How to Build Your First Claude Skill

By the end of this walkthrough you will have built your first Claude skill: a reusable workflow that Claude can repeat on demand, exactly the same way, every time. I explain what a skill actually is under the hood, then build one live from a simple "research trending AI topics" task using Claude's built-in skill creator. And here is the good news up front: everything you learn today is also applicable to ChatGPT.

What you need

• A Claude account. The skill creator comes prepackaged, so there is nothing to install.
• One task you already do multiple times a day: updating your CRM, checking your emails, searching for information online. Any of them works.

1. A skill is a reusable workflow (0:12)

At 0:12 I give you the core definition. Imagine something you do literally every day, multiple times a day. Everything you repeat like that is a workflow, a reusable workflow. A skill is simply a standardized way for AI to repeat that workflow time and time again.

2. A skill is a mega prompt (0:40)

The second lens: a skill is a mega prompt. Whenever you use a skill, what you are really doing is sending the same prompt over and over again to the AI. Inside that prompt there are very specific parts:

• A description. This is what triggers the skill. If you create a skill called "Do Web Research on AI Topics", the description tells Claude: whenever the user asks you to do research on AI topics, use this skill.
• The skill.md file. That is just a Markdown file, a type of text format, and it holds the instructions.

3. The optional toolkit (1:26)

A skill can be much more than one text file. Say you have a skill that generates a document, some legal document or a business proposal. You can include the supporting material in the skill itself: visual assets, examples, templates. And for the more advanced skills, you can even include scripts. For example, if you want to check your CRM and run analysis on it, you can ship a script inside the skill that does exactly that.

4. How to spot a skill worth building (2:00)

The build process starts before any building. First, spot the skill. You can even ask Claude or any AI tool directly:

Check what we did right now and tell me if we can build a skill with it.

You do not have to write the descriptions yourself anymore; everything is done directly by Claude. The only thing you need to do is notice what you do each and every day, do it once with AI, and then tell the AI to turn it into a skill.

5. Live demo: research trending AI topics (2:33)

Time to build. My example task is simple on purpose:

Hey Claude, can you please do research, just one web search, on trending AI topics in the world?

Claude does it once and returns a few AI news items. Now, maybe I like to do this two, three, four times a day. That makes it a candidate. Do not let the simplicity fool you: skills can get very advanced, real end-to-end workflows across many departments of a company. A skill can be extremely complex and very long. But you learn the mechanics on a small one.

6. Turning it into a skill with the skill creator (3:18)

With the task done once, the conversion is one message:

Can you please turn this into a skill?

That is genuinely all. Claude uses something called the skill creator, a skill it comes prepackaged with. Whenever you ask Claude to create or modify a skill, it uses this skill to do it, which is a fun bit of recursion.

7. The finished skill (4:00)

The output in my demo is a skill called AI Trends Briefing. As promised, a skill is literally just a folder containing a single file called skill.md. The description sits at the top, so Claude knows that whenever I ask for a web search on trending AI topics, this is the skill to run. Below it is the entire mega prompt explaining, step by step, everything it needs to do.

8. Saving and managing your skills (4:38)

To keep the skill, click the save button. From Manage you can see every skill you have access to, click into each one, and read what it contains. My AI Trends Briefing holds a single file, the mega prompt. Compare that with the skill creator skill itself: it has the skill.md text, plus assets, agents, and many other bundled pieces meant to be reused every single time. Same format, very different scale.

9. Simple vs complex, and the payoff (5:27)

A skill can be super simple or extremely complex. Either way, it is what turns AI into a repeatable workflow machine, and that is where the productivity actually comes from. I am not talking twenty percent. I am talking two to three times the level of productivity you have today.

Pitfalls and tips

• Do the task with AI once before converting it, then ask AI to turn it into a skill.
• Do not hand-write descriptions. Claude generates the trigger description for you, and that description is what makes the skill fire at the right moment.
• Best starting move, straight from the video:

Read through your memory and see what we can turn into a skill.

Where to go next

Once you have a skill or two, put them on a schedule with Automate Your Work with Claude (Scheduled Tasks), or see what multi-agent workflows look like in Scrape Every Social Platform at Once with AI.