Claude Unveils Skills: Revolutionize Custom Instruction Manuals Creation!

Claude has now distinctly defined its direction. While ChatGPT, its main competitor, seeks to dominate the generative AI market by infiltrating every facet of its users’ lives, Claude is targeting a more specific audience: professionals. Gradually, the tool is incorporating new abilities in coding, agent-based AI, or document analysis. The latest addition is the introduction of Skills, announced in a blog post on Thursday, October 16, 2025. Let’s delve into the details!

Customized Capabilities with Claude’s Skills

Skills are “folders containing instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can load as needed,” according to Anthropic. This system allows Claude to perform specialized actions such as creating an Excel spreadsheet, formatting a document according to a specific template, or applying an internal analysis method.

Skills are not permanent; Claude utilizes them only when relevant, which helps avoid overload and keeps the model swift. This differentiates them from Projects, which are always active, and from Custom Instructions, which are generally applied to all conversations.

While working on tasks, Claude analyzes the available skills to find relevant matches. When a match is found, only the necessary information and files are loaded, enabling it to operate quickly and access specialized expertise, the announcement explains.

Designed to be reusable across all of Claude’s interfaces, Skills can also include executable code, useful for more complex operations. They require the activation of the Code Execution Tool.

Integration across Claude, Claude Code, and the API

Skills are integrated throughout the Claude ecosystem, with different applications depending on the environment. You can use Skills in:

• The Claude application: the feature is accessible to Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers. Claude identifies the ongoing task and activates the relevant modules without manual intervention. Additionally, the creation of Skills is facilitated by the “skill-creator” tool, which “asks you about your workflow, generates the folder structure, formats the SKILL.md file, and compiles the resources you need”.
• Claude Code: users can install Skills from a marketplace or add them manually to their workstation. Teams can then store these modules in their code repositories to share and maintain them collectively. With the Claude SDK, developers can also create their own agents that incorporate these Skills.
• Claude API: an entry point named /v1/skills allows for creating, managing, and versioning the modules. Anthropic also provides several ready-to-use templates for generating Excel, Word, PowerPoint, or PDF documents.