Ultimate Guide To Claude Skills transcript

Claude skills are one of the most powerful AI capabilities that's available right now in 2026 and learning how to use them will completely change how you use Claude and the value you get out of Claude and also out of ChatGPT 2, but in this video I want to focus on Claude and I want to show you exactly what Claude skills are, the best ways to create them yourself from scratch, and plenty of different examples that I want to share with you that you could copy and paste.

I'll share the exact instructions that I used to create these skills. And I also want to mention how to use these skills in a safe way. A lot of the one that you create yourself are completely safe, but there are skills on the internet that you could download and they may have security issues, so I'll point that out at the end. So what exactly are Claude skills? Well, I like to think of skills as a way to upgrade your Claude experience.

They're basically a set of instructions that you create once and then Claude remembers that skill forever and then pulls it in as it needs it. So instead of typing the same set of instruction or the same prompt in every new chat to tell Claude what he needs to know, skills allow Claude to dynamically load that skill at the right moment when he needs that expertise. Now, what does a Claude skill look like? Let me just show you inside and then I'll break it down for you.

So inside of the Claude app or the Claude website, I'm going to go to the customize section here and I'm going to click on skills. And then you'll see different skills here that get loaded up. So they could be skills that you've created and they have lots of templates. I'll show you in more detail in a second. But ultimately this is a skill. This is the set of the instruction that tells Claude how to do something very specifically.

And all they are is what's called a markdown file. So the format for them is typically skill.md. MD is a text file that's known as a markdown file. And you don't really need to know much about it because we're going to use something called a skill builder inside of Claude to create these. We don't have to type every single word in the set of instructions. But, if you look at one skill, this is typically what they end up looking like and then they will appear here in this page.

Now, from this section also, I could go to browse skills. This will show you a template set of skills that Anthropic, the creator of Claude, have added to your Claude account. So, you will already have these skills here that say Anthropic. Skill creator is actually a skill to help you build skills, which we're going to get into in a second. Brand guidelines is another useful one. Building web artifacts is another useful one.

But, I'm going to show you a handful of skills that go beyond these that you could create yourself. But, this is definitely a great place to start. And these default skills are already part of your Claude account. So, if you press the settings icon right here, you'll see right on top is turned on. Now, if I disable it, it won't be able to use that in a Claude chat. If I enable it, when you type in a prompt and Claude knows that skill can be beneficial, it will pull that into chat.

You could always force it to be used, too. You could call that skill. But, by default, you could have 50, 60, 70 skills turned on in the background and Claude will use that. And it actually doesn't slow down or changes how you use Claude. It just initially loads a little tiny bit of data and it knows that skill exists. And then it pulls in the full skill and the set of instructions, even if they're really heavy set of instructions, where he actually needs it to complete a task.

So, it's really something that happens in the background. Okay, let me show you how to turn on skills and then I'll go ahead and show you how to create them in the best way possible. But, to turn it on, you just have to go to your settings icon here and then you need to click on settings. They They a section right here called capabilities, and in order to use skills, you actually need to have something turned on, which is called code execution and file creation.

This needs to be turned on in order for skills to work. Now, that may already be turned on if you already use Claude, but if it's not, make sure this is toggled on to blue. Next, let's create our very first skill. So, I'm going to go back to customize here, and I'll go to skill, and we could create our skill from here. So, if you press the plus sign, browse skills, I already showed you that page, those are skills available, a lot of them are created by Anthropic.

Create skills is how you can create a skill without knowing how to code or be a developer, just with plain English. And you'll see there's multiple ways to create a skill. Writing a set of instructions is the one I don't recommend because you'll have to just type it out. You can do this with a back-and-forth conversation with Claude, but this is definitely the more difficult part. If I click on it, it basically gives you this blank canvas and a little bit of instructions on how to do it.

Now, you could also upload a skill because, as I mentioned, they're a .md file, basically a text file that you could download from somewhere else and upload, and there's marketplaces, there's all kinds of different ways you can get skills, but you got to be very careful on where to get skills. I'll talk about the safety of skills, but right now, let's go ahead and create with Claude. Now, this basically just loads in a prompt.

Let's create a skill together using the skill creator skill, that's the one I mentioned that Anthropic has created. First, ask me what skill I should make. This creates just a back-and-forth conversation, and it interviews you to figure out exactly what you're looking to do, just one question at a time, right? And once you answer those clarifying question, you could go ahead and draft and test and then save that skill, so it gets loaded into chat anytime it's needed.

Now, just for this first skill, I'm going to show you one of the most common skills you could build, which is something that could mimic your writing style for whatever you want to do. Now, I would recommend creating different skills for different things you write, so one for email, for example, one for a sales letter, one for a newsletter. This one is going to be for my video scripts, and you basically just told me to upload text from one or two different scripts, so I'm going to do that next.

