Developing Skills with Claude

A Skill is a one-page instruction sheet, under 150 lines, that says: every time I need to do X, here is exactly how, what done looks like, the steps, the edge cases, and an example. Write it once, paste it forever. It is how a good workflow stops living in your head.

• Gate 1: Define done. The slowest and most important gate. AI asks four questions, trigger, document type, output format, and must-haves versus must-nots, and you end with a one-paragraph definition of done you can use to settle any future argument.
• Gate 2: Write the steps. Turn how you currently do it into a numbered methodology under 150 lines: the inputs, every step in order, one weird edge case, and one good example plus one bad one. The bad example teaches more than the good one.
• Gate 3: Audit and update. Two weeks after shipping v1, answer five questions: did the methodology hold, what broke, what edge case did we miss, what step was unnecessary, what step was missing. Bake the answers into v2. Set a 90-day reminder or the Skill decays.

Build yours in the Skills Builder tool.

• Your Org Context Document (Module 3).
• Your first reusable Skill (this module).
• The advancing-prompting stack (Module 8) baked into your process.
• A 90-day audit reminder on your calendar.