Issue #86: How To Use Claude Skills (Save Time, Make Money)

Good morning.

A few days ago, Anthropic shipped something I've been waiting for since 2019.

Not another model. Not another feature.

More like a way to “package” cognition.

They call it Claude Skills.

Most people will treat this like a prompt library. Save a few templates. Get slightly better outputs. Move on.

That's not what this is.

Claude Skills is the first real attempt at making AI remember how your business works, without you having to explain it every single time—and without you needing complex code, RAG, and more to make it work.

This is the shift from prompting to packaging.

And if you miss it, you'll be re-explaining your brand voice, your workflows, your SOPs to Claude (or any AI) for the next three years while your competitors install it once and move on.

Let me show you what's actually happening here.

— Sam

IN TODAY’S ISSUE 🤖 

• Why Skills changes the AI game (it's not about prompts)

• What Claude Skills actually are (Markdown + progressive disclosure)

• Real numbers from Rakuten, Box, Thrasio (87.5% time cuts, $2M saved)

• Five business types already using this (SaaS, agencies, solopreneurs, marketing, ops)

• How to build your first Skill in 15 minutes (no code required)

Let’s get into it.

1. The Shift: From Prompting to Packaging

Here's what most people are doing with Claude right now:

They open a chat. They write a prompt. They hope it works.

If it doesn't, they rewrite the prompt.

If it does work, they save the prompt to Notion.

Next week, they do it again. Same explanation. Same context. Same re-teaching.

Perhaps they venture into using Projects, or if they’re really pushing themselves, they’ll experiment with Artifacts and Claude Code.

But it’s really just manual labor with a chatbot.

Claude Skills changes the pattern.

Instead of prompting from scratch every time, you package your logic once (your tone, your workflows, your standards, your examples) into a Skill.

Claude loads it when it's relevant. Automatically.

You're not re-explaining anything. You're not hoping it "remembers" from three conversations ago.

You define it once. Claude applies it consistently.

This is operational AI, not conversational AI.

The old way: "Write me a customer support email in our brand voice."

The new way: Install a "Customer Support Voice" Skill once. Every time you ask Claude to write support emails, it loads your tone guide, your examples, your do's and don'ts, without you saying a word.

Rakuten's finance team cut manual reporting from a full day to one hour. That's 87.5% time savings.

Thrasio automated 50%+ of support tickets and saved $2M in the first year.

Box users are transforming stored files into branded presentations, spreadsheets, and docs, automatically.

These are live implementations, six days in.

Take a look at this official repo to get a feel for what they are.

2. What Claude Skills Actually Are

A Skill is a folder.

Inside that folder:

• A Markdown file with instructions (SKILL.md)

• Optional reference docs (brand guides, templates, data files)

• Optional scripts (if you need deterministic logic or calculations)

That's it.

You write the Skill in plain language. No code required (unless you want it).

Claude scans all available Skills at the start of a session (each Skill takes 30-50 tokens to describe itself).

When you make a request, Claude checks: "Is there a Skill for this?"

If yes, Claude loads the full instructions and resources. If no, Claude works normally.

This is called progressive disclosure.

Claude doesn't load everything at once. It loads what's needed, when it's needed.

That means you can have 50+ Skills installed without clogging Claude's context window.

Your brand guide Skill? Only loads when you're writing customer-facing content.

Your financial reporting Skill? Only loads when you're analyzing numbers.

Your API documentation Skill? Only loads when you're writing technical docs.

Ask Claude to create a quarterly business review presentation, and three Skills might activate at once:

1. Brand guidelines (colors, fonts, logos)

2. Financial reporting (data visualization, metrics formatting)

3. Presentation structure (layouts, narrative flow)

All three coordinate automatically. You don't select them. You don't activate them manually.

Claude figures it out.

This is composability. And it's why Skills is fundamentally different from Custom GPTs, Copilot Studio, or any other "custom AI" approach.

Skills are portable.

The same Skill works in:

• Claude.ai (web interface)

• Claude Code (command line)

• Claude API (your own applications)

Build once. Use everywhere.

No platform lock-in. No rebuilding for different tools.

This brief explainer video is worth watching:

3. The Early Numbers

Anthropic launched Skills on October 16, 2025. 

A lot of companies had pre-launch access so we already have concrete data.

Rakuten (Japanese e-commerce giant):

Their finance operations team uses Skills for management accounting workflows that previously required manual coordination across departments.

Tasks that took a full day now take one hour. 87.5% time reduction.

Box (enterprise content management):

Users convert stored files into PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents—all automatically following organizational brand standards.

Result: "Saving hours of effort per document transformation task" while ensuring brand consistency across all outputs.

