Let’s explain to you What are Claude’s Skills?also called Skills in Spanish. This is a method with which you can create custom versions of Claudean alternative to GPTs of ChatGPT or the Gems of Gemini.
Skills are a very powerful feature, and also very open to be shared on the Internet. Its uses are as many as you can imagine. They are a series of instructions that you can add or generate, and that artificial intelligence will read before answering your questions.
What are Claude’s Skills?
Skills or abilities are a system with which you can create Claude customizationsor own versions of artificial intelligence. The skills are something similar to ChatGPT’s GPTs, but much more complete. They can be simple files like a GPT, but they can also be folders of instructions, scripts, or other resources.
What you are going to achieve with this is that instead of using the generic version of Claude, when you use it loading a skill you interact with a version that is much more personalized and adapted to what you need, or that takes into account a specific context. Skills teach Claude how to complete specific tasks in a repeatable manner.
In short, a skill is an encapsulated procedurethe way to tell Claude how to perform specific tasks, under what conditions and with what rules you want him to do it, without having to repeat these instructions in every conversation.
For example, you can create a specific skill to teach you the rules of a board game you want to learn to play. Or you can also create it to help you improve your writing, to review your texts, or to teach mathematics to your children. They’re like skills that you set up and load whenever you want.
When you activate a Skillwhen you make a request to Claude the AI will first read the file for this skill, incorporating its instructions into the context window. If these instructions refer to other files, Claude will also read them, or if the instructions mention executable scripts the AI will also execute them.
What are Skills for?
To understand what Skills are for, you must first take into account how Claude’s memory works. AI keeps some key data about you and how you want things, but does not remember the contexts from one conversation to another. In a chat you can give detailed instructions to do something, but when you open a new chat you will be starting from scratch.
And this is where Skills come into play. If you usually or want to do recurring tasks with Claude, you don’t need to give detailed instructions every time that you are going to do it in a new chat. You can create a skill that contains all the precise instructions you need, and then load it whenever you want or are going to use it.
This allows you to do several things. In the most practical case is to create a type of specific applications. For example, imagine that you like to analyze the SEO of something you write. So, every time you go to ask for this analysis you have to give the instructions to Claude, but If you load a Skill you do not need to give the instructionsand you can simply activate it and write the text you want to analyze.
You can also use it to maintain your brand’s tone of voice when writing contentsuch as writing emails or making posts on social networks. You can use it to have a specific formula active when analyzing data, or generating code that follows your team’s internal standards.
A Skill can be a simple set of instructions, but it can also be much more complex and include dozens of reference files. So, there are many ways you can schedule it.
How to use Claude’s Skills
In Claude you will find two types of Skills. One is the pre-designed ones, those created by Anthropic itself to give its AI capabilities to do specific things, and which are activated automatically when you ask to do something for which there is one of these skills.
And secondly there are custom skillswhich are those created by any user writing instructions in Markdown. It doesn’t require any programming knowledge, because you can create them by typing the instructions, upload one you created outside of Claude, or even ask Claude to create one following your request.
There are two methods to use Skills. The first is to mention it, add it explicitly so that what you write next takes these instructions into account. But they will also be activated automatically when you ask it to do something for which there is a Skill, such as creating web artifacts.
How Claude’s Skills are created
To create a Skill in Claude you have to go to section Personalize from the left column in Claude. Inside, click on the section Skillswhere you will be able to see all the pregenerated ones that the AI has already created.
Once you are in the Skills section, click on the + button and a dialog will open with the three available options. This will allow you to create one with Claude, manually write the instructions or load a Skill that you have downloaded or downloaded from somewhere.
If you are going to create a Skill by handyou will only have to add a name, a short description and then write all the instructions you want it to include. You can expand all you want.
If you decide to upload a skill, you will need to upload the .md file containing that name, description, and the skills in YAML format. You can also upload them with .zip or .skill fileswhere the SKILL.md file is with the instructions, but it also has other files that you should take into account and that are mentioned within the instructions.
Who can use Claude’s Skills
Anthropic’s pre-designed Skills can be used by everyone users, including free users. These are used for tasks such as creating Word, Excel, PowerPoint or PDF documents, and you can use them without having to pay. Claude’s skills require code execution to be enabled in the AI setup, it is the only requirement.
Custom Skills are paid. This means you will need to be paying for a Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise plan to be able to create and use them. Skills are also available in beta for Claude Code users, and for all Claude API users using the code execution tool.
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