Chapter 4
Skills — the Multiplier
Last updated April 27, 2026
The single biggest behavioural shift between casual users and power users: power users build Skills.
A Skill is a saved instruction set Cowork runs the same way every time. Once you've nailed a prompt, save it as a Skill — next month, next quarter, next year, the same workflow runs to the same standard.
Finding and viewing your Skills
Skills live in the left-hand menu. Hit the Customize button at the top left to open the Skills panel — you'll see every Skill available to you, including any shared by your team.
Running a Skill
Three ways to trigger a Skill:
Slash command
Type /skill-name directly in the task input to invoke it immediately. For example, /earnings-prep or /month-end-close. This is the fastest path once you know the Skill exists.
Auto-detection
You don't always have to invoke a Skill explicitly. If you describe what you want and Cowork recognises it matches a Skill you have, it will pick it up and apply it automatically. Just work naturally — the Skills are there when relevant.
Ask for it by name
You can also just ask: “Use the earnings prep Skill for AAPL.” Cowork will locate it and run it. Useful when you're not sure of the exact slash command name.
As repeatable workflows
A Skill captures a multi-step task — earnings prep, 10-K diff, month-end close. Run it once, save it, run it the same way every time. Schedule it to fire on a cadence and it runs without you touching it.
As information containers
Not every Skill is a workflow. A “house style guide,” a “portfolio holdings” reference, a “preferred sources” doc, a “marketing review policy” — Claude pulls these in automatically when relevant. Institutional knowledge, no longer tribal.
When to build a Skill
- You've run the same multi-step workflow more than twice
- The output needs to look the same every time (reports, memos, IR responses)
- You want to schedule it (month-end, weekly, pre-earnings)
- You want to share the workflow with the rest of the team
- You have a piece of institutional knowledge Claude should reach for automatically
How to build one
The simplest path: get the prompt working in a normal Cowork task first. Iterate until the output is what you want. Then ask Cowork:
Save the workflow we just ran as a Skill called "{skill-name}".
Capture the structure of what we did, the file naming, the output format, and any house-style instructions I added along the way.Cowork creates the Skill, scaffolds it both inside the app and to the local .claude folder, and you can run it from any new task by invoking it like a command. Edit the Skill instructions in the right-hand panel anytime — no code, just the same plain-language instructions you already wrote.
Personal Skills vs shared Skills
When you build a Skill, you choose whether it stays personal or gets shared with your team. Personal Skills are only visible to you — useful for individual workflows or anything still being refined. Shared Skills show up in every team member's Skills panel.
The patterns that work for shared Skills:
- →Build and test a Skill personally first — share it once the output is consistent
- →One person owns each shared Skill. When the workflow evolves, that person makes the edit. Others fork if they need a variant.
- →A small group of power users can seed the firm's Skill library (earnings prep, 10-K diff, month-end close) so everyone starts from a working base
Anthropic is still figuring out the best way to handle multi-user Skill collaboration — versioning and shared edits aren't fully solved yet. Until they are, single-owner discipline is the right approach.