Thrasio (e-commerce operations):

Deployed Claude Skills within their Assembled Assist customer support platform.

Results in the first two weeks:

• 50%+ ticket automation

• ~$2M in cost savings

• 50% decrease in resolution time

Honeylove (direct-to-consumer brand):

Same platform, similar timeframe:

• 54% increase in solves per hour

• 20% decrease in escalations

• 18% CSAT increase

When you can handle 54% more support volume with the same team (or cut your support costs in half while improving customer satisfaction) you’re doing pretty good.

4. Five Business Types Already Using Claude Skills

The earliest adopters of Claude Skills are established businesses with real operations, real teams, and real pain points.

SaaS companies. Agencies. Solopreneurs. Marketing teams. Operations departments.

Each one is solving a different problem. Each one seeing material results within days.

I consult with a number of different businesses, across all kinds of industries. Many of them can do a lot of work with a Claude Max plan alone, and perhaps using Manus or other tools.

Skills is another, more efficient, way of getting work done.

Below are the workflows they're automating, the Skills they're building, and the actual time savings they're reporting.

This is what's working right now.

SaaS Companies: Documentation and Support at Scale

SaaS companies have a documentation problem.

APIs change. Features ship. Product specs evolve. Support tickets pile up.

And someone has to write, update, maintain, and explain it all—consistently—across dozens of docs, hundreds of help articles, and thousands of support interactions.

Most SaaS companies solve this with headcount. More writers. More support reps. More people.

Skills solves it with knowledge capture.

What SaaS Teams Are Building

API Documentation Skills

Feed Claude your OpenAPI spec, your terminology guide, your formatting standards.

Claude generates:

• API reference docs

• Code examples in multiple languages

• Troubleshooting guides

• Version-specific documentation

One developer-focused SaaS company reports 60% reduction in technical writing time while improving consistency scores by 18%.

That's 60% time savings on one of the most tedious, high-stakes workflows in SaaS.

Support Ticket Automation Skills

Customer success teams are using Skills to:

• Classify and route tickets across 200+ languages

• Generate standardized response templates

• Analyze support call transcripts

• Identify patterns in customer feedback

Assembled (a customer support operations platform) integrated Claude Skills into their product.

Results from their customers:

Thrasio:

• 50%+ ticket automation

• $2M in cost savings (first year)

• 50% decrease in resolution time

Honeylove:

• 54% increase in solves per hour

• 20% decrease in escalations

• 18% CSAT increase

These numbers came from the first two weeks of implementation.

Not six months. Not a year. Two weeks.

Product Documentation Skills

Notion integrated Skills to reduce "prompt wrangling on complex tasks."

MJ Felix, Product Manager at Notion: "More predictable results."

The integration lets Notion users package workspace-specific knowledge into Skills that Claude applies automatically when working with Notion data.

No more explaining how your team structures docs. No more re-teaching Claude your internal conventions.

Install the Skill once. It works forever.

The Real Unlock is Domain Expertise as Code

Skills let SaaS companies package domain expertise that previously lived only in senior employees' heads.

A financial modeling Skill:

• Validates calculations according to company standards

• Enforces naming conventions

• Applies company-specific formulas

• Flags anomalies that violate internal logic

A contract review Skill:

• Checks compliance against standard terms

• Identifies deviation risks

• Suggests approved alternative language

• Routes edge cases to legal

This changes Claude from a general assistant into a specialist trained on your organizational knowledge.

That's the shift. That's why this matters.

Agencies: Managing 20 Client Brands Without Losing Your Mind

Agencies have a context-switching problem.

You're working on Client A's Instagram campaign at 10am. Client B's email newsletter at 11am. Client C's landing page at 2pm.

Each client has different:

• Brand guidelines

• Tone of voice

• Visual standards

• Approved messaging

• Compliance requirements

And if you mix them up (if Client A's casual tone bleeds into Client B's enterprise messaging) you've got a revision cycle, an awkward call, and a credibility hit.

Most agencies solve this with Notion folders, Google Drives, and hoping someone remembers to check the guidelines.

Skills solves it with automatic brand loading.

The Agency Workflow

Create one brand guidelines Skill per client.

Inside that Skill:

• Brand book (tone, voice, personality)

• Logo usage rules

• Color palettes (exact hex codes)

• Typography standards

• Approved and prohibited vocabulary

• Platform-specific requirements

When you ask Claude to create social media content for Client A, Claude automatically loads Client A's brand Skill.

Switch to Client B? Claude loads Client B's Skill.

No manual searching. No cross-contamination. No context-switching overhead. Just a folder with your brand standards.

