Robyn Anderson walks through Claude's skills feature: how to call them with backslash commands, create and edit them in Settings, discover community-made ones, and share them with others. Skills are repeatable markdown-based processes that replace static prompts, and keeping them updated matters as Claude's models change.
Chapters
The most important thing you need to understand when using Claude is what a skill is. A skill is a repeatable process inside Claude. It's replaced prompting, and it is what will help you get your work done. And if we haven't met before, my name is Jam. I teach thousands of small business owners, coaches, consultants, creatives, and professionals how to use AI to save time and save money. All right folks, well, let's get into it. I'm right here inside Claude, and I wanna show you how you can call a skill, create a skill, and where you can add skills that are already made. So number one, a skill is a repeatable process. So back when I first started teaching AI, we used to talk about prompts. Well, prompts used to have to save somewhere in a Google Drive, or some people just had them on their desktop. Now you can turn that prompt into a skill. So a really good example of that is I really liked the prompt where I could call up my roundtable of advisors. So in real life, there's no way I could sit in a room with like Alex Hormozi, Amy Porterfield, Brené Brown, Gary Vaynerchuk, you know, all of these amazing marketing people. They're not gonna spend their time with me and sit in a room. However, I had a prompt called the roundtable where I could actually talk to them and give them my business information. So I used to have this whole big prompt and I'll show you what it looked like, but now I've turned the prompt into a skill. So if I just go \jamroundtable, it's pulling this 2-page prompt right here, and it's always there and ready for me to use with a simple backslash. That's all I do to get it up in here. So if I want to go into the skill, I'll show you how to get there. You'll go select your name and then you'll hit Settings, and down at the bottom under Customize, you'll see Skills. So go ahead and select that. I'll bring up the Roundtable one as that's the one that I was showing you. So I have this Jam Roundtable skill. So it gives you kind of an overview of what it does, but this is the contents and this is what the prompt is. So every skill has what's called an MD, so it's a It's a file that AI can read. So a markdown file is what AI tools like to read. So it has this whole overview of who I am and who's on the board, right? So every time I say, hey, I'm thinking of adding this new product, or I'm thinking of, I'm thinking of maybe not speaking anymore, or I'm thinking of maybe I'm going to up the price of something. Well, I can just put it in here and it'll give me advice from each advisor. So what I'm showing you right here used to be the prompt. I told you it's ginormous, but now I can just go backslash roundtable and it pops right up. So the really cool thing with skills is you can share them with other people, you can download them and share them, or you can just try it right here in a chat. So if I click it, it's saying, okay, here's the roundtable, and I can say something like, should I start another business? They're gonna say no. So that's just how that skill works. While that's writing, let me show you this other cool thing. So if you go back to your account, go to settings, we're going to go back down to skills. And there's this little toggle now called Discover. And so these are skills that other people made and that Anthropic themselves made. And so you can just simply go ahead and try it or add it, and you can test out other people's skills. So there's everything from financial advisor type skills to creating animation to building websites. To building artifacts. And so you can just scroll through here and find pretty much anything you're looking for. The other really cool thing about skills is that if you're having a really great session in Claude, let's say you've been working in Claude and you had it build you the perfect blog post. Well, at the end of that, you can just say, make this a skill, and it'll get to work and create the skill for you. So you're not actually writing out any sort of long prompt. You just create with Claude in a chat. So that's a really great way to go if you are a beginner. Let's say you know what the end result should look like, but you're not really sure what exactly you want it to do, right? You don't know the words or the language to explain to a technical robot how to build this skill. But if you chat with Claude and just tell it the end result that you're looking for, he'll whip it right up for you. In my community ClubJam, we share skills all the time, and so we can upload each other's skills just like file. So you would just upload it and then you have skills from a friend, a colleague, or just something you found on GitHub that you think would be really amazing to try. So I'm not going to read all these because I'm not going to start another business, but that gives you like this where the board lands, which I think is really cool. So it summarizes kind of like the perspective of each of your advisors and kind of wraps it up with a pretty bow. So that's one of my favorite skills. If you look inside Club Jam, I have so many skills and prompts that I share with everyone. Everything from how to humanize your voice in AI to my magic 30 shortcuts to a really fun one where it's more of like an Instagram glow-up skill. And each one has a video of how to use it and kind of showing you exactly what it does at the bottom. Now, this is super important. This is a skill that I recently just shared with everybody and I'll link it below, but this is skill management. And so skill management is where it's actually managing all your skills. And why this is important is because you're creating skills all the time and they actually work with each other. So let's say you have like a website page skill, right? It knows how to post and create pages on your website. And then you have a blog skill. Well, those will work together because once your blog is done, you probably want it on your website. So skills end up working together and oftentimes they can contradict each other or get out of date. I just had to redo 16 of my skills because a few things— I've changed things in my business, but also these models inside Claude have gotten smarter. So they used to have instructions like, ask me questions, list every step of how you're building this. But now it's October 2026. I don't need to do that anymore. These models know exactly what skills are, how they should be made, and they don't need my input on it. And so I just remade a bunch of skills inside my platform, and now my entire system is working a lot better. So that's what a skill is. It's super easy to call them, create them, and you can share them with people in your organization or maybe with a friend. Definitely check out the skills that we have in ClubJam. The link is in my description below, and I would love to see you in our community. If you want to learn more about creating an AI system that actually helps you save time and This is the place to be. See you in the next one, friend.
