Claude Skills Tutorial (2026): Build, Run, and Share transcript

Claude Skills are reusable prompts you save once and run by typing forward slash and the name of the prompt. Today, you'll learn how to create your first skill step-by-step, run them across Chat, Cowork, and Claude Code, and share skills with your team. I'm David DeWinter, your guide to all things Claude. Open up a browser, head to Claude.ai with me, and let's dive in. Together, we'll create a skill to catch you up on long email threads.

It'll summarize the thread. Tell you your action items as well as draft a reply. To create a skill, you do not need a paid plan. Just simply head over to the sidebar and then click on Customize. Skills live under this Customize Skills tab. A skill is nothing fancy. It's literally a file with a prompt. This Gmail Summary skill, for example, just looks for recent emails to draft responses to. Under the covers, it's a single file called a Markdown file.

Basically, it's a text file which has special characters for formatting. Simple skills only have a prompt, but some more complex skills can actually embed code. For example, this Dashboard Updater skill also includes some Python code to run its task. But regardless of the complexity, skills are saved prompts. So let's create our first one. From this screen, the easiest way is to click the plus button, go to create skill and then create with Claude.

You get a prompt which as of filming looks like this, we're actually going to create a skill using its skill creator skill. So it's a bit meta. So it starts off by asking, what do we want to do with this skill? Now, I've got a response already prepared. You can grab this from the resource guide that's in the description. Basically, given a long email thread or a Slack thread among my co-workers, help me summarize the main points, call out action items and draft a response.

We are asking for help building tone. This is so the email it drafts doesn't sound like AI. Before we look at the response, notice I added these words. What else should I clarify? This tells Claude not to make assumptions about how we want this build instead default to asking us for clarification. We see those questions showing up right away here. So really don't worry about being super precise with your first prompt.

Claude will guide you through this process. Your questions will be different. So take the time to respond thoughtfully. Now, while this is running, I do want to call out question three about triggers. Once you create a skill, you can invoke it by the name of the skill. That's the shortcut it references here. Or Claude will pick it up automatically based on context. That's this option. In my experience, while Claude is getting better at recognizing skills through this, it's actually more reliable to invoke it with the shortcut.

After you answer that first round of questions, it will either ask you more questions or start drafting the skill. Claude here has drafted the skill and has separated it into this thing called front matter and the body. Front matter describes a skill at a high level and details how you use it while the body is the actual prompt. So it's helped us get more specific, which is good. And now the next step of the process is to test against examples.

This helps you refine your skill before you turn it on. Now, you have a choice here. You can either have Claude create the examples or paste in examples yourself. I've got an email thread ready to go, so I'll test it against that. Now, while that's running for those of you who didn't reach this step as in it didn't create the skill, just tell it inside of your next prompt. This is good. Create the skill. As for this example email thread, I just sent in, it gives us a summary action items and two draft replies.

Now, I'm glossing over the details of the summary and the action items here because this isn't a video about how to write emails. It's a video about skills. But you need to know that this is where the real work is. Any feedback you can give on these test examples will make the skill better. You can send in feedback just by writing a prompt. I'm sure you get the idea by now. So let's install the skill. It gets packaged up as the skill file and then clicking it will reveal the prompt behind the skill.

And remember, if you keep getting asked feedback questions, you can force the creation just by telling Claude to do so. To install the skill, you can either click the save skill button here or the save skill button up in the preview pane. You'll see the skill saved dialog and let's click manage here. Thread Reply now shows up in the skills list here and you'll see its description and the prompt down below. Now, here's a cool thing to know about skills.

These prompts are super long, right? So if you have all the prompts from all the skills you have loaded in every conversation, Claude would probably get confused on what to do. That's why these prompts don't get loaded automatically. They only get loaded when a skill is triggered and a skill is triggered in one of two ways. The first is when typing the skill name directly. And the second is when Claude refers from the context that it needs to be used, though the first way is definitely more reliable.