How This Actually Works

An agency managing 25 active clients traditionally spends 5-20 minutes per project searching for brand guidelines, reviewing past examples, remembering client preferences.

With Skills, this context loads in milliseconds.

Time savings:

• 25 clients × 100 deliverables/month × 10 minutes average = ~200 hours saved per month

That's before you account for the actual content creation acceleration.

That's just from automated guideline retrieval.

Skills Stack Automatically

When you ask Claude to create an Instagram carousel for a healthcare client, four Skills activate simultaneously:

1. Client's brand identity (tone, colors, messaging)

2. Instagram specs (resolution, aspect ratio, text limits)

3. Healthcare compliance (HIPAA, required disclaimers)

4. Agency's creative framework (storytelling structure)

Claude orchestrates all four. You don't select them. You don't activate them manually.

They just work.

North Highland (management consulting firm, early Claude Enterprise adopter) uses this pattern for:

• Content development

• Client communications

• Proprietary methodologies

• Analytical frameworks

Every consultant applies the firm's methods consistently, reducing quality variance between junior and senior team members.

Client Reporting on Autopilot

Agencies also use Skills for monthly client reports.

Create a reporting Skill containing:

• Client's preferred KPIs

• Chart styling standards

• Executive summary format

• Insights framework

Upload raw performance data. Claude generates the complete report—branded, formatted, visualized.

Solopreneurs: Running a 10-Person Business Solo

At Anthropic's October conference, CEO Dario Amodei made a prediction:

There’s a 70-80% probability of a billion-dollar single-person company by 2026.

Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger (now Anthropic's Chief Product Officer) confirmed he and Kevin Systrom "could have built Instagram alone with Claude 4."

Instagram originally required a founding team and rapid hiring to scale.

Now? One person could do it.

I'm not saying you should try to build a billion-dollar company solo. That's extreme. That's an edge case.

But the directional truth is clear:

Solopreneurs can now operate at team scale without the headcount.

What Solo Operators Are Building

Karo Zieminski (AI product manager) built three production Skills in 90 minutes:

1. Messy notes organizer (transforms brainstorming chaos into clean documentation)

2. Visual infographic generator (enforces brand colors automatically)

3. SEO internal linking analyzer (for Substack pages)

Her reaction: "The kind of chaotic, 3 a.m., look-what-it-can-do excitement that only happens when something fundamentally shifts."

A content creator built three Skills in 10-15 minutes each:

1. Editorial style guide (applies publication tone automatically)

2. Proposal generator (consistent pricing rules and branding)

3. Press release generator (writes AP-style drafts from product details)

This is saving 5+ hours of repetition in the first week.

What This Actually Replaces

Solopreneurs traditionally face an impossible choice:

• Wear all hats (poorly)

• Hire specialists (expensive)

Skills creates a third option: 

Package specialist knowledge into reusable workflows.

A solo consultant can create Skills that function as:

• A designer (brand compliance, presentation formatting, visual content)

• A writer (content with consistent voice and SEO optimization)

• An analyst (data processing, report generation, insight extraction)

• An assistant (document prep, meeting notes, email management)

• An accountant (financial reporting, expense categorization)

• A project manager (status updates, task tracking, prioritization)

You're not replacing humans with AI. You're capturing workflows that would otherwise require hiring, which can be expensive or impossible for solopreneurs.

Alitu (marketing tech company) created a Claude Project with brand voice, customer transcripts, and product info.

They use it for partner resources, blog posts, and email templates.

Time saved: 10+ hours per week (500 hours annually—equivalent to a quarter-time employee).

Their comment on this: "The reason most AI marketing tools suck is because they're trying to create context through prompts instead of using real context from your business."

Skills solves this by packaging actual brand documents, customer feedback, and historical examples as context that loads automatically.

The Content Multiplication Effect

Amber Figlow (marketing consultant) built a content repurposing workflow:

1. Record podcast or video

2. Upload transcript to Claude

3. Generate: titles, descriptions, show notes, newsletter, and 30 social media threads (formatted for Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn)

One recording → 40+ content pieces. In minutes, not days.

Her note: "I never use the first output directly; always edit for authenticity."

Skills accelerate the 0-80% journey. Human judgment handles the 80-100% refinement.

That's the pattern across all implementations.

The Scalability Advantage

Early Skills might save 2-5 hours weekly.

As your Skill library expands to 10-20 Skills covering major business functions, time savings reach 20-40 hours weekly—approaching full-time employee equivalent capacity.

You just pay for a Claude Pro or Max subscription. No per-skill fees. No usage limits. No expensive infrastructure.

