Claude Code Skills: Teach AI Your Workflows

0:01 We'll be covering skills in this video which is arguably one of the most exciting components of using cloud code. Essentially skills um is a set of instructions and guidelines on how to execute and complete a task that is completely uh that can be completely written in natural language. Right? So no coding uh you can just describe what you want done kind of like an SOP but maybe even less structured if you want it. Um and the beauty of working with an agent is that they can take this unstructured set of guidelines and try to execute against that. And that's what skills allows you to do. So, if you have um a repeatable task that you repeat often, instead of having to tell Claude what they should do every single time, you can just say, "I'm going to create a skill because I know I'm going to use it. I'm going to invoke that skill again and again." Um, and so you go out and do it, right? And I think uh especially for GTM, there's a lot of these sort of more subjective unstructured tasks that do loosely follow a set of steps uh but with some room for creativity and going on tangents, right? And so skills work really nicely with uh with sales and marketing. Um the point of this video isn't to necessarily cover sort of the full extent of what skills are capable.

1:31 I think there's going to be have to be more videos that go into more advanced use cases of skills. But um my goal in this video is to sort of show you how skills work uh using basic examples and how you can start creating uh your own skills uh to really um to really accelerate uh and amplify uh the impact that cloud code can have uh in your GTM workflows. Okay. So, we're going to take a very uh basic use case, which is getting Claude to go to a website of a prospect or an a target account and doing basic research. And as you can see, um we have the anthropic uh context here, which means that uh we have a basic overview uh of Anthropic as a company.

2:26 So, we'll act as if we're trying to sell Claude and um based on that overview that Claude gets of our target company, we will combine that with some of the context on Enthropic and think about how we might be able to sell Enthropic or Claude uh to this company. Hey, can you go out and do some research on the company AIO? That is a tio. Uh their website is adio.com. Um, they are a uh a a modern CRM company and uh what I would like you to do is do account research on the company and maybe it's founders or founder and CEO see if they have any uh sort of public speaking engagements or newsletters or whatever it is um or or social media and try to get a comprehensive overview of the company. um with the context being that uh we're doing account research to um think about how we might uh pitch our product to them. While it's doing this research, I'm actually going to spin up another claude code sess session and I'm going to show you something meta which is creating a skill to create a skill.

3:42 So, uh, as I mentioned, Claude code skills are quite unstructured, but there are a few conventions that, um, you do need to follow. And so, what I'm going to do is teach claude code what that what those conventions look like, what the best practices look like for creating a skill, and then, uh, get it to create its own skill to create a skill. So, uh, cloud code is going to create a skill to be able to create a skill and then we're going to come back to this and then create a skill to research to do account research. Hopefully that makes sense, but I think it'll become clearer as I walk you through the steps of creating this skill. So, I'm spinning up another uh cloud session here on this side.

4:37 Hey, go look up Claude Code's skill documentation and understand how skills work, how to create one, and let's create a skill based on that understanding on that research that you do uh to create a skill, right? So, it's a little bit meta, but um go do research on uh cloud code skills, how it works, how you set one up uh and then let's create a skill to create a skill.

5:08 So while this uh cloud code agent is doing that, let's come back and take a look. So it's done a lot of research here. I think this again probably like 60% 70% good enough. Uh I would do uh sort of a skim through if I have more time, but the point of this uh walkthrough isn't to necessarily get the research right. It's to create skills. So, I'm going to say this is good enough and I'll say okay, save it as a file in the uh research directory uh and create a new folder called uh account research and then save it as audio.m skill location. Let's just save it in this um in this project. And the scope of the skill will be um it'll walk through the entire process.

6:02 It'll help the user create a skill. Um and if needed, it'll ask some questions to the user. The user will answer them. Hopefully uh we can give some specific options to the user to make uh decision-m a little bit easier. And that's it. Uh the target audience is me. Cool. A note on skill location similar to what did we cover? Um trying to remember uh similar to claw.md file um I I mentioned this in that walkthrough you can save a skill in this project uh and then locally in this project just for me and then you can save it at the user level which means that it'll apply to every project that you work on on your local machine. Um, and then you can do something uh where you package it as a plug-in which makes it more sharable.

6:55 And we'll cover that uh in a future video. But there's a lot of different ways of saving a skill. But the most straightforward thing to do would be to save it just um in this in this project to be used uh specifically in this project in the context repo. So coming I'm switching back here and I'm letting it uh save this file. now of uh the account research that is done on audio and we'll come back to this and package what we did or what Claude did as a skill once we create the skill to create a skill.

