3 Ways To Build
A Claude Skill

A "skill" is just a saved set of instructions that teaches Claude to do a repeatable job the same great way every time, so you never have to re-explain it.

Think of it like hiring someone and writing down exactly how you want a task done, once, so they nail it forever. The question is how you write those instructions. There are three ways to do it, and they are not equal. The first two feel faster. The third is the one that actually gets it right, because it's built around how you work instead of how someone else does.

The fastest way. You grab a skill someone already made, from a GitHub repo or from one of my free guides, and drop it straight into Claude.

This is genuinely useful, and honestly a great place to start. A well-built skill for something generic, like formatting a weekly report or cleaning up a spreadsheet, will work for almost anyone. But the second the job touches how your specific business runs, it starts to miss. Everyone's life, offers, tools, and clients are different, and a stranger's skill has none of that context baked in.

Best for: getting started fast + generic, universal tasks.

Weak for: anything specific to how your business actually operates.

A big step up. Instead of borrowing someone else's, you describe the skill you want and ask Claude to write it for you. You explain the task, the steps, the output, and it drafts the instructions.

This is better because at least it's your description. But there's still a gap: you're describing how you think you work, from memory, in one sitting. And that's almost never how the job actually goes. You forget the edge cases, the little judgment calls, the "oh, except when it's this kind of client" moments. Claude builds a clean skill for the version of the work in your head, not the messy real one. It's still guessing, you're just the one feeding it the guess.

Best for: a solid first draft when you can't demo the task live.

Weak for: capturing the real judgment calls you make without thinking.

This is the only method I fully trust for my own business, and it's shockingly simple: instead of describing the work, you do the work with Claude, once, correcting it in real time. Then you tell it to save that whole session as a skill.

Now the skill isn't built from a template or a memory. It's built from a real run of the task, with your real corrections and your real standard of "good" baked right in. Here's the exact four-step loop.

Here's the prompt I use to kick off Step 1. Paste it, fill in your task, and run your real workflow with it. It forces Claude to watch how you actually work instead of guessing.

Once the output is genuinely good, that you'd send it as-is, run the second prompt. This is Step 4: it turns everything you just did into a permanent, reusable skill you can run again tomorrow (or hand to a teammate).