The ONLY Claude Skills Tutorial Beginners Need in 2026 – Transcript

00:00Claude Skills is easily one of the best things you can learn in 2026 to level up in AI. And I'm sure you've heard a lot about it already. Maybe you even tried creating your own custom skill at some point. But I'd like to take this opportunity to cover everything you need to know about Claude Skills all the way from using it as an absolute beginner to an absolute pro. In this video, we will cover the following things. What is a Claude Skill? How to use it? Level one of using Claude Skill, which is using Claude's default skills. Level two, which is modifying a Claude Skill. Level

00:28three, which is using partner skills and plugins. And level four, creating your own custom skill. And finally, I will give you a pro secret. This is basically a tip that I haven't seen anybody give out in any Claude Skill tutorial video. And if you learn this pro secret, the way you write your custom Claude Skill is going to be five times better than most people's.

00:46And we'll cover all of this using real-life examples and demos of workflows that I personally use for my work. So, hit that subscribe button and let's get into it. Let's start with learning what a Claude Skill actually is. In case you already know the basics and you just want to go straight to the demos, feel free to navigate this video using the chapters.

01:05But in simple words, a Claude Skill is a file that contains a set of instructions and guidelines to perform a certain task. It's that simple. The coolest example I can think of is the movie Matrix, where Neo learns kung fu inside the Matrix. There is a scene where he's just downloading martial arts skills while being plugged into the Matrix.

01:23That's very similar to what skills are. For example, let's say that you make decks in a certain way. There's a format that you use, there's certain brand colors, there's certain fonts, and even a specific tonality. A Claude Skill is a file that contains all those guidelines and instructions. So, that every time you want to perform that task, say make a deck, instead of writing all those instructions every time you prompt, you can just invoke the skill and get exactly the output you want. And this file is a dot md file, which stands for

01:50markdown, which is a fancy way of saying that it's just a read-only text file. Now, in order to use Claude Skill, you need to make sure of this one thing on your Claude account. Go to customize and click on capabilities. And if you scroll down, you'll see this thing that says code execution and file creation. Just make sure that both these things are toggled on. Now, most of the times this is toggled on by default in most accounts, but just make sure of this before trying out Claude skills. Once that is set, let's see how to use a

02:17skill. Now, there are fundamentally two ways to use a skill. The first is when you prompt normally and Claude automatically selects the relevant skill. For example, let me ask Claude to turn this research paper that I have into a deck. So, I'll upload my research file and I'll just say, "Turn this into a deck so that I can understand this easily."

02:38Now, I haven't asked Claude to activate any particular skill at all over here. But, if you see, it's already saying loaded pptx.skill, which basically is Claude understanding my requirement and loading a skill that is already there inside Claude by default, which is basically a skill required to create PowerPoint presentations. So, here Claude automatically invoked the PPT skill. So, that's the first way of using it. You don't directly invoke it. The second way to call a skill, which is what you'd be using a lot of, is when

03:06you call it directly instead of letting Claude decide by itself. To do this, all you need to do is in the chat, type forward slash and out comes a list. Now, you won't be able to see a lot of options here because you haven't enabled a lot of Claude's default skills and neither have you created a lot of custom skills. But, I have quite a lot of skills that I have installed and created over here, so I can see a long list of skills. You can see UGC ads, I can see seed on director, which actually creates prompts for me. I can do video prompt builder, which is another prompt

03:34building skill that I have. There's a campaign planning skill, there's a competitive brief skill, there's a content draft skill, quite a lot of skills that I actually have over here. And if I want to use one of these skills, I just have to click on it and type my prompt and Claude will use the skill by default. And that's how you use a skill that you already have. Now that you know how to use a skill, let's go to level one of Claude skills, which is using Claude's default skills. If you click on customize and if you go to skills and click on browse over here,

04:01you will basically get to see a bunch of default skills that Claude already has built in. This opens up this box that you can see in front of you, which shows a set of skills that were designed by Claude for some of the most common tasks. If you want to know more about what a skill does, just click on one of these things and you will get a description over here. So, I've clicked on Theme Factory, and Theme Factory is basically a skill that provides curated collection of professional fonts and color themes, each with carefully selected color palettes and font pairing. So, it's basically just a

04:29collection of fonts, and you can already see some of the font files that are already added over here. So, if you want to know more about other skills, you can just click on it and you can just read the summary of it. Now, if I want to add any of these skills, all I need to do is click on this plus icon, and that's it.

04:43It's added onto my skill library. And now every time I hit forward slash in the chat, I can access this skill directly. Let's actually try this out and create an output. Now, let's scroll through this. I can see this skill called forward slash learn, and the description is use this skill when the user wants intellectual understanding.

04:59Learning how or why something works, not getting a task done, or soliciting Claude's judgment. This kind of seems like an interesting skill. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on install, but before that, I'm actually going to write a prompt without having this skill triggered. So, I already have that written over here, and my prompt is I want to learn about convolutional neural networks. And Claude made me made me a basic generic response. It basically gave me the definition, it gave me the core idea, it kind of gave me the entire answer that I was actually looking for, and also some resources

05:28that it was actually pointing me towards. Now, let's see what actually happens when this skill is actually activated. So, I'm going to first click on install. I'm going to close this. I'm going to do forward slash learn, which is me invoking the skill, and I'll write the same prompt. I want to learn about convolutional neural networks, and I'll click on enter.

