Transcription
Have you ever noticed that no matter how much context that you give your LLM, the outputs are never truly the same? And in fact, they can tend to get worse the longer that you chat with it. And Enthropic has just released Claude Skills, which is designed to solve just that.
In this video, I'm going to explain to you what Claude skills are in a non-technical way so you can actually understand them. The crucial difference between skills and cloud projects that'll save you thousands of tokens, and five plug-and-play business use cases that'll save you dozens of hours.
Okay. So, what exactly are Claude skills? Think of Claude skills of having like a personal recipe book for your AI. Without skills, every time that you want Claude to do something specific like format a report a certain way or follow your brand guidelines, you have to give it the full instructions every single time. And more complex your instructions become, the more tokens that you need to accomplish whatever it is that you want to do. This is why your output starts degrading over time.
With Claude skills, also known as agent skills in Claude, you write down the recipe once, then whenever you need it, Claude just pulls up that recipe and then follows it perfectly. No reexplaining, no copying and pasting the same instructions over and over. And here's the really clever bit. Claude doesn't load every recipe at once. It only opens the cookbook, if you will, to the page that it needs when it needs it. This means faster responses and better results because it's focused on exactly what it is that you are asking for. The technical term for this is called progressive disclosure, which means Claude is loading information in stages as it's needed rather than consuming all of your context up front.
Now, let's go into Claude and I'll show you exactly where to start accessing skills. But before we do that, if you're new here, my name is Rick Mul already and for the past almost 12 years now, I've run a seven-figure online business helping other online business owners grow and scale their online business. Today, I run an AI community called the AI playbook where I help online business owners leverage AI so that you can become more efficient, streamline your business, and increase profitability in your business. I'll link to the AI playbook community in the description below. Would love to see you in there.
Okay, so you can access Cloud Skills in the web version, in the desktop version, and the API in Cloud Code. We're looking at the web version right now. So, you're going to go down to your little initials in the bottom lefthand corner, click on settings, and then you'll click on capabilities. And if you scroll down here a little bit, you're going to see skills. These are going to be defaulted to off. Claude is going to use these automatically. You don't have to set anything up. These are already pre-built. You just flip them on based on whichever ones that you want to do. We're going to look today at the brand guidelines one. And the other option is to create your own skill, which again we're going to talk about more here in just a second. You just click on upload skill and then you can upload it right here and you will see it in your list much like I've done here with the YouTube growth engine skill. And by the way, to access skills, you are going to need to be on a paid claude plan. And also another important note, custom skills right now are individual to each user, which means if you're on a team plan or an enterprise plan, they're not shared organizationwide.
Now, you might be wondering, Rick, I already use cloud projects. What's the difference? Cloud projects are persistent context containers, if you will. When you create a project, you're essentially saying, every conversation in this space should know X about me or my business. projects are going to be best for ongoing work with consistent context. Like for example, if you're working on content creation for your business and you need Claude to reference specific docs repeatedly.
Claude skills on the other hand are executable capabilities, if you will. They're specialized tools that Claude can invoke or use to perform specific tasks all by itself. Think of them like a plug-in or mini apps. and skills are reusable across any conversation and you can use them within cloud projects. So here's a practical framework for thinking about this. Use a cloud project when claude needs to know your brand voice or your ICP for every single chat. Use a cloud skill on the other hand when you want a repeatable workflow like YouTube content creation or when you need to create specific file types and you want to update those files dynamically as you are using them. The key is does it follow a specific workflow with clear inputs, steps, and outputs? That's a skill. Is it ongoing context that Claude needs to remember in a specific place? That's a Claude project.
Right. Now, let's talk about how agent skills are structured. Remember agent skills, claude skills, same thing. Let me show you the anatomy of a skill so that you understand how to build one. And the first thing to understand is that every skill is going to require a skill.md file. So, it's a markdown file with YAML front matter. If you were like, "What are you talking about, Rick?" All that means is at the top of your file, you're going to define the name of the skill and the description of what the skill does and when to use it. Then after that, you're going to want to provide clear step-by-step instructions for Claude to follow, plus, if applicable, any concrete examples. You're also going to want to have a folder if necessary. In this case here, a folder for logos and additional fonts. Well, those are going to be in either one or maybe two additional files.
So, here's an example of what the structure of your skill might look like. So, you're going to have a folder with all of these resources for the skill in that folder. So, you're going to have the skill.md like I just talked about, and then you're going to have additional folders with different resources. Maybe you might have a folder for the logo files. You might have a folder for the font files. You might have a folder for examples, so showing us examples. You might have a folder that contains your writing style or your tone of voice or what have you. And here's a tip. Only add context that Claude doesn't already have. The key here is being lean and keeping it as simple as possible.
All right, now that you got the foundational knowledge of Claude skills, let's talk about five mind-blowing use cases where skills really shine. Hey, for the first use case, I want to show you how easy it is to use one of the pre-made skills that Anthropic has included here in Claude. So, again, I'm going to go down to settings. I'm going to go to capabilities and then go down here. I want to make sure that the brand guidelines skill is turned on. And if you click these three little dots here, we're going to say try in chat. And it's going to give us this little message here. I just added the brand guidelines skill. Can you make something amazing with it? I'm going to click go. And let's see what it comes back with.
All right, cool. So, it came back and told me it's an example skill that applies Anthropics brand colors. I don't care about their brand colors. So, I'm going to say I want to create my own custom brand guidelines skill for the AI playbook. It's creating comprehensive brand guidelines, replacing the template with my AI playbook brand standards. And you'll notice here, by the way, that the first file that it's creating is that skill.md file, which again is the name of the skill, the description of the skill, and then the instructions for how to use the skill. All right, it's just wrapped up here. Took a few minutes to do it, but really, really well done. It's created my brand guidelines skill for me, which is the downloadable file right here. It tells me what the brand identity it used. All that is correct. It created the uh brand demo PowerPoint slides for me. It created the readme file uh for a markdown file to include in the skill. And then here are all the skill files that it gave me. So I can click on download now. And for the AI playbook brand skill, I can then go into I can click on upload skill upload. I just did this and you'll see it right here. So, anytime I want to create like PowerPoint slides or visual materials or whatever inside of Claude, I can just tell it to use my brand guidelines because I've created this skill. It will do it the same way every single time that align with my brand.
Okay, for use case number two, let's create a lead scoring calculator skill. Imagine you've got a pile of leads and you need to prioritize who to follow up with first. So, we're going to create a skill that takes your lead list and automatically generates an Excel spreadsheet that scores and ranks them based on customizable criteria that you set. The skill will ask for your leads and scoring criteria or use intelligent defaults like company size, budgets, engagement level, etc. It'll then output an Excel file with individual scores, total scores, priority rankings, and even conditional formatting with green, for example, for for hot leads, yellow for warm, and red for cold.
Okay? And here's the prompt I'm going to use. And just by the first sentence here, I'm telling Claw, create a skill called lead scoring calculator that does the following. And I've given it very explicit things that I want it to do. All right. In less than 2 minutes, it's created the skill for me and it's outlined exactly what's included in the skill. Now, let's test it with our lead data. All right, so I just put in a sample of five leads with a whole bunch of data about those leads to test the skill. And you can see here as it's going through and processing my request, it's going through each of the only the necessary files within the skill. So, it's first referring to this skill.md file because that has the instructions on basically how to use the skill, but then it's only going to pull from the necessary resources that it needs like I talked about before. And here you can see that it's creating the lead scoring spreadsheet for me. All right, here it's giving me the priorities using the colors that I asked it to and a summary. And then here is my spreadsheet over here in a new artifact. And by the way, just to note, this is actually a really important distinction. When you are creating skills this way on the web version, any files that Claude's creating for you as part of the skill, they're not being stored locally on your machine. They're being stored virtually in Claude temp files. You can get more advanced with it and create skills that connect to files actually on your computer. We talk a lot more about that, go a lot more in depth in my AI playbook community if you want to get into creating slightly more advanced style skills.
