skill-creation-walkthrough

A walkthrough for designing, writing, and maintaining your own Claude Skills. Covers when a skill is the right shape for your problem, how to write a description that actually triggers, how to structure SKILL.md and references, and how to test and iterate. ## When to use - You catch yourself writing the same prompt or instructions repeatedly. - You want to package a workflow or framework for reuse. - An existing skill of yours is not triggering when it should. - You are publishing skills for others to use. - You want to teach Claude a domain-specific way of working. - You are reviewing a skill someone wrote and need a quality bar. ## When NOT to use - For one-off prompts (just write the prompt). - For information that should live in system context, not progressive disclosure. - For changing Claude's general behavior across all conversations (use Claude.ai settings or system prompts, not skills). - For replacing tool calls (skills are instructions, not tools). ## Required inputs - The task or workflow you want to encode. - The audience: who will trigger this skill, in what kind of conversation. - Existing artifacts: prompts you have used, docs you have written, examples of good output. ## The framework: how skills work A Skill is a folder with a `SKILL.md` file. The SKILL.md has YAML frontmatter (name and description) and a body with instructions. It can also include reference files, scripts, or templates that get loaded when needed. The key property: **progressive di...