Build Reusable AI Expertise: Create Claude Skills with Claude Code

Stop Repeating Yourself: Build Once, Scale Infinitely

You’ve perfected a prompt that delivers exceptional results. You’ve spent hours crafting the right context, examples, and instructions. Then the conversation ends, and your hard-won expertise vanishes. Tomorrow, you’ll recreate it from scratch—burning tokens, time, and momentum.

Professionals and leaders face a fundamental scaling problem: the expertise that makes us valuable is trapped in our heads, scattered across documents, and repeated manually in every AI conversation. Claude Skills solves this by packaging your procedural knowledge into reusable, composable assets that Claude can automatically discover and activate.

What You’ll Learn

By the end of this guide, you’ll understand what Claude Skills are, when to use them, and how to create custom skills using Claude Code. You’ll walk away with a working skill that scales your expertise across unlimited conversations. I included a video to share examples of how I leverage Claude skills and build/refine skills in Cursor using Claude Code.

Note: You can create custom skills directly in Claude.ai through conversation. See the help articles that Anthropic updated today:

• How to create a skill with Claude through conversation

• Teach Claude your way of working using skills

This guide focuses on Claude Code, which offers more control for building, editing, and refining skills as part of your broader prompt library.

My preference is to “see” skill markdown files on my local machine so I can manually edit and use Claude to improve them.

I am also including the full lesson deck “Compose Reusable Agent Skills to Execute Your Unique Expertise” from the Hands-on Agentic AI for Leaders course. This lesson deck is updated regularly based on cohort feedback.