For cash-constrained bootstrappers, this is a legitimate competitive advantage.

A solo operator with a sophisticated Skill library can bid for work previously requiring 5-10 person agencies—undercutting on price while maintaining quality through consistent AI-powered workflows.

Marketing Teams: Brand Consistency at Campaign Velocity

Marketing teams have a tension:

Produce high volumes of content across multiple channels while maintaining brand consistency, platform optimization, and regulatory compliance.

Most teams solve this with checklists, brand police, and revision cycles.

Skills solves it with automatic brand loading.

What Marketing Teams Report

Customer.io's marketing team uses Claude Skills daily for:

• Analyzing user research transcripts to extract pain points

• Creating omnichannel narratives that work across email/landing page/paid social

• Diagnosing campaign performance drop-offs

• Generating weekly updates from Salesforce data

• Identifying churn risk for retention campaigns

About 72% of marketers report AI saves them 20%+ of their time, and over half ship campaigns faster.

The Brand Guidelines Pattern

Every marketing team implementation includes a brand guidelines Skill.

Inside:

• Voice/tone specifications (formal vs. casual, technical vs. accessible)

• Vocabulary to use and avoid

• Sample approved content

• Messaging pillars

• Logo files

• Visual asset guidelines

When any team member requests content (social posts, email campaigns, blog articles, presentation decks) Claude automatically applies these standards.

What you get is consistency improvement with 18% increase in content output consistency scores (Anthropic research) when brand Skills are active versus ad-hoc prompting.

Campaign Automation Example

A product marketing team launching a new feature asks:

"Generate campaign assets for the Q4 product launch."

Claude composes five Skills automatically:

1. Brand guidelines (visual identity)

2. Product messaging (positioning, value props, competitive differentiation)

3. Multi-channel campaign (email/social/ads with platform specifications)

4. SEO content (keyword optimization, meta descriptions)

5. Compliance (legal disclaimers, regulatory requirements)

The output you get is a complete campaign package (emails, landing page copy, social media posts, paid ad variations, SEO-optimized blog content) with consistent messaging and proper compliance.

Manual coordination of these requirements across five different documents and team discussions would take days.

This is a lot faster, without sacrificing quality.

Time Savings Breakdown

For a typical marketing team of 5-10 people:

• Content creation: 10-40 hours weekly saved

• Reporting: 5-10 hours weekly saved

• Campaign planning: 15-20 hours per campaign saved

• Research synthesis: 3-5 hours per project saved

Cumulative savings is somewhere between 50-100 hours monthly, which is the equivalent to one full-time employee focused purely on execution.

The actual team focuses on strategy, testing, and optimization. Not busywork. Not formatting. Not guideline enforcement.

Operations Teams: Workflows That Used to Require Personnel

I'm not going to spend as much time on operations because the pattern is identical:

Capture repeatable workflows. Install them as Skills. Run them automatically.

A few examples of what operations teams are building:

HR and Hiring:

• Job description templates → scorecards → interview questions → onboarding checklists (one Skill, four outputs)

Finance and Accounting:

• Financial model QA (validates spreadsheet logic, catches naming issues, flags broken assumptions)

• Expense categorization and reporting (follows company-specific rules)

Process Documentation:

• Turn screen recordings or Looms into clean SOPs in minutes (formatted to company standards)

Compliance and Legal:

• Contract review (checks against standard terms, flags deviations, suggests approved language)

• Regulatory documentation (ensures required disclaimers, proper formatting)

The operational advantage is that Skills eliminate the "check this against the guidelines" step entirely. Guidelines load automatically. Compliance happens by default. 

You're not replacing operations teams. You're automating the repetitive, well-defined work so the team can focus on edge cases, judgment calls, and strategic initiatives.

You see the same patterns across all business types:

The Pattern Across All Five Categories

• SaaS companies: Consistency in documentation, support at scale.

• Agencies: Multi-client brand management without context-switching.

• Solopreneurs: Team-scale capacity on individual budgets.

• Marketers: Brand consistency across high-volume production.

• Operations: Automated workflows for repeatable processes.

The common thread:

Replacing repetitive, well-defined work that requires organizational knowledge but not creative judgment.

That's what Skills is good at. That's where the time savings come from.

Next section, I'll show you how to build your first Skill (step by step, no code required) and what unlocks once you have a library of Skills running across your business.

5. How to Build Your First Skill (Step by Step)

You don't need to be technical.

You don't need to write code.

You just need to know what you do more than once.

If it's repeatable, it's packageable. If it's packageable, it belongs in a Skill.

Here's how to build your first one, from zero to working system in 15 minutes.