And then it typically asks a set of clarifying questions, so go through those. And after a couple of questions here, it asked me to test it out, so I asked it to write a script about Claude's skills in my tone, and I think it did a fantastic job here. It actually had a better intro than, I think, what I had in this video, but this is ready to go ahead and download or just copy and paste from here. Or, since you're inside of Claude, you could open this in your Google Drive, too.

Now, the next thing you do is you tell it to save that skill here, and then it will show you the set of instructions that it wrote to create that skill, and then you could go ahead and press save that skill. Now, once this skill is saved, let me start a new chat here, it will automatically know to pull in that skill anytime I ask it to write a YouTube script in my tone of voice. But, if I really wanted to have more control, I just type in {slash} and I have one called YouTube Script Writer.

It's going to show you a preview of the set of instructions for that, and then I could ask it to write me a script. This script is now going to be written with this set of instruction that I just created with that skill. So, this is the sure way to know that it's going to use that skill when it's doing that task. Now, if you go back to that skill section under the customize tab here, this is where you could turn it on and off if you want.

You could always download it, too, if you wanted to share the skill with someone else. It simply downloads the markdown file here that you could share. You could go ahead and edit it anytime with Claude or just edit it simply on your own and make any of the changes to the set of instructions. So, it typically has a name, it has a description, and these are the set of instructions. And you can see they're quite long. But, I didn't really do anything.

I just copied and pasted a couple of my YouTube scripts, and it decided that this is the typical way I make YouTube scripts, and it created a skill based on that set of instructions. Next, I want to show you five different skills that I think you're going to find really practical, and I'm going to show you how to build each one, and I'll share a lot of these with you. Me and my team actually put together an entire resource just for this video, completely free, and it shows you everything that you need to know to get the most out of skills here inside of Claude.

And by the way, ChatGPT also uses skills. Any AI agent also uses skills. So, skills go way beyond Claude. It's just one of the more useful things inside of Claude that I like to usually teach people. And in the guide, I also include the prompt I used in the video and some other ones. They both include the prompt that I used to build the skill, so what you give to Claude's skill builder, and I also included the skill.md file.

So, if you want to use that text instead of building it, you could also do that. And it also has a lot of the things I covered in this video in text format if you prefer that as well. I'll put a link in the description so you grab that resource. Now, let me show you some of these examples. Now, this first one I want to show you here is called a deep research auditor. So, this is going to help us build that skill. So, I just said, "Use the skill creator to build me the skill." And it audits long-form PDF reports for internal contradictions.

So, this is great for any type of research where you have it do all the work in, let's say, a 100-page PDF that you upload to it, right? So, it's not just summarizing it, it's not doing things that you could do with Claude. It actually converts it entirely in a different way, so you could actually see all the different things, charts, and things like that, and cross-reference the data from figure A to the claim in figure B, and find any type of contradictions.

Now, this time it gave me save the skill by default. I didn't have to specifically ask for it, so I'm going to go ahead and save that skill. But, let me show you something about this skill because I did mention the skill is a dot md file. That's a set of instructions, but sometimes skills are actually a lot more than that. So, in this case, it created a folder structure with different md files, too. So, it goes beyond just creating a dot md file, skills.md file.

It's created Python files, for example, and code. Again, you don't have to worry about all this, but it creates kind of a comprehensive package to make the skill work because it does need quite a bit of data here for it to be able to do what I asked. Now, this is how easy it is to use this skill. I don't even really have to type much of a prompt, but this time I will bring in that skill on purpose. I'll just put the slash and then bring in that skill, and then I'm going to upload a PDF file that is going to follow the instructions of that skill.

And here's the PDF that it needs to go ahead and analyze. I'll upload that. And that's the great part. I literally didn't even have to type out a prompt. This skill has the instructions, so it knows what to do with this PDF. And here's the result I got from analyzing that PDF with my skill. It's showing me all the findings here. I could see all of them based on high, medium, and low priority here, and it's very, very useful in this nice dashboard format here.

These are called artifacts here on the right panel, and they're also downloadable as well. And you could always share these by publishing them and sharing your findings with any of your team members. Now, this one is called an interactive dashboard builder skill, and it's actually one of my favorite ways ever to use Claude, but now you could turn this into a skill, and I actually have a longer set of instructions for building this.

As you could see, I'm not going to the skill builder. I'm just doing it right here inside of chat. I just say use this skill creator to build the skill, or you could just press the slash sign and bring in that skill, But, this knows how to bring it in. This turns messy CSV into polished interactive dashboard that Artifact Dashboard Builder is already built in to Claude Code and it's already built in to your Claude website, too.

So, this is a really useful type of a prompt here, and then it'll take you to that interview format where he's going to ask you some clarifying question. Now, in the document that I created with my team, I have all these first prompts included. So, how to start building these and exact instructions for the skill, too. If you want to see how those are laid out, they're included with the examples. But, I'll go ahead and show you this one here.