05:47Now, Claude is going to first call on the skill. You can actually see that right here. It's loading the learn skill right here. And observe how it actually responds. So instead of giving me the information, it's actually asking me a question.

06:01What's your starting point? Do you already know how neural networks are or are you fairly new to this whole area? Is there something specific pulling you towards CNNs? So it's basically trying to get more and more context out of me so that it can determine where I am in the learning process and teach me accordingly rather than give me a generic response. So do you see how the simple addition of a skill completely changed how Claude is responding to you?

06:25And this by the way is just level one. These are just Claude's default skills. I want you to go and explore some of these default skills and see how your output actually changes. And once you're done with that, let's move on to level two. Now in level two, instead of just using a default skill, we're going to modify it and use it. So here we have this default skill called brand guidelines. And it is basically a skill that emulates Claude's brand guidelines whenever you make a deck or a document or a PDF or something like that. Just so

06:53that Claude can actually give you nicely formatted things. It is going to give you in Claude's brand colors. But what if I want to do it for my brand colors? Because Claude's brand colors are basically orange and gray and all that. What if I have much more of a poppy vibe and I actually want to do that? So what we're going to try and do over here is we're going to use this skill and we're going to modify the skill so we don't have to write it all the way from scratch. And instead of using Claude's brand guidelines, we're going to add our own brand guidelines over here. So firstly make sure that the skill is

07:19already installed and activated. And now I'm just going to go and write a simple prompt. Okay, so here's my prompt. I want to use {forward slash} brand guidelines, which is the brand guidelines skill, and create a new skill by duplicating it. This new skill must follow my brand colors and typography that I've uploaded instead of Anthropic's. Create a new skill based on brand guidelines skill and call it brand book. This is uh want to call this new skill as brand book instead of brand guidelines and give me an option to save

07:46this skill. So, here I've basically uploaded my brand guidelines. This is just a random brand book that I actually generated using ChatGPT, but you would obviously use your own brand guidelines over here. And let's actually press enter. All right. So, that modification has basically been done and this is what the new skill document actually looks like.

08:06Now, I basically just asked Claude in order to give me a button to save this skill so that every time I press forward slash it actually comes as a part of my skills. All I need to do is I just need to save this. Now, the next time I actually open a new chat, I can see this new skill called brand book, which is just the skill that I had modified right now. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask Claude in order to make that same PPT that I did using that research paper earlier. So,

08:34I'm just going to upload that research paper. And I'm just going to write the same prompt, which is make a deck to help me understand this better. All right. And the deck is ready and here it is. Look at that. Just for contrast, let me show you what the previous deck actually looked like. So, this is with Claude's brand guidelines and this is with my new brand guidelines. Do you see that?

09:02All the colors, all of it just with a new skill. So, now every time I want to use my brand guideline for anything, be it a deck, be it uh a PDF, be it an image or whatever it is, all I need to do is I need to press forward slash and brand book or whatever I want to call that skill. Ultimately, what we did here was use the base skill and modify it according to our specific needs. But, the next level is about using plugins and partner skills, which open up a

09:28whole new range of possibilities. So, let's go to level three. In the same window here, when you click on customize and browse, if you just click on plugins, you will see a wide range of domains like marketing, productivity, sales, data, blah blah blah. Each of these options basically pack tons of skills that are relevant to that particular domain. So, everything that you see over here is a collection of skills in that particular domain. So, let's for example go to marketing, okay?

09:55Now, here in marketing you can see that there are eight skills. There's a brand review skill, there's a campaign plan skill, there's a competitive brief skill. Whenever you hover over each and every one of it, you'll actually see So, if I'm hovering over content creation, I will basically see draft marketing content across channels, blog posts, social media, email newsletters, landing pages, press release, blah blah blah, make it SEO optimized, give headline options and call to actions.

10:19Right? And if I click on it, I'll basically see the entire skill file. So, I can get a much more detailed understanding of what is exactly in the skill file. Now, based on what I do at work, I can basically choose to install whatever I actually want from here. If I'm in finance, I can just install this entire finance package and I'll get that entire finance package as a part of my plugins. So, for example, if I wanted to install this finance package, I just click on this button. And next time when I go to chat and I press forward slash,

10:47I can just scroll, and I can see all my finance related skills in one place. It also nicely segregates them. So, depending on what line of work you're in, Claude also gives you a collection of skills for your particular domain. And now, because you have already learned the level two, which is modifying these skills, you can modify it according to your own needs.

11:07Now, if I were to go to one of the domains, let's say marketing again, you will see this thing below called as connectors. Now, this is what is super special about using Claude skills at level three. So, everything that you see in connectors over here is basically a tool that you might use at work. Like for example, in the marketing domain, the connectors are Slack, Canva, Figma, HubSpot, Amplitude, Notion, Ahrefs, Clavio, Supermetrics, etc. These are basically tools that a lot of marketers

11:34use on a day-to-day basis. If I were to go to, let's say, sales, I might see Slack, HubSpot, Close, Monday. You can see a lot of CRMs over here. You can see Notion, which is for organization. You can see Fireflies, which is a meeting note-taker app. You can see a lot of tools that a lot of sales people use in their everyday lives. Now, what are these connectors exactly and how exactly do they relate to skills? A very simple way you can visualize what connectors are is imagine Claude as the brain. Okay, the brain