🧩 Claude Code Skills Complete Guide

Skills = Claude Code’s Recipe Book

Aren’t you tired of telling Claude Code the same thing every time? “Use this format for reports, write in English, include tables…”

Skills let you write those instructions once and never repeat them. From then on, Claude just knows. Like giving a chef a recipe once — after that, you just say “make that dish” and it’s done. That’s exactly what Skills are.

How Skills Work — Claude Picks What It Needs

Claude doesn’t memorize the entire recipe book. Instead, it remembers just the titles and opens the relevant recipe when you ask for that dish. This saves memory while still letting it work like an expert when needed.

A Skill Is Just a Folder

At its core, it’s just a folder with files in it. The minimum requirement: 1 folder + 1 SKILL.md file. That’s it!

my-report-skill/
├── SKILL.md     ← This is all you need
├── format.md    ← (Optional) Reference material
└── template.txt ← (Optional) Template file

SKILL.md is the core. Just having this one file makes Claude recognize it as a skill. Add other files as needed later.

SKILL.md File — What It Looks Like

Let’s look at a real example first, then explain it.

---
name: Daily Report
description: A skill that collects news and creates an English report every morning
---

# Daily Report Rules

## Tasks
1. Collect 5 AI-related news articles
2. Summarize each article in 2 lines
3. Save as report.html

## Rules
- Write in English
- Include the date in the title (e.g., 2026-03-15 AI News)
- Use a clean card layout design

The section between --- markers is the ‘name tag’. Below that is the ‘actual instructions’.

The description is the most important part. Claude reads this one line to decide “should I use this skill or not.” The more specific, the more accurately it works.

Built-in Skills

Claude Code already comes with several built-in skills. No installation needed — ready to use immediately.

Create Your Own Skill — 2 Methods

Method 1: Ask Claude to Do It (Recommended)

The easiest way. Just say this to Claude Code:

Create a daily report skill for me.
It should collect 5 AI news articles every day
and save them as report.html.

Claude creates the folder, writes SKILL.md, and it’s done!

Method 2: Create It Manually (4 Steps)

5 Real-World Skills — Here’s What You Can Build

Concrete examples will give you a feel for it. For each skill, we show what to say to Claude and what to put in the SKILL.md.

---
name: Daily News Briefing
description: Collects the latest AI news and generates a summary report in English
---

## Rules
- Collect 5 news articles and summarize each in 2 lines
- Save as news-YYYY-MM-DD.html
- Card layout, English

---
name: Weekly Report
description: Classifies this week's tasks as completed/in-progress/upcoming and writes a report
---

## Rules
- Collect this week's work from git log
- Highlight key achievements and issues
- Save as weekly-report.html

---
name: Customer Response Email
description: Writes appropriate reply emails by customer inquiry type
---

## Rules
- Polite and friendly tone
- Auto-classify inquiry type (shipping/refund/technical, etc.)
- Structure: greeting → answer → additional info → closing

---
name: Brand Design Guide
description: Applies our brand colors, fonts, and layout rules to designs
---

## Rules
- Primary color: #3e6ae1, background: white
- Font: Pretendard, rounded card layout
- Logo always placed top-left

---
name: Meeting Notes Organizer
description: Structures meeting content and extracts action items per person
---

## Rules
- Organize date, attendees, and agenda
- Separate decisions from action items
- Specify assignee + deadline

Sharing Skills

There are 3 ways to store your skills. Usually option 1 is enough.

Skills vs MCP — What’s the Difference?

Many people confuse these two, but the chef analogy makes it crystal clear.

Give a chef who knows recipes (Skills) great tools (MCP) and you get the best dishes possible. They’re not competitors — they’re a combination.

Plugins — Upgraded Version of Skills

A Plugin is Skills + tools bundled as a package. Like installing an app from a smartphone app store, just use /plugin install and you’re done.

For example, installing the Playwright plugin gives you “web automation skills + browser control tools” all at once. More powerful than Skills alone.

# Search for plugins
/plugin search data-analysis

# Install a plugin
/plugin install @anthropic/data-analysis

# Check installed list
/plugin list

How Skills Have Evolved

In just 6 months, it evolved from “saved prompts” to “expert systems.” Understanding Skills now means you’ll naturally keep up with future features as they arrive.

5 Tips for Great Skills

Keep these in mind when creating your first skill.

Try It Yourself

Pick one of these two exercises.

Create a skill that automatically generates a weekly report every Monday.
Classify this week's tasks as completed/in-progress/next-week,
and highlight key achievements.

# Step 1: Create skill folder
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/weekly-report

# Step 2: Create SKILL.md file
cat > ~/.claude/skills/weekly-report/SKILL.md << 'EOF'
---
name: Weekly Report
description: Organizes this week's work and generates an HTML weekly report
---

## Procedure
1. Collect this week's work
2. Classify as completed/in-progress/next-week
3. Save as weekly-report.html
EOF

# Step 3: Restart Claude Code

# Step 4: Test
claude "Create the weekly report"

Verification Checklist

Tips + Sources