Transcription
Claude skills or agent skills. This is something I have been waiting for a long time, and honestly, I'm so excited because these has a huge potential and such a game changer, just like MCP in changing how we design AI workflows or AI agents. And not just within Claude, other AI models might likely adopt similar concepts. So in this video I explain what skills actually is, why this is another game changer, and most importantly, how you can start using them today to get immediate results. Let's go.
So what is Claude skills? Really, the official definitions is very confusing. The easiest way to think of it is reusable instructions manual that Teach Claude how you want task to be done, what tools to use, what standard to follow so it execute automatically anytime, anywhere when you need it.
Before Claude skills. When you execute repetitive tasks like writing, marketing, emails that follow your brand voice or process, you will have to repeat the same instructions in every single chat. This is inconsistent and time consuming. Now, you might be think, just use a Claude project with custom instructions, right? Yes, 100% and this is what most people are already doing, but there are still two fundamental limitations. First, these instructions are not portable. Imagine next time when you're doing another campaign, you either have to execute inside this project or you repeat all the instructions again. And second, it's not stackable. Imagine you have a specialized project for copywriting and other project for campaign analysis. You can't just combine them together for a new task. They operate in complete isolation. And so you have to build so many different projects, which might actually end up with overlapping workflows. And that's why the solution Claude skills.
So instead of embedding all these workflow instructions and resources inside a project, you extract them out and package them into what they call the fancy term skills and make them available at the account level, including the web app, Claude code, or Claude API. So once you understand this, you can have so many kinds of user manual, perhaps an email writing manual, market research manual, design template manual, and they can be used all together as well. And that is why this is a game changer, as now you have way more flexibility and portability of these skills for your workflow or agent design.
Now another big confusion is between skills and MCP and projects. And someone might tell you skills is just Anthropic's way to fix the MCP problems. And this is a big misconception. If you view it under the lens of Claude's, ecosystem, Claude itself is the brain. The core intelligence that make decisions. skills are the instruction manual, the reusable instructions for how specific tasks should be done. MCP provides the tools, the actual capabilities to do things outside of Claude's knowledge, like creating a file, calling a database. Projects are the dedicated workspace where you can combine skills. MCP tools and background knowledge for specific ongoing work. And this is exactly what makes this Claude ecosystem so powerful. You can mix and match based on what your specific workflow needs. Not every workflows needs all these components. They are not competing. They are building blocks and are designed to be coexist, to build powerful workflows or agents.
Basically there are three types of skills you can use with Claude. For this video demo, I'll be using the Claude web application.
First, the official skills by Antrhopic these are ready to use skills built right inside Claude. Just go to settings under capabilities here. You will control what capabilities Claude will use in the chat, but first you have to make sure code execution and file creation has been turned on in order to use skills. Then you will see a list of predefined skills. I do not recommend you turn them on all at once. Just pick the one that you are really gonna use, because more skills might confuse Claude when executing the workflow.
Besides the official skills created by Anthropic, they're also skills created by Anthropic's partner like Notion. So you can check out the official GitHub repository and scroll down to partner skills where you can download the skills and use them on Claude so I will put the link in the description.
And second custom skills. So these are your own creation. It can be your own workflow instructions, resource template, or even coding script. You prepare your own skill file according to the official format, and you activate them by uploading the skill file. You can also turn on and use the official skill called “skill-creator” to create your custom skill if you’re a non-technical. This is how you personalize Claude to your way of working, and I'll show you how in just a minute.
Third is Community-created skills. So there is also a growing ecosystem of skills created by other Claude user, but you want to be cautious about security when using these community skills.
And according Anthropic, once you turn on the skill, it will be automatically triggered when it's contextually relevant. But from my experience, Claude might not trigger all the time as you expect. So my tip is to also add this to the account level. Custom instructions to make sure Claude will always, always consider relevant skills when responding.
And if you are marketer wanting to build your own Claude skills, there is a resource that pairs perfectly with what we will be covering in this video "Claude Hacks for Marketers". from THE HUSTLE, you can find the download link below. It is a comprehensive prompt library designed specifically for marketing power users like us. It has 10 core sections covering every common marketing task we are all familiar with content creation, business research, dashboard creation. Particularly, I like the strategic analysis and thinking section. I believe that AI shouldn't just give you direct answers. It can be your great thinking partner that can challenge your own assumptions, uncovering your blind spots, and here is the best part. You can integrate these prompts directly into your custom Claude skills as you build out your marketing workflows so you are not building everything from scratch. Download it for free in the description it's made by the Hustle, who is sponsoring this video. Thank you so much!