From here, try your skill by clicking the three dots in the top right and then clicking try and chat. This is how you invoke skills, a forward slash plus the name of the skill. Type in the context that your skill needs and then submit it. Now you might find that even with all that iteration, your skill might not be that good. It might work, but just not as well as you doing it on your own. You're on the right path, keep using it and then tune it right afterward.

You can do that simply by asking Claude to update the skill. For example, I don't like signing off emails with the word best. So I'm just going to tell Claude to update the skill not to do that. In a few seconds, it makes the changes and you can continue building from there. Great skills have three components. They're specific. They've been built based on real examples and they've stood the test of time. The skill we just built summarizes and drafts replies based on your voice.

But skills get more interesting when you teach them the rules that only you know about your business. Let me show you what that looks like with today's sponsor QuickBooks Workforce. Okay, so say you run payroll for a small business and before you hit submit, you want a quick sanity check that everything looks okay. You can do that with a skill. So the key is to get the data out of the system that you're using. QuickBooks Payroll can do that when you click preview payroll details.

You can save this PDF, upload it into Claude and then run your skill. It flagged a couple things I need to pay attention to. So now I can go back and fix my payroll. Oh, and I hope you caught that you don't even have to remember your skills name. You just type the forward slash key and all of your skills show up in an autocomplete window. If you've got a small business, payroll can be a huge challenge with so many taxes, fees and state specific requirements to keep track of.

If you feel that burden, check out QuickBooks Workforce. All your employee records stay in one place. Your team can add their time sheets through a mobile app and you can make sure your payroll goes out on time every time. Check out QuickBooks Workforce using the link in the description below for% off for three months. Now we just built this thread reply skill on Claude on the web. But if you download Claude for the desktop, the same skill is about to show up somewhere we didn't install it.

Check it out. When you install Claude Desktop, you get access to three apps, Chat, Cowork and Code. We've still got the customize button here too. And when we click on it and then go to skills, you'll see the thread reply skill is still there. I didn't have to install it separately. These environments are all connected. Let's go back here and see how this works inside of the Cowork app. Cowork introduces some cool features on top of chat and the main one is that you can work in a local folder.

The reason that's so valuable is so you can jumpstart every conversation with all the context in that folder. For example, the folder I just selected has this file about our business, this file about our financials, and this file about our team. So back in Cowork, I can ask it use the business context in this folder too and then invoke the thread reply skill. And then I'll paste in the perfect email thread to use it on.

Now while this is working, you'll see a whole number of new things on the right side of the page here. If you're interested more in Cowork, check out our tutorial in the top right. So this is cool. It's like we've saved our prompt inside of this thread reply skill and we get the same type of result inside of Cowork. We get the email summary, action items for me, and a draft reply. And you don't just see this in Cowork, you'll see it across the Claude ecosystem.

That includes Claude for Word, Claude for Excel, and Claude for PowerPoint. Claude Code works differently though, so let's spend a few minutes reviewing how skills work there. Here I've got Claude Code running inside of VS Code. I like this view because I can see all the files of the folder that I care about on the left side of the screen. To make this easier to follow, I won't use the terminal today, but everything I show you will also work in the terminal.

So let's try our thread reply skill. When you type slash in Claude Code, you'll quickly find out that the skill list here doesn't match the rest of the Claude ecosystem. So what's the deal with that? Skills are installed differently here, and you can get some insight on that by asking about global versus project skills. Global skills are available to every Claude Code instance across your machine, and then project global skills live inside this folder.

Now to create a skill, you can use the same pattern that we used on the web, and you can even ask Claude Code for help creating a skill. It takes you down a very similar road. It'll tell you what it needs, and then it asks you what you want. But we've already built this thread reply skill. So is there a way to import it into Claude Code? Let's take a look. I've just gone back to the skills view inside of Claude. You can get this on the desktop or the web app.

