If You're Not Using Skills, You're Using Claude Wrong

Most people using Claude or ChatGPT have no idea what a skill is, and it is by far the number one most important thing you need to master. And if you’re already using skills, there’s still many mistakes you’re likely making. If you’re reusing the same old chats over and over again, Claude is probably forgetting your original instructions and making a lot of mistakes. But when you turn your instructions into a template called a skill, it fixes everything. In this video, I’m going to teach you what’s a skill, how to install one, or build your own, and at the end, I’m also going to give you my seven most used skills I use daily. If you don’t know me, my name is David Bitton, and I’m a five-time entrepreneur that’s generated hundreds of millions in revenue, and I’m now teaching AI automation to companies and classrooms worldwide. And if you’re not already, make sure to hit that subscribe button for more AI tutorials like this.

So to get started, I want to first explain, what is a skill? A skill is just a folder with one text file inside called skill.md, which stands for markdown, and that file teaches Claude how to do one job, step by step, exactly the way you want it done. Whenever you see a .md file, it stands for markdown, and it’s the same exact thing as a text file or a doc file for Microsoft Word, but it’s just what AI likes to use. At the very top of the skill file, there’s a name and one sentence that tells Claude when to use it, with instructions below it. Some skills also come with extra files, like templates, checklists, or tests to ensure it’s being used correctly, basically. But you’re probably thinking, why do I even need this, when I can just keep working in the same chat session or agent like I always have been? Well, I’m going to show you an example why.

So let’s say you want Claude to create invoices for you. So what you normally do is probably go into Claude or ChatGPT and ask it, create an invoice template for me with my logo, colors, fonts, or my website, right? And after a lot of back and forth, you’ll probably be happy with your final template, and here’s mine as an example. But, if you want to create a second, third, or fourth invoice, what you’re probably doing, right, is going back into that same old session and asking it to generate a new invoice or whatever you’re trying to do over and over again. And it’s usually fine in the beginning. But after a while, when that session gets super long, and you’ve asked it a million times for something, Claude compacts the session, which summarizes all of your original instructions over and over again, and it eventually forgets some of your instructions, so your future invoices, or whatever you’re working on, will come out different or wrong.

So, as you can see here, here’s my original template, but... If I ask it to make an invoice for the 10th time, it might forget and break the template and it might look like this, right? Maybe it moved the logo from the left to the right. Maybe it changed how invoice details looks. Maybe it changed the payment options, right? But something usually changed because it compacted the session so it lost those instructions. And by the way, if you want to start a brand new session and say, make me an invoice, it has no idea what you’re talking about. It has zero memory, zero clue it’s a brand new session. So you have to explain the instructions all over again. So in order to get Claude to generate the exact same instructions or the exact same invoice every time, you just tell it to save that template or whatever you’re working on as a skill. And that’s it.

So, in my case, I can go back to my old session, where I was generating my invoices, and I can say something like, create a new invoice skill to generate invoices with the same instructions and the template that we made, and use the Skill Builder Protocol and call it invoice generator. So you’re gonna notice I have certain instructions, how I want invoice numbers to run, right? So you have certain instructions that the skill is gonna package and save for you. And what you’re also noticing is I’m using the Skill Builder Protocol, which is another skill that helps me build skills, but I’m gonna get to that later on. So, once it’s done, you’re gonna see that it says, Invoice Generator skill is built as a Claude skill. So now if I wanted to use that skill, I can actually start a brand new session, and I can type in, run the, and to use a skill, you have to hit the forward slash command. So I hit forward slash, and then I type in invoice, and I select the invoice generator. To generate a new invoice for John Smith from ABC Company, whatever.

As you notice, by the way, I have a typo here, and that doesn’t matter. It knows what you’re trying to say. And as you can see, it’s running the skill, and it will generate the original template perfectly because it’s following the original skill’s instructions. And the skill is just a set of files that just tells it exactly how to run the skill. And as you can see here, it built the invoice, and I can open it up, and you’re gonna see, it looks perfect. Now, there is an issue here, though, that I didn’t like. Then it said, insert location and insert email, and maybe I don’t have that. So, in this case, I could actually edit the skill to teach it. So, I can go back into Claude, and I’m going to copy this for a second here. And I can say, edit the skill to remove these two information, location and email, if I didn’t give it to you, then regenerate the invoice.

So, what a lot of people don’t realize is that you can continue editing your skills so they get better and better and better every single time you use it. And that’s how you build the best skills going forward. And so it now tells me the skill no longer adds location or email. Now here is my actual skill, and I can go into the outputs folder, and it will save my invoices here if I tell it to. And I even have the skill folder, which is just the instructions of what it’s supposed to do. And you can even look at the change log, and every time I make a change, it tells me, it follows and keeps track of all the changes I’ve been making. So as an example, missing bill two lines are now left out. Right? Pretty cool.

If you’re not sure what skills you should be building, you can actually go into Claude or ChatGPT and just ask it. Review all my sessions from the last 30 days and tell me which skills I should build and it will recommend some skills for you. And if you want another cool pro tip in Claude, they have a feature where you can type in slash insights and submit it. And it will actually generate a report of how you’ve been using Claude, what are the good things you’re doing, and what are the bad things you’re doing that you can improve on, and will actually give you those recommendations. And if you’re liking these pro tips and you’re getting value from this video, please hit the subscribe button as it really helps the growth of this channel.

Earlier, you notice I told Claude to build the skill using my Skill Builder Protocol. That was actually a custom skill I made to help me build the best skills or edit existing ones using Anthropic’s documentation on building great skills. And if you’re already building skills today, that one skill can change everything for you. The first thing the skill does is interview you about what you’re trying to build. Then, it builds the skill using my exact template, which creates a CLAUDE.md file, which has all the rules that must follow, a memory file for anything it needs to remember, an output folder so all your files the skill builds stays organized, a random folder for, well, you know, everything random, and a skill folder for the actual skill like I showed you before. And it also adds a changelog, like you saw, reference files, scripts, and tests that also catch the most common mistakes. To get that skill, just click the link in the description of this video to download it.

Then, you’re gonna double click on the Skill Builder Protocol skill file on a Mac or PC, and it should open up in Claude, and then you’re gonna click Add to Library. By the way, you can also do the same thing in ChatGPT, or you could just drag that skill into any session and say, install this for me. And as you’ll see, it even shows you the reference files it’s going to add in, everything that it adds, the skill will add for you on the left. And just like you saw earlier, if you want to use a skill in Claude, you type in the forward slash command, and you type in Skill Builder Protocol, and then create a skill to do XYZ, whatever you want. That’s how you use skills. Really easy. It is the number one most powerful thing in Claude that you must master.

Typing in the slash command can get annoying though, and you might forget to type in slash Skill Builder Protocol. So here’s another pro tip. You can actually tell Claude to... Edit my global CLAUDE.md file and my global instructions, so anytime I create or edit a skill, always use a Skill Builder Protocol. Now I’m voice transcribing that using Wispr Flow, and I can send that off, and it’s gonna edit and add those rules to my CLAUDE.md file, which is basically a hidden file inside Claude that has rules Claude always has to follow on every single session. So from now on, you never have to remember to use that skill. It will remember it for you.

One of the best parts about skills, though, is they can be shared with your friends or coworkers. Just like you just downloaded my skill, you can also create and share your skill with other people, too. You’re gonna click your name on the bottom left of Claude and hit Settings. You’re gonna search for skills in the top left, click on that. You’re gonna click yours to see your skills. And then you can open up any skill you want, and then click the three dots to download it. You can also edit it, rename it, replace, whatever you want to do. Download it, and then just share that file with whoever you want. By the way, if you’re on a business team company account, you can even make the skill shareable. There will be an option on your Claude to share the skill with your company, and other people can just download it straight from there.

Before we continue, I actually want to explain the difference between a skill versus an agent versus a routine or a scheduled task, because a lot of people in the comments were asking. So hopefully by now you know what a skill is. An agent is just a regular Claude or ChatGPT session. So if I say, you know, act as my CEO... That’s it. You now have a CEO agent, right? And you could also watch my last video right here about agents. A routine or a scheduled task is basically asking Claude to do something for you every single day or week, for example. And you could actually run your skills on a daily basis automatically, and that’s what we’re gonna cover next. So I created a skill called Online Brand Monitoring that gives me a report of what people are saying about my brand or my competitors’ brands online. But if I wanted to run that skill and do that analysis on a weekly basis, I would just tell Claude to... Create a scheduled task every Monday at 9 a.m. to run my Online Brand Monitoring skill. And I would send that, and it would do it for me every single Monday. That’s it.

Most people ask me if I always build my own skills, or if I download other people’s skills, but in reality, it’s actually a mix of both. Your best skills will be the ones that you’re going to customize for yourself or for your business. And what I like to do is actually find other people’s skills to get inspiration and then merge them into one super customized skill just for me. The easiest way to find skills is once again, click your name on the bottom left, go to settings. Search for skills. Click on that. And you’re gonna see it actually defaults to the Discover tab, which will be Anthropic’s own skills, plus skills from other companies like Notion, Figma, Microsoft Office. And you can just either search for whatever you’re looking for, or download whatever skill you want right from here. And they even have plugins that is basically a bunch of skills packaged together.

So as you can see, 2 million people nearly. Download the finance skill, which has, the finance plugin, that has eight skills inside of it, on how to audit finance, you know, audit support, financial statements, journal entries, whatever you need to do. So, there’s actually a lot of really cool and really good skills here. Personally, I’ve never used these before, because I always build my own. But, play around and just click the plus sign, and you can just download them in one shot. What I do, however, is actually use a custom skill that I built called Skill Finder that searches through thousands of skills online for you. So if I wanted to use it, I would basically just say, use the Skill Finder. To find me SEO skills to generate blog posts that rank in Google, right? And chat to me, T. And it’s gonna start searching through thousands of skills online to find all the best search engine optimization skills.

And once it finds a bunch of them, I’m now gonna tell it, let’s take the best parts of all these different skills, package them together, I’m gonna give you my own feedback and my own way that I like to write blog posts, and then it’s gonna build me some monster, amazing SEO skill for me in one shot. By the way, that Skill Finder skill is also in the link in the description below. In the beginning of this video, I promised you seven free skills. The first two are the Skill Builder Protocol and the Skill Finder. The others are a YouTube summarizer that turns any video into a summary. The next one is a coupon finder that searches for coupon codes for any software you’re buying online, and this has saved me... Hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.

The next one that I used this week, actually, for a concert, is an event ticket finder that finds the best price seats at concerts, comedy shows, sports games, or any event by searching StubHub, Ticketmaster, I mean, you name it, it’s searching those websites. The next one is a Mac disk cleaner. So if you have a Mac, it will clean up all the space in your hard drive and free up all that space. And one of my personal favorites is my health tracker skill that keeps track of all my medical records, blood tests, my health in general, my goals. It keeps track of my, you know, Garmin, Apple Health, everything all in one skill. So there’s a lot of really cool skills that are all in that download file in the description.

And by the way, if you want another little hack, I’m gonna put a link in the description for the video transcript. So if this is a lot of information for you, just copy that link, paste it into Claude or ChatGPT, and say, do everything in this video for me. Now that you know how to use skills, make sure to watch my part two advanced tutorial right here, which will actually show you why I never install skills in Claude, and I use them locally in a completely different way that will change how you use them. But for now, take some baby steps, start playing around, start using skills a little bit, then watch that video, and I’ll see you on the next one.