Skills

What it is

A skill is a folder of instructions that teaches Claude how to do a specific thing really well — build a slide deck, fill in a PDF form, audit a codebase, write to your brand voice. Install one and Claude uses it when the situation calls for it, without being asked.

Anthropic ships its own skills — the document-creation ones behind Excel, Word, PowerPoint and PDF output, for example — and they’re available to everyone. Beyond those you can install skills from the directory, get them bundled inside a plugin, or write your own.

Where to find it

On desktop

• Sidebar → Customize → Skills. Yours lists what you have; Discover is the directory.
• The same manager is in Settings → Customize → Skills.
• + menu in the composer → Skills › — pick which skills this conversation can use.

On the web

• claude.ai/customize/skills — the same two tabs; it lands on Discover, at /customize/skills/discover.
• The same + menu → Skills › in the composer.

How to use it

Use one in a chat

Most of the time you don’t do anything: Claude reads the skills you have installed and loads the relevant one. To be explicit, type / in the composer and pick the skill by name, or open + → Skills › and choose.

Install one

1. Customize → Skills → Discover, or search from the box at the top.
2. Add the skill you want. It appears under Yours, enabled.
3. You can turn a skill off again without removing it, and turn it back on later.

To upload one you’ve written, use the Add button at the top right and pick the upload option. The skill must be a ZIP whose root is the skill folder:

my-skill.zip
└── my-skill/
    ├── skill.md
    └── resources/

Record one instead of writing it (Mac)

In the inspected unified desktop composer, the + menu has Record a skill — you do the task once while Claude watches your screen, and it proposes a skill from what it saw. It’s also reachable from Customize → Skills → Add → Record your screen. Recording is available on Pro, Max and Team plans, in Cowork in Claude for Mac; the older guide calls this a Cowork feature. The unified desktop UI exposes the entry directly; recording itself was not tested.

Write your own

A skill is a directory holding a skill.md file: YAML front matter, then Markdown instructions. Two fields are required:

• name — human-friendly, 64 characters maximum.
• description — what the skill does and when to use it, 200 characters maximum. This is load-bearing: it’s what Claude reads to decide whether to invoke the skill.

dependencies is optional, for software packages. You can add reference files and scripts alongside skill.md.

Start simple, zip the folder, upload it, then test with several prompts that ought to trigger it. If it isn’t firing, the description is usually the thing to fix. Example skills are on GitHub at anthropics/skills.

Share one (Team and Enterprise)

Anthropic documents this as an owner-gated flow: an owner enables Share with organization under Organization settings → Skills first, after which skills shared org-wide appear for colleagues in the directory’s Your organization tab.

Good to know

• Code execution must be on. Skills run in the code-execution environment, so Settings → Capabilities → Cloud code execution and file creation has to be enabled — its own description says “required for skills”. On Team and Enterprise an owner enables it, plus Skills, in Organization settings → Skills.
• Available on every plan — Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise — and in beta for Claude Code and for API users with the code-execution tool.
• Turning a skill off isn’t deleting it. Anthropic’s guidance is that you toggle skills on and off in Customize → Skills, so you can park one without losing it.
• Plugins bundle skills. Install a plugin and its skills appear in Customize → Skills.
• Also in the Office add-ins. Enabled skills work from the sidebar in Claude for Excel and PowerPoint.
• Only install skills you trust. A skill can tell Claude to install packages or reach external networks. Review anything you didn’t write — including something a colleague sent you — and never hardcode API keys or passwords into one.

What’s changed recently

• 2026-10-07 — Skills Discover and Add skill remain available on both platforms. Record a skill is visible in the unified desktop + menu; no recording or installation was performed.
• 2026-09-13 — The skills manager is a tab of the full Customize page again, split into Yours and Discover, with search, filter and a Sort by Last edited control; the old ”+ → Create skill → Upload a skill” path is now a single Add menu. Record a skill is in the Cowork composer’s + menu on Mac. Settings → Capabilities no longer holds a skills manager — it just says “Skills have moved to Customize”. Corrected the skill file name to lowercase skill.md, and dropped the claim that skills follow a cross-platform specification, which no Anthropic source states.
• 2026-04-18 — Cross-referenced with official help-center articles; added sources.

Related

• Customize
• Plugins
• Directory
• Chat composer