Creating Skills

Create portable, reusable expertise that extends Claude's capabilities across contexts.

What a skill is for — read before writing one

A skill is a procedural anchor. Measured across 528 paired executions, 65.7% of skill effects come from supplying a usable procedure — setup steps, tool sequence, intermediate checks, pitfalls — and 4.5% from supplying facts the agent lacked (Jiang et al. 2026, arXiv:2608.14036).

Three consequences shape every rule below: