What are Skills in Claude

Skills are folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude dynamically loads to improve performance on specialized tasks. Think of them as expert packages: they teach Claude to perform specific tasks in a repeatable way. If you have ever asked Claude to create an Excel spreadsheet, a PowerPoint presentation, a Word document, or a PDF file, you have already seen Skills in action. These file creation capabilities work precisely thanks to Skills running in the background. The key distinction between Skills and a regular conversation: Skills encode not just "what" needs to be done, but "how" it should be done — the specific steps, the order of operations, and the methodology that you want applied every time. This makes results predictable and reproducible, which is critically important for workflows that need to be run over and over again.