Claude Skills Are Taking the AI Community by Storm
Anthropic's Viral Claude Skills Toolkit, Packed With Ready‑to‑Copy Templates
The AI world hasn’t slept in 72 hours, and I get it.
I’ve been testing Claude Skills myself, and it’s not your usual “neat feature” energy.
It’s the kind of chaotic, 3 a.m., look-what-it-can-do excitement that only happens when something fundamentally shifts.
Simon Willison called it “maybe a bigger deal than MCP.”
Ethan Mollick said it’s “both an easy path for workable agents and a step forward in what AI can do.”
Today, we’re going to look at:
What Claude Skills are (and what makes them actually special)
What I built with Claude Skills in <90min
Infographics Maker
Messy Notes Organizer
Substack SEO Internal Linking Strategy
When to use Skills, and when to stick to MCP or external tools
Hey, I’m Karo 🤗
AI product manager, builder of StackShelf.app, and chronic optimizer of workflows. If you’re new here - welcome! Here’s what you might have missed:
Vibecoding Tips: The Ultimate Collection
10x Your Productivity with Perplexity Comet: 11 Use Cases from “Nice” to “Wow!”
Product People of Substack
What Are Claude Skills And Why Are They Special
Skills, like most great inventions, are deceptively simple. They’re just a set of instructions you teach Claude to follow.
The old Claude couldn’t fetch YouTube transcripts ➜ the new one can (if you give him the skill).
The old Claude couldn’t keep every visual on brand ➜ the new one can (if you give him the skill).
And that part - the giving Claude the skill part - is the real shift. Anthropic made skill-building something anyone can do. No API keys. No SDKs. Just Markdown and curiosity.
You can teach Claude without any code.
(It even rhymes! I didn’t plan it. Probably.)
The tech behind Skills isn’t new. Tools like Manus AI have been doing text extraction and on-brand visuals for a while.
What’s new is how accessible it is.
Before Skills, you had three options:
Option 1 — MCP servers: complex setup, infrastructure overhead, token management, mostly aimed at engineers.
Option 2 — Custom tools: build API integrations, maintain auth flows, debug constantly — the cognitive equivalent of bringing a moving truck to buy groceries.
Option 3 — Advanced context engineering & system prompts: powerful but brittle, and not for everyone (or every occasion).
With skills you have a folder with some markdown and maybe a script. That’s it.
And when anyone can create a Skill, anyone can improve one or build on top of one.
How To Give Your Claude New Skills
Enable Skill Creator
Go to Settings → Skills → Skill Creator → Enable.Describe your workflow in plain English
Build a skill that saves my blog posts in Notion.Answer Claude’s follow-ups.
It will ask about inputs, outputs, edge cases, and constraints.Review the generated files.
You’ll get SKILL.md (+ optional resources/scripts). The files may look intimidating at first, but it’s easier than it seems:
SKILL.md → the brain: where understanding lives.
/resources → the study notes: cheat sheets, and examples
/scripts → the muscle memory: what turns knowledge into action.
Download the ZIP file and go to Settings → Skills → Upload. Toggle it on.
Test in a new chat. Prompt naturally to see if Claude can recall the skill.
Build on Top of a Growing Skill Library
You don’t have to start from scratch, the Claude community is already doing the heavy lifting. Developers are curating public GitHub repositories packed with Skills for every niche imaginable: text cleaning, automation, design, analysis, and more.
Here are a few of the best places to start:
anthropics/skills
Official examples from Anthropic (great for studying structure and naming conventions).BehiSecc/awesome-claude-skills
Community-curated collection of practical and experimental Skills.docx - Create, edit, analyze Word docs with tracked changes, comments, formatting.
pdf - Extract text, tables, metadata, merge & annotate PDFs.
pptx - Read, generate, and adjust slides, layouts, templates.
xlsx - Spreadsheet manipulation: formulas, charts, data transformations.
markdown - Parse, generate, and format Markdown documents.
michalparkola/tapestry-skills-for-claude-code
A creative repo focused on Claude Code workflows and integrations.PleasePrompto/notebooklm-skill
Connect Claude Code to your NotebookLM.
adrianpuiu/claude-skills-marketplace
Turn Claude into a professional Project Architect.
👉 A list of all Skills and repos I know of (approx. 120 skills!)
Companies are building too. Rakuten automated their management accounting. “What once took a day, we can now accomplish in an hour,” said their AI general manager. Real company. Real savings. Not a demo.
If you’d rather skip the browsing, feel free to copy the Skills I built 👇