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Build Your First Claude Skill

The 5 steps I used to make Claude write like me, and why a good Skill fires even when you never type its name.

Rob Howard

By Rob Howard, Innovating with AI

I assumed building a Skill meant writing something close to a program. It doesn’t. A Skill is a text file. That’s the whole trick.

The magic isn’t the file. It’s that the agent re-reads every Skill you have available each time it decides what to do, before it does anything. So a well-written Skill fires on its own. You describe what you want in plain language and Claude reaches for the right one.

Which has a consequence for day one: turn off or delete the Skills you don’t want anymore, because Claude looks at all of them, every time.

2 kinds of Skills. Start with the style one.

Style Skills capture how something should look or sound. Mine include /robs-writing-style and /iwai-branded-powerpoint-creator.

Repetitive-task Skills capture a job you do over and over. Ours include /post-coaching-call and /run-revenue-report.

Start with a style Skill. The raw material is already sitting in your sent folder.

The 5 steps that built my writing style Skill

  1. Gather 10 articles you wrote yourself. Purely handwritten, no AI assistance anywhere in them. Give them to a fresh Claude session.
  2. Ask Claude to describe your writing style. Not to imitate it yet. Have it read the pile and tell you, in its own words, what your writing does. Then argue with the answer. Where you disagree is where your Skill gets specific.
  3. Add your own guidelines. The rules Claude can’t infer from samples. My favorite addition is Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, which does a lot of work in a small number of words.
  4. Add the not-to-dos. Mine: limit em dashes. Cut adverbs. No dramatic comparisons. Skip this step and you get writing that’s technically in your voice and still reads like a machine wrote it.
  5. Add personality. Claude loves talking about my eight backyard chickens, which is fine, because they show up in my newsletter. Tell it what it’s allowed to be weird about.

Then the prompt that turns a conversation into a permanent asset:

“Based on this conversation, create a new Skill so that you can easily write in my writing style in the future.”

Do the job by hand 3 times, then say “now make that a Skill”

This is the pattern for repetitive-task Skills, and it runs backwards from how it sounds like it should work.

Say you have a library of old tutorials to rebuild against a new template:

  1. Put the template in one folder, the old material in a second, and leave a third empty.
  2. Tell Cowork to take three items from the old folder and rebuild them using the template.
  3. Review those three. Correct what’s wrong.
  4. Then say: “Now make a Skill called tutorial conversion based on what you just did.”
  5. Read the Skill it wrote. Fix anything you disagree with.
  6. Then: “Run the tutorial conversion Skill on everything else in the folder.”

You’re not writing instructions from imagination. You’re capturing a process that already worked, which is why it holds up across the rest of the library.

You almost never need the slash command

Skills can be invoked with a slash. In practice I almost never type one.

If your Skill has a clear description of when it applies, Claude picks it up while deciding what to do and uses it. If you find yourself invoking it by name every time, the fix is in the Skill’s description.

3 ways Skills go sideways

Claude will offer to update your Skill. Sometimes the suggestion is good. Sometimes it’s overkill, or a slow drift away from what you wanted. Proceed carefully with unprompted updates. Instruct the change directly when you want one.

When the Skill changes, the old version is gone unless you backed it up on purpose. That’s the argument for keeping your Skills folder under version control, which takes a little extra setup once and saves you the week you’d otherwise lose.

Every Skill gets read, so every Skill costs tokens. Not money directly, since you’re on a flat-rate plan, but it counts against your usage limit. A short shelf of sharp Skills beats a long shelf of vague ones.

Start with your sent folder, not a blank page

If you do one thing today: open a fresh session, hand Claude 10 things you wrote, ask it to describe your writing style, argue with its answer, add three not-to-dos, and ask it to save the result as a Skill.

You’ll have a permanent asset before the end of the day, and you’ll understand how Skills behave in a way no explanation of them delivers.

The Skill is one piece of a bigger system

Skills sit on top of Connectors, Projects, Memory and the choice between Chat, Cowork and Code. That’s where the compounding happens. A Skill that pulls live data from your CRM and writes a finished document to your Drive is a different animal from one that formats text.

That’s what we build in Innovating with AI’s Claude Masterclass: seven chapters and 27 recorded lessons, for non-technical business people, with real demos on real business data.

See the full Masterclass and get instant access

– Rob
CEO of Innovating with AI