You're using Claude daily but it still doesn't know how you work

A lot of the teams we work with have already adopted AI. Many of them are using Claude regularly. But when you look at how, it's almost always the same pattern. Open a new chat, explain the context, get something back, close the tab. Repeat. One L&D lead described it to me recently as "96% usage, almost no variation." Everyone's doing the same basic thing over and over. The tool is capable of so much more but nobody has taught it how their team actually works.

That difference between using Claude and teaching Claude is exactly what had the internet moving this week.

Thariq Shihipar, an engineer on the Claude Code team at Anthropic, published a piece about how Anthropic's own team uses Claude internally. It hit over 6 million views. The next day he ran a live session and brought in someone from Uber to show how their team uses the same approach at scale.

The post is about something called Skills.

In the same week, Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, open-sourced his entire Claude setup on GitHub. A collection of Skills that give Claude different roles across his whole workflow. One acts as a CEO reviewing ideas, one writes as an engineer, one reviews that same work for bugs. The repo already hit 37K+ stars.

Over on Reddit, someone posted "What exactly are Claude's Skills?" and the thread is still going. The general sentiment is a Skill is more powerful than a saved prompt, but most useful when your work is repetitive enough to warrant a procedure rather than a one-off instruction. The best framing in the thread is that a prompt tells Claude who to be while a Skill tells Claude how to think. Skills went from niche feature to mainstream conversation in about a week. So what actually is one? And how can you start using it for your own work?

A Skill is a permanent brief. You write down your workflow, your standards, your voice, your context once. Claude reads it, follows it, applies it automatically.

One writer compares it to training a new team member. Day one, you explain how you like things done. Day two, same. Day three, same. By week two you're exhausted. A Skill is writing it down once. Claude reads it and delivers the work exactly how you want, every time.

Thariq's post revealed that when his team catalogued all their Skills, they fall into three types:

• Reference Skills: your brand guidelines, your tone, how you write.

• Workflow Skills: step-by-step processes Claude should follow.

• Gotcha Skills: the specific failure points Claude keeps hitting in your work that you've learned to catch.

The best Skills, he says, get updated over time. They get smarter as you use them which is what makes this different from a prompt. Here's what that actually looks like across different jobs:

• For writers and content creators: A voice Skill that makes Claude write exactly like you

• For marketers and business owners: A repurposing Skill that takes any long piece of content and extracts platform-specific angles for LinkedIn, email, and social, etc…

• For Ops and PMs: A meeting debrief Skill that follows your team's exact structure every time

• For career and personal development: A feedback Skill that reviews your work before it goes out

• The skill that builds other Skills: Claude's own skill-creator Skill. Describe a workflow in plain language, answer a few questions, and it builds the file for you. This is how you start.

It’s important to note, however, that you don't need to be a developer. Khe Hy wrote a full walkthrough for non-technical people. Anthropic also published a practical intro notebook if you want to understand how they work under the hood.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the difference between using AI and getting better at it. How even inside AI-native companies, most people only delegate 0–20% of their work to Claude because knowing what's good is hard to outsource. Skills don't close that gap on their own but they definitely change the starting point of every single session.

How to AI 🤖 

Every week, this section is your shortcut. Here are a couple of ways you could try AI this week that are worth your time:

• How to bring anything to life using Google AI Studio

• How to use Lovable for more general tasks

• How to turn a messy doc into a portfolio using Stitch by Google

• How to use Claude Code (50 tips and best practices)

• How to use Claude Cowork like a second employee

Before you go ✌️

Is there a task you keep re-explaining to Claude every week? Tell me what it is and I’ll help you think through what a Skill for it would look like.

See you next Sunday!