Alright, let’s try a simple example using the official ‘theme-factory’ skill we just turned on. So let's say I'm building a landing page for a new SaaS product called PowerTrac, and I already got the copy now just attached to copy to Claude, and then asked there to build the landing page mockup using a beautiful theme notes I haven't mentioned using any specific skills. But you can see Claude is now checking the theme factory skills automatically to pick a beautiful theme. And that is because the account level custom instructions I have already set. So within just a minute, the landing page is ready. The official theme factories has 10 theme, and Claude picked the tech innovation theme from the library. It looks pretty cool and tech savvy. So with this simple skills, you can quickly apply ready to use styling to any documents that you create, like a landing page or a presentation.
Let's try another example. So this time ask it to draft an FAQ word document about these product launch, which will be shared with the internal team. So this time Claude is reading the building document creation skills and generating these well-formatted document. So this looks pretty decent and comprehensive with seven pages and you can see Claude apply the same theme to this document as well as The only complaint I have is it didn't use the internal communication skills that I expect for driving these FAQ response. So this is the limitation of Claude skills that it highly relies on the context to trigger the relevant skills, or you need to specify the skills explicitly in a chat. And what I like is now I can just either download the document or I can upload to my Google Drive, making it more easy to share with the team. So using the official theme factories or any other built-in skills that you turn on, you can already quickly apply that into your workflow by giving relevant context.
Now you know how to use an existing built-in skills, but you can also create a new custom skills in case there's no one that match your needs. And that three main ways to create a new custom skills.
The first way is to extend an existing official skills and repackage it into a new skill. For example, I run a flower business and my company has this branded presentation template, and I want Claude to use it whenever building a presentation deck. Now, just attach this presentation template and ask it to first read the official PowerPoint building skills and then create a new skills called branded deck that extends it. Now, I highly suggest you is give more context to Claude whenever creating new skills. So when the skills should be triggered, any usage example, any specific guidelines, and most importantly, ask it to reference the parent skills to avoid duplication, and also use the official skills creator to ensure the proper formatting. Then output it as a ready to use set file. So now Claude is reading the parent skills and the skill creator to understand the structure and also my upload template to extract the relevant colors and fonts. And then the new skills is ready, is in a zip file format, and then we can just download it.
So to activate these new custom skills, just go back to settings under capabilities, and here you can upload the new skills we just create. And now this new skills is ready to use everywhere in the chat, so for example, I'm building the Q3 business performance review presentation. So first upload the sales data and the marketing research report and ask Claude to extract key insights from these resources. And just within a few minutes, we have this comprehensive executive brief about the performance analysis. This is really Claude's strength to provide this kind of strategic insight with summary tables. And now we are ready to build a deck. So ask Claude to base on these executive brief insights. Create a company branded presentation deck. Notes. I have emphasized the keyword company branded to make sure Claude will use the branded deck skills we just create. So it is now triggering the brand deck skills and understand the brand guidelines and presentation requirements and then also reading the official PowerPoint presentation skills. And so it is now creating the presentation and within just a few minutes, the brand presentations is ready. It looks pretty good with all the themed slides and we can just download for double checking. So, Claude does most of them right The theme and style look exactly the same as the company presentation template. Although there's still some minor margin or layout issues that I have to adjust myself for. For most of the content is correct and fits well within the layout. A complaint is that it was not using any charts in a deck as I instructed, but just the table only. And whenever you find any issues when executing a theme or you want to enhance it, you can always give it back to Claude and adjust the skills and update for you. Although it's not like 100% finalized, to be honest, I'm still impressed because this is a complicated theme with images and heavy styling and compare with other AI models. Claude is by far the only AI really able to build beautiful presentation like this within one single workflow. And I would say this is the most immediate, easiest, quick win for every marketers or working professionals.
And this method doesn't just work for presentations, it works for documents. Excel spreadsheet landing pages it's completely scalable. And so you get the idea. You don't need to start from scratch in creating new skills. Try to leverage any existing official skill first and build upon it.
Now, the second way is to turn any existing workflow that you are already using and package it into a new skills. And this is an another immediate quick win.
For example, I have this Custom Claude project about team reporting. So this project is specialized in pulling the project checker status from the Notion database and building a custom dashboard. So it already has a very detailed project, custom instructions, like the role, the tool that it should be using, workflow details output format, and also the output template in the resource. So this is a really good scenario in packaging it as a new scale. So first, make sure you already turn on Notion MCP. Then use this prompt to ask it to create a new skills called Notion Project. Dashboard. Very important, is to ask it first study the available notion MCP tools, and determine which tools are really needed for this specific workflow. So the reason is because usually for an MCP server, it might contain so many different tools, and you don't want the skills to load every possible tools, which might not be needed. Then again, include all those important context about these new skills, and then paste back the full set of custom instructions with workflow details, and then upload the output template file as well. So immediately the new skills is created and ready to be uploaded and activate. So the magic here is then I can now just ask Claude to generate the project status dashboard from Notion in any new chat. And I don't need to stick with any project. Claude will now call the Notion MCP server and triggered Notion project dashboard skills for this task and the dashboard format styling look exactly the same as I generated within this project. And that means now using Claude skills, you can make any of your established workflow portable And combining with MCP, you can bring them anywhere as you chat with Claude.
Now let's go more advanced and take a step even further. So that is the third way. Create multiple new skills from scratch and use them and MCP all together within a Claude project. So for example, I want to streamline my workflow of blog content creation from keyword research to the actual block content creation. So first let's build a new skills called keyword research that will be using the Ahrefs MCP and ask it to study the available Ahrefs MCP tools, as there's so many. So give it all the context and this time also include the workflow details. And this is important because we need to teach Claude to understand the process and to follow through. Of course, this has been simplified for the demo purpose. I highly suggest you attach a more comprehensive versions to ensure the skills quality, and within a minute we got this new cured research skill.
Then the second skills is the blog writer skill. So this time, besides including the workflow details in the prompt, also include the output guideline, as I want to make sure every generated blog articles is optimized for AI search engines.
Now, let's say we have this brand project for the light cast carrier coaching platform product. It already has the product overview file, product materials, also with the custom instructions that briefly covered the brand voice target audience. Notes here I have include "Skills Workflow" and saying for SEO Content and blog writing content, it will use the skills keyword research and blog writer. The tip is you don't need to include the workflow details, just instructor skills it should be using for what task. Another tip is you can also add the tools in the custom instructions to make sure Claude knows which tools it can use for this project. So let's say we want to create a new blog post about how to build a personal brand on LinkedIn as part of the campaign launch. So the prompt is very brief and you can see Claude is now calling the blog writing skills and keyword research skills that trigger the Ahrefs MCP tool to get the relevant keyword and question data,, and even doing the web searching as this is what I have instructed and the block writing workflow. And Claude is following all the workflow details and finally generate this formatted word document. I am quite impressed. It is very comprehensive with six pages and it's exactly the format that I want with the two long don't read sections for AI use of the question as the heading. And then use of bullet points. And I can even upload to Google Drive for further adjustment. And this is just a simplified versions clock can also add internal links, external links, and even images to this blpg content. And you can always just ask Claude to make changes for you.
So when do you really need the skills or need to create a new custom skills? Ask yourself These three core question. First, do you need to repeat the same instructions across different chats like three times or more? Second, if putting it in a real world situation, would you need to train a real human about this process or standard? Third, if quality or format consistency is needed every time. If you have more than two boxes checked, the better. You should create skills.
Also, if you're on the pro plan, the weekly usage limit can be quite pain, only create custom skills for your most repeated workflows to avoid burning tokens, or use other AI models to create the skills for you. You can simply upload the official skill-creator zip file to ChatGPT, ask it to study it and generate a new skill by including your requirement. This works 100%. And skills are static and might need maintenance, especially when it needs to call an MCP tool function, which might change over time. So you can ask Claude to include what I call a backup plan. Whenever a tool call fails and try not to use too many MCP tools in one scale. Keep it simple.
So make sure you try all this method I mentioned and let me know how it goes in the comment, and give me a thumbs up if you enjoyed this video so far. Also, I encourage you to join my community every month. We have specialized deep dive workshop and you will also unlock all the prompt resources I share on this channel. I hope to see you there and before you go, also watch this video about MCP so you have better understanding of how these two will work together. I'll see you next time.