Skills: Teach Claude Cowork your way

In this lesson, you'll define a skill and explain how Claude uses one, recognize the four building blocks a skill can include, and build a skill from one of your own recurring processes.

What a skill actually is

A skill is a reusable playbook — a folder of files and resources — that teaches Claude how to do a specific kind of work the way you'd want it done. When you start a task that matches the skill, Claude loads the playbook and follows it.

Skills are automatically used during the task right when you need them. You don't have to invoke them by name; Claude notices when a task matches a skill you have installed and loads it automatically. You can also be explicit ("use the board memo drafting skill") when you want to.

What's inside a skill

A skill is more than a long instruction. The four kinds of files a skill can include — and how they work together — are how you encode a real process well enough that Claude can run it like your team would:

• Instructions (the SKILL.md file). The brief that tells Claude what the skill does, when to use it, and how to do it. Write it the way you'd write a runbook for a new colleague — specific enough that they can do the work.
• Assets. Logos, brand templates, slide masters, fonts. The raw materials the skill uses to produce real-looking output.
• References. Examples of good output, style guides, clause libraries, the past work you'd hand a new teammate as the bar to match. References are how Claude learns what "good" looks like for this kind of work.
• Scripts. Small pieces of code Claude can run for the parts of the process that should happen the same way every time — a variance calculation, a structured comparison, a chart formatter, a doc reformatter.

A skill can use any combination of these. Some skills are just a SKILL.md file with instructions, and that's perfectly fine for some processes. Others have a SKILL.md plus a brand asset folder. Others have all four. The mix follows the work: include what needs to be included, nothing more.

This is what makes skills so useful for codifying how your team works. Cowork is a coworker that can act on your behalf — and skills are how you get it to do the work the way it should be done. The instructions tell it what to do; the assets give it the raw materials; the references show it what good looks like; the scripts let it run the repeatable parts the same way every time.

Build a skill with Claude

The fastest way to build a skill is with Claude.

Start a new conversation in Cowork and say something like: