How to Add Skills in Claude (2-Minute Setup + 5 Skills to Build First)
Skills are the most underrated feature in Claude right now — and the reason two people with the same subscription get wildly different results. A skill is a small instruction file Claude loads exactly when a task matches it: your writing voice, your slide format, your definition of "humanized" text. Set it once, benefit in every chat after.
This guide covers the setup in two minutes, the template that makes skills actually work, and the five skills worth building first.
What a Claude skill actually is
Think of a skill as a specialist instruction card, not a prompt. Three properties make it different from pasting text into a chat:
- It has a trigger. The skill describes when it applies ("whenever I ask for slides"), and Claude pulls it in automatically.
- It loads on demand. Your context stays clean; the skill only shows up when the task matches.
- It's permanent. You stop re-explaining the same preferences in every conversation.
If you've read our guide on running Claude as your operations system, skills are the layer below that: the reusable capabilities your system is built from.
How to add a skill in Claude Code
Skills live in a folder. Create one and drop an instruction file inside:
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/my-first-skillInside that folder, create a file called SKILL.md — the template below goes in there. That's the entire installation. Claude Code picks it up automatically and uses it whenever a task matches the description.
How to add skills in the Claude apps
In the Claude web and desktop apps, open Settings → Capabilities and enable skills. Community-built skills can be added from marketplaces; your own skills follow the same structure as the template below. The exact menu names shift as the feature evolves, but the principle is identical everywhere: a named capability with instructions Claude loads when needed.
The SKILL.md template (copy this)
Every reliable skill answers three questions: WHEN should Claude use it, WHAT are the rules, and HOW should the output look.
---
name: my-skill-name
description: One sentence - what this does and WHEN to use it.
---
## When to use
The exact trigger: "when I ask for X" / "whenever output is Y"
## Rules
1. The most important rule
2. The second rule
3. What to NEVER do
## Output format
Exactly what the result should look like - structure, length, tone.The description line matters most: it's how Claude decides whether to load the skill. Make it specific ("formats sales reports with traffic-light flags") instead of vague ("helps with reports").
The 5 skills to build first
- The Humanizer. Kills the AI smell: no buzzwords, varied sentence length, no throat-clearing intros. The single most-searched skill for a reason.
- Your Voice. Three examples of your real writing plus the rules that make them yours. Every draft sounds like you wrote it.
- The Slide Builder. Your fixed deck format — title style, words per slide, structure per slide type.
- The Offer Checker. Your standards for anything customer-facing, applied automatically before you see a draft. Pairs well with the prompts in our founder pack.
- The Report Format. How you want numbers presented: always included, flagged, cut.
Each is a 15-minute build. Together they compound — which is the whole point of skills over prompts.
The mistake that makes skills useless
One mega-skill that "does everything" fails, because the trigger becomes mushy and the rules contradict each other. Keep each skill to one capability, one trigger, one output format. If your SKILL.md scrolls past two screens, split it into two skills.
Where to go from here
We packaged the template, the setup for both environments, and all five starter skills into a free kit — grab it below. And if you want the full library of playbooks and systems behind it, the $1 trial opens everything for a week.