What Are Claude Skills? How to Create One for Your Business (and Skills vs MCP)

Imagine you hire one assistant and, every Monday, you explain again how you like your client reports. Same format, same tone, same three sections. Every single week. Exhausting, right? Now imagine you could write it down once, hand it over, and never explain it again.

That is what a Claude skill does. And here is the surprising part: Anthropic's own engineers gave a talk titled "Don't Build Agents, Build Skills Instead". Their point was that you don't need a new AI agent for every job. You need one good agent with the right know-how for each job.

In this post we explain what Claude skills are, how they work under the hood, how to create one in a few minutes, where to find skills other people already built, how skills compare with MCP, and how to stay safe. It follows a good walkthrough on YouTube, linked at the end. The business example and the advice are ours.

What are Claude skills?

A Claude skill is a folder that teaches Claude how to do one specific job your way. At its simplest it holds a single file called SKILL.md. The top of that file has two lines that matter: a name and a description. Below them, you write the instructions in plain English.

Think of your phone. The AI model is the processor. The agent, like Claude, is the operating system. Skills are the apps. You don't buy a new phone every time you want a new feature. You install an app, and suddenly the phone does something it couldn't do a minute ago.

You don't need more AI employees. You need one employee with a better toolbox.

Anthropic launched skills in October 2025. In December 2025 it published them as an open standard called Agent Skills, so the same folder can work in other AI tools that support the standard, not only Claude.

How do Claude skills work?

A lot of people think Claude reads every installed skill on every message. Not really. That would fill its working memory, the context window, very quickly. Anthropic describes three levels instead:

1. 1.At the start, Claude loads only the name and description of each installed skill. That is a line or two each.
2. 2.When your request matches a description, Claude opens that skill's full SKILL.md and follows it.
3. 3.If the skill links to extra files, like a template, a price list or a script, Claude reads or runs them only when the job needs them.

Anthropic calls this progressive disclosure. In plain English: the toolbox stays closed until you need a tool. It also means you can install many skills without slowing Claude down. If you want the background on why the context window matters so much, our guide to prompt, context and harness engineering explains it.

So the description does the heavy lifting. It isn't for you. It is how Claude decides when to use the skill. A vague description means the skill never fires, or fires at the wrong time.

SKILL.md file format (with a business example)

Here is an example for a small business, a made-up dental practice: a skill that drafts replies to Google reviews in the owner's voice.

---
name: review-reply
description: Drafts replies to Google reviews for Bright Smile Dental in the owner's voice. Use when asked to reply to, answer or respond to a customer review.
---

# Replying to reviews

1. Read the review and note the star rating and the main point.
2. Start with the reviewer's first name if it is shown.
3. 5 and 4 stars: thank them for one specific thing they mentioned.
4. 3 stars or lower: thank them, say sorry once, and invite them to
   call the office on (555) 010-0199. Never argue or share details
   about their treatment.
5. Keep it under 80 words. Sign off as "Dr. Maria, Bright Smile".
6. Never offer discounts or free treatment in a reply.
7. Show the draft. Do not post anything.

A few rules from the Agent Skills specification: the name can be up to 64 characters, using only lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens. The description can be up to 1,024 characters and should say both what the skill does and when to use it.

Want the review side of this done properly? Our guide to getting more Google reviews covers what you can and can't ask for under Google's rules.

How to create Claude skills: 3 ways

1. Write it by hand

Create a folder, add a SKILL.md with the name, description and steps, then upload it to Claude as a zip, or place it in Claude Code's skills folder. It is worth doing once, because it shows you exactly how skills work. After that, most people never write one by hand again.

2. Let Claude write it for you (our pick)

Anthropic ships a skill-creator skill. You describe the job, and Claude asks you questions until it understands it: what goes in, what comes out, what to avoid, what good looks like. Then it writes the SKILL.md. In the video, the creator answered about a dozen questions out loud and got a working research skill in minutes.

Our tip: paste in a real example of the job done well, like a past client report or a reply you were proud of. Claude learns more from one good example than from a page of rules.

3. Install one someone else built

Before you build anything, check whether the skill already exists. That is often the fastest way, and the next section covers where to look.

Claude skills examples, library and GitHub

There are two main places to find skills:

• •Anthropic's own skills. In Claude's settings you can browse and switch on ready-made skills, such as the ones that create Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files. Anthropic's public skills repository on GitHub has examples you can read and copy, including the skill-creator. Anthropic says its example skills are available on paid Claude.ai plans.
• •The community. Because Agent Skills is an open standard, developers share skills on GitHub and on skill directories. Search GitHub for the job you need, like "invoice skill" or "SEO skill".

Good first skills for a small business: replying to reviews, writing quotes from your price list, turning call notes into a follow-up email, formatting a weekly report, and writing social posts in your brand voice. If you are not sure which jobs to hand to AI at all, our list of tasks AI can automate in a small business is a good shortlist.

Claude skills vs MCP

This is the question people ask most. They solve different problems, and they work best together.

Put simply: MCP lets Claude reach your tools, and a skill tells Claude what to do with them. A monthly report skill might say "pull last month's traffic, compare it with the month before, write three bullet points in plain English", while an MCP connection does the pulling. Our guide to MCP vs APIs explains the connection side.

Claude skills vs agents

Before skills, the habit was to build a separate agent for each job: one for emails, one for content, one for outreach. Each needed its own setup, testing and fixing. The video's creator says he fell into exactly that trap for months.

Anthropic's argument is that agents rarely lack intelligence. They lack expertise: the specific know-how of your business. A skill adds that expertise to the agent you already have. So instead of five half-trained agents, you keep one agent and give it five skills. If you want to know when you do need a real agent, our guide to AI agents for small business covers it.

Are Claude skills safe?

Mostly, if you are careful. But skills can include scripts that Claude runs, so a skill from a stranger is like software from a stranger. Anthropic's advice is to install skills only from sources you trust, and to audit anything else before you use it.

• •Read the SKILL.md and every file in the folder before installing.
• •Look closely at any scripts, and at what they install or download.
• •Be suspicious of instructions that send data to outside websites or servers.
• •Ask Claude to review the skill for anything risky before you switch it on.

Do you even need skills?

Honest answer: not for one-off questions. If you ask Claude something once, a good prompt is enough. Skills pay off for jobs you repeat every week in the same way. A simple test: if you have explained the same job to Claude three times, it should be a skill.

The bigger picture

The first wave of business AI was about clever prompts. The next one is about writing your business's know-how down once, in a form AI can use. A folder of good skills is a training manual that never forgets and never needs a refresher. And because the format is an open standard, that manual isn't locked into one tool.

So, which job have you explained to Claude three times already? That is your first skill. If you want help turning your team's processes into skills, tell us which jobs eat your week.

Sources: the YouTube walkthrough that inspired this post, at youtube.com/watch?v=VxGIopUQVKo; Anthropic Engineering, "Equipping agents for the real world with Agent Skills", October 2025; the Agent Skills specification at agentskills.io; Anthropic's skills repository on GitHub.