Everything You Need to Know About Claude Skills

Claude has grown a lot of surface area lately. Projects, connectors, artifacts, Cowork, Code, plugins. Every few weeks there's a new panel in the settings menu, and it's getting genuinely hard to know which features deserve your attention and which are for developers with too much free time.

Skills deserve your attention. If you use Claude for anything you do more than once, they might be the single most useful feature in the product.

Here's the problem they solve. Most people repeat themselves to Claude constantly. The same instructions, the same context, the same "no, format it like this" corrections, typed out fresh in every conversation. A skill lets you write all of that down once. From then on, Claude applies it automatically, without being asked.