guide for building robust skills without starting from scratch.

Users can now upload instructional files to teach Claude AI specific abilities. This allows the AI to perform complex, branded tasks like creating presentations or designing posters according to a company's unique style guide, effectively turning it into a personalized expert assistant.

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.

Instead of using Claude's slow and error-prone web UI to generate skills, a more effective workflow is to use an AI-native code editor like Cursor. By providing Cursor with the official documentation link, it can rapidly and reliably generate the entire skill folder structure, including markdown and validation scripts.

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.