With the thread reply skill selected, I'm going to hit these three dots and then click download. When you're prompted for a file name, actually rename it to .zip. The reason for that will be clear in just a second. Now extract the zip file. You're going to get a folder with a skill file in it, and it will look something like this. On the right side of the screen, we have the folder that's open in Claude Code. To install a skill here, you need to copy it into a skills folder inside a dot Claude folder.

I'll move the thread reply folder, not the skill file directly, but the folder into the skills folder. Back in VS Code, you can see that folder structure show up here in the left sidebar. Now it doesn't show up in your current Claude Code session, but if you start a new one, and then try the skill, you'll see it's recognized. Now before we leave this example, one cool thing to keep in mind. This folder structure of dot Claude slash skills also works within Cowork.

That means if you're sharing a folder with someone, you can also share skills this way. So let's answer the top question that I get from teams that I train on Claude. How do we share skills? Path number one to share skills is to use a zip file. Now I just showed you how you can download a skill out of Claude using the three dots menu here. So if you have a skill to share, download it first here, then have your colleague click this plus button under skills, go to create skill, and then upload a skill.

Then they can choose a zip file or a skill file to upload into Claude. Now that we've covered that, let me share why you should never do it. You now have two copies of the skill, one on your machine and one on your friends machine. So if one of you updates the skill, you're now running two different versions, and you have to run through this download upload process to get back in sync. Path number two solves this problem, but it only works if you have a Claude teams or enterprise account.

Organization-wide admins get access to this special organization settings view. I'm going to take you down on the left side to the section called skills. There are some interesting skill settings here, but I'm going to direct your attention all the way to the bottom to organization skills. You can upload skills the exact same way I showed you before, but this time they're accessible to your entire Claude organization.

These skills can be used in the exact same way that I've showed you before. And in fact, if you go to the customized skills view, you'll also see a new section for those organization-wide skills. Now one thing worth knowing about organization skills, you can use them, but you can't edit them. But if you want to make a change, you can always ask your Claude admin to download the skill and send it to you. Now if you don't have a Claude teams account, but you do have a shared cloud drive like OneDrive or Google Drive, then there is an experimental way I've found to share skills.

Here's how it works. First, make sure you sync that drive down to your local machine. That's what this folder is. Then for the folder you want to work in, right click and click on something that looks like always keep on this device. This menu option will be called something different depending on the tool you're using. This is for OneDrive. Next, load up Cowork and select the folder that you just downloaded. Inside this folder, we've got a Claude folder with a skills folder, which contains a skill.

But for Cowork to pick up the skill, it's got to be in a dot Claude folder. Unfortunately, OneDrive does not support folders that start with a dot. So we've got to settle for Claude as is. And then we use this special file called CLAUDE.md to preload the skills in the folder. This is a bit advanced. So if you want to learn more, check out the resource guide in the description for the full setup. Let me show you how this works.

Now first of all, the skill is not installed anywhere, so it doesn't show up in auto-complete. But I can still say run the contract generator. That's the name of the skill on this deal notes file. And you can see before it even loads the file, it'll load the skill that we have in the directory, even though I misspelled it as contractor generator instead of contract. We'll check back on this one in just a minute. Let me take you through the last option.

This is Git. It's a source control system, which is mainly used by software developers. Because skills are basically marked down or text files, it's really useful to have a version history. This is super useful in case someone modifies a skill and makes it worse by accident. Git shows you this version history and allows you to revert to previous versions. Git can get complex, so we'll stop our overview here. But if you are non-technical and you want to learn more about how to use Git with your team, let me know in the comments.

Now you know how to build a Claude skill. You know how to run them in Chat, in Cowork, and in Claude Code. And you know four ways to share them with your team. Your next step is to connect your apps with your skills, which you can learn more about here. Now big thanks to our sponsor QuickBooks Workforce, link in the description below for 50% off for three months. I'm David DeWinter, and I'll see you in the next video.