Claude Skills: Your Workflows, Encoded Once, Applied Intelligently

Progressive disclosure for your workflows: lightweight markdown files that load just-in-time, saving context and time.

You’ve seen the announcement about Skills for Claude Code. Another AI feature drop. Another promise to change everything. The skepticism is healthy. But before you add this to your ‘check out someday’ pile, here’s what actually matters: Skills let you encode your team’s workflows once and have Claude apply them consistently. Not revolutionary, but genuinely useful.

I’ve been experimenting with Skills since they released to the public. Typical test: could Claude recognize when to create a PR without being told? After encoding my PR workflow in a Skill, I worked through a bug fix naturally. Claude recognized the completion pattern in our conversation, loaded the Create PR skill, and executed the workflow perfectly. No command needed. That’s when the potential for skills became clearer for me.

Here’s the practical reality (in the context of Claude Code): Skills are lightweight workflow recipes that live in your project ([project]/.claude/skills/) or globally (~/.claude/skills/).

Example content and layout of a Skill

YAML frontmatter for metadata, markdown for instructions, optional scripts for deterministic operations, plus any additional reference files for expanded context. Claude recognizes when to apply them without explicit commands. This post shows you exactly how they work, when they beat slash commands, and how to build your first one today.