I'm going to jump into the results of this one. The interview questions are pretty straightforward. I'll show you what this one ends up looking like, and we got a couple more to build out, too. Okay, our CSV dashboard is created. It will basically create these type of dashboards just from a simple CSV upload. So, if I go back to a new chat, and if I bring that skill in this time, this way, and if I upload a CSV file, which looks like this, now just like that, I got myself an identical-looking dashboard because in that skill, I told it specifically how I want a dashboard to look every single time.

So, if you start a new Claude chat, you can turn things into a dashboard like this. But, it's always going to look different, right? This skill is going to make it always look this way, on brand, in dark mode. And as always, you could go ahead and publish this artifact here and share it with anyone you want. This next one I called the Hyper-Personalized Content Engine. So, I showed you how I created YouTube scripts with it.

Well, this one will create all kinds of different assets for me across all kinds of different formats. So, SEO blog post, for example, a LinkedIn post, a Twitter or X post. And I'm going to upload a raw transcript of information here along with this to build the skill. So, sometimes you can have a set of instructions, press the plus sign, add any file that needs to go with your instructions, and build that skill that way.

And our content engine is ready. Says, "Turn one raw video scripts into a full week of ready-to-post content that sounds like a real person, not AI." So, let's go ahead and take this for a spin. Our content engine, I'm just going to give it the transcript of my Claude for beginners video from YouTube. And there we have it. We have ourselves three different LinkedIn posts, four different LinkedIn posts. We got ourselves an entire Twitter thread here, and an SEO-optimized article about Claude features that I covered in that video.

Now, obviously, I'm just going quickly through it, but if you take your time and you teach it the right writing style from your own examples, and take your time to tweak it, these skills are the best ways I found to create content from your existing content. Now, I'm still going to mention the security flaws and the marketplaces to get more skills, but right now, I also want to show you this last example. So, this will create on-brand presentations for you.

The way it does that is you're going to describe exactly what you want. Again, get this from my guide here and tweak it, but you have to also upload things along with it. So, I give it our logo, for example. I give it what a slideshow should look like. So, I took one slide from a slideshow that I already made, and I also gave it this other {dot}md file, which is our brand guideline. It looks like this. And again, I didn't create this one.

This one Claude created for me. All I said was go to futuropedia.io and create me a brand kit, and it created that, and then I uploaded that. So, this was part of a different Claude chat, but then I'm going to build this skill from that. So, I'm going to let this go to work, and then I'll show you a presentation that it could create. The skill got created here, and this is an example of what the skill should look like based on some of the references and some of the design ideas that I gave it.

So, this is for Claude Code. And then I asked it to create a presentation as for Claude Skills for Beginners, and you could see how close is that to our template. Using our brand logos, using our brand colors, using the exact style of how I want this presentation to go. And these are PDFs here, but let me go ahead and just present it in full screen. I mean, this is the exact type of presentation that that skill was designed to make.

Now, every time I create a presentation, it's going to look like this, which is a huge time saver. I don't have to have back-and-forth conversations. I just simply brought in that skill into chat and I said, "Create me a six-page presentation on brand about Claude Skills for Beginners." And I give it some context on what to include, and it's pretty much right on. Now, you could also Google Claude Skills Marketplaces.

This is one that I just popped up. I don't know it at all, but in this one, if you click on any of these skills here, you can download them. They download as a zip file, or you could just copy the prompt here and install it. Now, I should warn you, this is where the security flaws come into play because there's ton of marketplaces, it's really hard to vet them. The ones I show you that you build yourself, well, you're in control.

The one from Anthropic in the beginning that I showed you, well, they're vetted by Anthropic. These, pretty much anyone could give to it, and they're set of instructions for Claude. So, I downloaded this one to show you what you get. You get this folder here. So, the skill.md file is like this, but you should really read through it and make sure it's not telling the computer to do something that you don't want because sometimes, yes, they take place right inside of chat, but this is also Claude Code.

You could write code. It could access files on your computer if it's in the instructions. Claude doesn't know that it shouldn't do that if it doesn't seem like it's harmful, and it might leak information you don't want that's sitting on your hard drive. So, definitely read through this. I also recommend the same thing when you're using Claude just to do the same thing with your prompt. Read through the prompt so it just doesn't go use up all kinds of different credits here and just follows the instructions.

Sometimes these really long instructions do more than they need to to get an outcome for you. So, read it, trim it, change it, and then you could use that skill. Let me know if you found this useful. I want to make another skills video where I show my top 10 all-time favorite skills. And if you like this, I'll make that video next. And make sure you grab the guide that I provided for free that I created with my team that shows you all the different prompts, all the different skills that I covered in this video, and much more.

Thanks so much for watching this one. Check out my Claude code video if you want to dive deeper into Claude.