(2025-10-22) Vo Claude Skills Explained How To Create Reusable Ai Workflows

Claire Vo: Claude Skills explained: How to create reusable AI workflows. This week is going to be all about Claude Skills, the newly released feature from Anthropic that lets anybody create and load up Claude Code, the API, or Claude.ai with specific skills and tools it can call on at any time.

Claude agent skills are a specific set of instructions and context that can be called on by Claude, whether you're using Claude code, the web or desktop app to do a specific set of tasks. And Claude skills solves a really interesting problem for anybody using AI, which is reusable workflows with a set of instructions that you want to call on demand, depending on the context of your conversation

Many of you are going to say, why can't I use Cloud Projects for this or, you know, OpenAI custom GPTs or projects? Well, those really stick with the context you've loaded in those projects. Once you set up a project, those chats associated with those projects always call on that context and instructions. It's not really dynamic and you can't call on a project on demand to get it to follow a set of instructions. Also, what I've seen is Cloud projects and OpenAI projects and GPTs generally have general purpose context that can feed a variety of tasks, but aren't really task specific instructions

I think they're (Skills) a really nice way to define and discover tasks that you're doing over and over and over with an LLM

the other thing that skills do quite nicely is bundle additional content and context into a skill through relative file references. So a Claude skill can reference other files in its folder, and those reference files can be examples, they can be templates, they can be additional instructions, and it helps Claude manage context a little bit better.

Claude skills can come bundled with executable Python scripts... the ability to reference Python files within a Claude skill is actually a really interesting extension and keeps you from having to rely on the agent and the LLM itself to define that Python for you and run it in a consistent way.

a Claude skill, the actual object, the thing that you make, is a folder. That folder has a skills.md file in it, and then it can have additional files next to it. So at the end of the day, how you set up a Claude skill, no joke, is you either put it in a folder for Claude code, to reference, or you zip up this folder and you upload it to the Claude.ai website.

the actual asset is a Markdown file, a set of other files and folders, either used by Claude code in your local directory or zipped up and uploaded to the cloud so that's how they actually work

the first thing you need to know about is the metadata and this is just a piece at the top of your skill file that you put in in this particular format that gives you the name of the skill so you know what it's named in a description what it does so this is going to help the agent in Claude actually know when to call this skill

The second thing that you're going to have in that file is instructions. So this is where all your prompt engineering skills need to come into play. You would put your prompt instructions, custom things in Markdown

And the way you're going to do that is actually give the content a relative link to that file.

I asked it to create a PRD generation skill. And so what was interesting about watching this cloud code skill to create skills, very meta, generate is it did seem to go through a pretty structured workflow. So it gave me a sense of how these cloud agents actually think about using skills. It read an example skill, which I'm presuming is in the instructions of the skill itself. It looked at detailed examples and then it kind of understood what it needed to do and it created this skill.md. with again the metadata at the top I'm actually going to switch into markdown views you can see exactly what it's supposed to look like has the metadata on top and then a set of instructions

you can see the outline of what it thinks a good skill is. So it includes when to use the skill, what is a decision tree on different types of decisions it needs to make about executing the skill, what's the template that it might follow when creating a document, which is quite long, actually. writing best practices, all those sorts of things

And then finally, it gives some questions to ask users. So this is something interesting I wouldn't have put in my own prompt if I hadn't seen it in this skill generator, but putting questions that the agent can actually ask users to get more clarifying detail is very interesting output format.

it did a lot of unnecessary work that kept me from actually using the skill. So it created probably, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, 12 files. It created 12 files when I really only needed five. And then the crummy thing is when I actually tried to download the files, it failed. I got an error. And so I would have had to download these files one by one, and put them in a folder and upload them in a zip to get them to be effective files

So what was a better way to create Claude Skills? Well, I'll tell you, I found that creating Claude Skills in Cursor was the easiest way to get this stuff done. And so what I did is I created a completely empty folder in my local machine. I opened up that folder. It's called Claude Skills. I opened up that folder in Cursor and I started a chat that said, create me an agent slash skill for creating Claude Skills. Here are the docs. So instead of relying on the Claude skill itself that Anthropic put out, I just literally gave Cursor the link to the documentation about what the structure of a skill looks like and asked it to create a skill to create skills. I will say this was much faster than creating it on Claude on the web app. It took probably three minutes where I think the web app took probably 10 minutes to generate and they didn't get the files.

this is the flow that I would recommend. Create a folder that you can go into on your computer. Make it your Cloud Skills repository. If you want to get fancy and deploy it to GitHub, you can. Maybe I'll deploy this one to GitHub and share it with you all. Create a skill to create a skill, or maybe I'll again share this with you all and you can clone my skill. And then just ask Cloud Code to make your skills. And then whenever you're in Cloud Code in this folder, what you can do is invoke those skills to do a variety of tasks that you think are really important and improve the quality of those tasks over time.

Now, the last thing I wanna show you is how you actually get those into the web UI or the desktop app

as I said, these are zipped up files that you need to upload in to Claude. So what you would do is go in to your finder or into your file browser in your desktop. You would zip up this file as you need into a zip. And then I'm going to I actually haven't done this before, so we're doing it live. You would upload that skill into the capabilities. Well, this didn't work because my skill name can only contain lowercase letters.