What a 'skill' is and when to build one

A skill is a packaged, reusable set of instructions Claude can pick up and use — the difference between typing out a long, careful prompt from scratch every time and having a named, repeatable capability sitting there ready to go.

You’ve probably already felt the problem a skill solves: you write a great prompt for “turn my meeting notes into decisions and owners,” use it once, and then either lose it in your chat history or retype an approximation of it a week later that’s missing half of what made the first one good. A skill is that prompt, saved properly, with a name.

Build one once you’ve run the same prompt by hand three or four times and it’s stopped changing much — that’s the signal it’s stable enough to save. Building one on the first try is usually premature; you don’t yet know what needs to be fixed versus what should stay flexible each time you use it.

The natural next step once you have a few skills you use often is turning them into slash commands you can invoke by name in Claude Code — see the prompt library for a worked example.