For use case number three, let's just say that you finish a client project and then they want a report. Normally, you're going to be spending like two, three, even more hours pulling data, copying metrics into a document, formatting it to look all professional. Instead, with a skill, let's just say that you've got a folder with files for your project data, your metrics, your notes, and then you can just trigger the client report builder skill that I'm going to show you how to create. tell it the folder path where that information lives, the client name, and the report date, and then it's going to create a complete report for you.
Okay, so I'm just going to paste in the prompt that I want to use to create the client report builder skill. And again, I'm telling it create a skill. And as you can see, the first file it's creating is the skill.md. So again, this is these are the instructions for the skill and how to execute the skill for itself. Okay, it's gone ahead and created the client report builder skill. And now, let's test it out. So, I'm just telling it use the client report builder skill to generate a report. And here's the report that this skill just created for me. You can see the cover page, executive summary, project overview, results in metric, client feedback, recommendations, next steps. It's pretty thorough. And of course, I can customize this however I want. If I want different results in my report, I can update the skill accordingly. That's a great thing about skills. You can keep iterating on it and give it feedback and it will dynamically update the instructions for you.
All right, for use case number four, this is what I call my strategic decision-making skill. Create a skill that walks you through your decision-making framework. So for me, for example, first principles, 8020 analysis, systems thinking, jobs to be done for any business decision. So for example, when creating your skill, you can bundle your framework templates, you know, example analyses of decisions based on these frameworks, a decision documentation format in the skill if you want. So now when you have a vague problem or something that you want to make a decision on, you activate the skill and it's going to guide you through a very structured analysis with a clear recommendation. It's like having a strategic consultant available 24/7 for you. And for me, here's what that skill looks like. This is the skill.md file which is explaining again name of the skill, the description of the skill, and then all the necessary information in terms of the frameworks etc. So now we can test this out. This is something I'm considering in the business. Actually going to do this. I'm going to test this out. I'm considering adding a higher tier to my AI playbook community. It will be $997 a month. What do you think?
So, you can see here that it is analyzing the different decision-m frameworks against the question that I've asked it. And now it's breaking down my question through each of these principles. And then coming down here, it's giving me its specific analysis.
And for use case number five, a super helpful skill to create is a survey data analyzer skill. So, let's say you send out a survey in your business, you get 40 or multiple hundreds of responses. Now, you're staring at a spreadsheet with hundreds of cells of text in it and data. I mean, it's going to take you hours to go through and analyze it. Let me show you a better way. So, I've given it my prompt for exactly what I want this survey data analyzer skill to do. Okay, so it's built the skill for me and I want to test it now with actual survey results from my AI playbook members and I just want to tell it to proceed. Okay, now using our skill, Claude has just analyzed our survey responses and given me the stats, average rating, NPS, and then it generated a bunch of files for me. So, it generated a 7page executive summary with an analysis, created an Excel document with four different tabs, rating distribution, wordcloud data, created a PDF for me with numbers and key findings, and then finally created a 10 slide PowerPoint presentation for me. I mean, once we've created the skill, it took a matter of what, 5 minutes to actually run the skill. Now, next time when you have survey results and you have this skill, all you have to do is attach your CSV file or tell it where it is on your on your computer and say, I want you to analyze these survey results for me and it will run the skill for you and give you this kind of level output.
Here's what all this really means. skills let you package your expertise, your processes, your frameworks into reusable tools that Claude can execute consistently every single time. I'm really impressed with Claude skills and how they're able to help me and make things way way easier in my business. Again, if you're an online business owner and you're looking to leverage AI more deeply in your business, you're looking to streamline, make it more efficient, make more money with AI in your business, and also increase profitability, I want to invite you to join us inside my AI playbook community, which I'll link to in the description below. As always, thanks so much for watching today's video. I'll see you in the next one.