7:31 And what's nice about creating a skill to create a skill is as you get really into creating skills, you might start creating a bunch of skills, right? And we're basically saying, well, we don't want to necessarily point claw to this documentation and learn how to uh properly format a skill file. So, let's just do it once by uh creating a skill to create a skill and then we can reuse that skill every time we need to create a different skill, right? So, you might do account research, uh prospect research, uh you might do some brainstorming, right? Like all of those can be turned into skills if you do them often enough and you can give Claude sort of an idea of you know how to turn it um like what to do every single time for that process.

8:16 Okay. So key findings from official docs file structure skills live. So it knows exactly what it needs to do. The front matter is the formatting that I told you about. Front matter is the the content that lives at the top of the file of the markdown file where um you have the name, description, disabled, model invocation, uh and a bunch of other parameters, right? And so it's creating the skill and let's go take a look at this.

8:46 All right, cool. So the name is called the skill creator and it's using when uh creating a new cloud code skill. this description in this front matter which is uh indicated by these three dashes the description gets loaded into cloud. So uh if you look at context uh so slashcontext you can see skills the yellow thing here right yellow little disc you can see that it's taking up 0.7%. Um, what's really nice about skills is that only this gets loaded into claw and so it doesn't take up as much of your context and only when you actually use the skill the rest of the skill gets loaded into the context window. Uh so this is a little bit different from MCPS which we'll cover later but MCPS the entire thing gets loaded and so people often complain about how much uh context window it takes up but with skills it's really nice because only this gets called and based on the description um when I say I want to create a new cloud code skill cloud says oh I saw that somewhere it's loaded in my context uh there's a a skill called skill creator uh the description says says, you know, uh, use it when creating a new cloud code skill.

10:12 So, now I'm going to actually go and read the entire skill file and use that skill. Okay, so I'm back in this uh, audio account research um, session. I'm going to create a skill uh, to do account research. And the way I like to do it is basically saying, "Hey Claude, we did I gave you some context around audio uh and what I want in my account research and you went ahead and got that information, right?

10:45 um can you turn what you did, the set of steps that you took as a skill called account research so that I can just give you uh the company name uh and maybe the domain if I know what the domain is. Uh and then you can basically do what you did for audio but for other companies as well. Perfect. So we successfully loaded that skill and now it's going to do it right. So now it's asking me uh let's see I'll create an account research skill based on the process I use for audio. Okay. So I am going to allow access to skills and here now we have the account research skill. So if you look at this one again it has it follows the right structure right the skill should be used when researching a company for sales.

11:36 And you can sort of see um everything that's in there. Things like let's see leadership profiles product and market position pitch positioning section for audio cloud code pitch position for audio why audio is a strong fit engineering driven culture AI native DNA scale up stage potential use cases. This is awesome. Pitch angles by entry point. Developer productivity is bottom up, right? You'd be targeting individual engineers. That makes sense. Engineering leadership top down makes sense. Product strategy makes sense.

12:16 Again, for the first pass, this looks great. Yeah, this is awesome. I like how you thought about bottom up, top down depending and then like looked at different sort of personas that we can target and and who they are at at this specific company. Um so, uh no notes, this looks really great. Uh let's incorporate this into the account research skill. So um in less than 30 minutes we just created uh two skills. a skill to create a skill which will serve you really well as you start diving into skills um and creating your own that really u are tailored to your specific use cases and then a generic uh account research one which you know granted we didn't really go into detail in terms of really refining the skill but you saw how uh through working with Claude using a skill that you built you can start extending it and and making it even better by just talking with Claude on giving it feedback. Um, and so yeah, if it's not super clear, what's really nice about Claude code is that there's all these there's this byproduct of your conversation with Claude, right? Like you're talking with Claude to do something, in this case, account research for a company, and you're saying, "Hey, I don't actually like this. I actually need this for my work, and I you need to do X, Y, and Z."

13:40 and Claude goes and edits and modifies its work, right? And then instead of just stopping there, what you can do is, hey, based on this feedback that I just gave you, go and fix the skill next time so that I don't have to repeat the same feedback and you don't have to repeat the same mistake, right? um that I think is something that you pick up as you start using claude code more where you're using claude to do a task and then there's all this um byproduct or side effects of these like feedbacks that you're giving claude and you can use those to further sharpen your skills, your context and whatever files you have in your in your folder.

14:24 So hopefully this was helpful. Um, I'm sure there's going to be more videos on skills because skills are really, really powerful. You can do some wild stuff with it. Uh, but hopefully this serves as a good primer to start getting into skills. Um, and as always, if you have any questions, let me know. Thanks.