Claude Skills: Your Permanent AI Memory

Stop Training Claude. Start Building Skills That Last.

Your AI assistant finally remembers what you taught it. (Image generated with Gemini)

Claude Got Skills. Here’s How to Build Your Own.

Remember that time you spent 20 minutes explaining to Claude how to format your weekly report? The brand voice, the specific metrics, the way you like charts positioned... and then next week you explained it all over again?

Yeah, me too. Except now Claude can actually learn.

This week, Claude got Skills. Think of them as permanent memory packages for your specific work. Not the vague “I’ll try to remember our conversation” nonsense we’ve dealt with before. Actual, loadable expertise that Claude pulls up automatically when relevant.

This isn’t about teaching Claude to be smarter. Claude’s plenty smart. This is about teaching Claude YOUR intelligence and packaging your expertise once so you can stop being a broken record.

Think about it: Every time you paste your brand guidelines into a new chat. Every time you re-explain your business metrics. Every time you describe your content structure.

That’s hours of your week spent training an assistant who forgets everything the moment you close the tab.

Skills fix that.

You package your knowledge into folders Claude can load. So your 50-page brand guide? It’s there when you need it, and invisible when you don’t. Your complete database documentation? Claude knows it exists, loads the relevant parts. Your entire process library? Available without overwhelming every conversation.

Anthropic already built Skills for documents - their Excel Skill generates actual spreadsheets with working formulas, the PowerPoint Skill creates formatted presentations, the PDF Skill fills forms. These aren’t demos. They work. And building your own takes literally minutes because Claude has a skill-creator built in that handles the technical work.

Let’s get into exactly what Skills do and which ones Claude actually needs.