Step 1: Pick One Repeatable Workflow

Ask yourself: "What do I explain more than twice a week?" or “What workflow do we already have documentation for?”

It could be:

• How to write a customer support email in your brand voice

• How to format a client brief

• How to analyze support tickets

• How to summarize a weekly report

• How to respond to product feedback

• How to structure a blog post

Pick one. Make it specific.

Don't try to capture your entire business in one Skill. Start small. Start with the thing that annoys you most. Like the workflow you're tired of re-explaining.

Step 2: Use Claude's Skill-Creator Tool

Open Claude (you'll need Pro, Max, Team, or Enterprise—this doesn't work on the free tier).

Go to Settings → Enable Skills (if you haven't already).

Then say:

"Use the skill-creator tool to help me build a new Skill."

Claude will ask you questions:

• What's the workflow you want to capture?

• What are the steps?

• What examples can you provide?

• What tone or standards should it follow?

Answer conversationally. Claude handles the rest.

It generates the folder structure, formats the SKILL.md file, and bundles everything you need.

No manual file editing required.

Step 3: Write the Instructions (In Plain Language)

Here's what a basic Skill looks like:

---
name: B2B Cold Email Skill
description: Use this Skill to write cold emails in our tone, format, and structure.
version: 1.0
---

# B2B Cold Email Skill

## Purpose
Write cold emails that sound human, not robotic. Follow our company voice and structure.

## Instructions

1. **Start with a first-line hook** based on a recent event, insight, or observation about their business.

2. **Use a tone that's direct and useful.** Never pushy. Never hype-y.

3. **Include a specific offer or outcome.** What will they get if they respond?

4. **End with a clear, non-needy CTA.** Make it easy to say yes or no.

## Examples

[Paste 2-3 great emails you've written]

Example 1:
"Hey [Name], saw your team just launched [feature]. Curious if you've thought about [specific problem]..."

Example 2:
"[Name], noticed [company] is expanding into [market]. We helped [similar company] with [specific outcome]..."

## What to Avoid

- Don't open with "I hope this email finds you well"
- Don't use generic pitches
- Don't ask for calls without context
- Don't use exclamation marks unless genuinely excited

## Output Format

Subject line (one sentence, under 50 characters)
Body (3-5 short paragraphs, max 150 words)
CTA (one sentence, clear action)

That's it.

You write it the way you'd train a team member. Claude does the rest.

Step 4: Add Reference Files (Optional But Powerful)

Skills get stronger when you attach examples.

You can include:

• Brand guidelines (PDFs, docs)

• Voice examples (past emails, blog posts)

• Data templates (spreadsheets, JSON files)

• SOPs (process documents)

Claude loads these only when the Skill is used. Not all the time. Just when relevant.

This keeps your context window clean while giving Claude access to deep organizational knowledge.

For example, here’s what an Agency Brand Skill could look like, inside the Skill folder:

• SKILL.md (the instructions)

• brand-guide.pdf (full brand book)

• tone-examples.md (5-10 examples of approved messaging)

• logo-files/ (folder with assets)

When you ask Claude to create social content for that client, it loads all of this automatically.

You don't reference it. You don't attach files manually. Claude just knows.

Step 5: Save and Test

Once Claude compiles your Skill:

1. Give it a name you'll remember

2. Ask Claude to confirm what the Skill does

3. Test it: "Use the [Skill Name] to write [specific request]."

You'll know it's working when Claude doesn't ask follow-up questions.

It just executes with your voice, your rules, your logic.

If it doesn't work perfectly the first time:

Edit the SKILL.md file. Add more examples. Clarify the instructions.

Skills improve through iteration. That's the point. You're refining a process.

Real Example: What This Looks Like in Practice

A content creator built three Skills in 10-15 minutes each:

Skill 1: Editorial Style Guide

• Applies publication tone automatically

• Enforces formatting standards

• Includes approved vocabulary lists

Skill 2: Proposal Generator

• Consistent pricing rules

• Branded templates

• Automated section structure

Skill 3: Press Release Generator

• Writes AP-style drafts

• Pulls from product details

• Follows company messaging pillars

Another operator (Karo Zieminski) built three production Skills in 90 minutes:

1. Messy notes organizer

2. Visual infographic generator (with strict brand color enforcement)

3. SEO internal linking analyzer

Her reaction: "The kind of chaotic, 3 a.m., look-what-it-can-do excitement that only happens when something fundamentally shifts."

Can you see how useful this could be for you?

Also, I’m sure you’re wondering how this is different from other Claude features

Skills vs. Other Claude Features (Quick Reference)

Let’s take a look.

Skills vs. Projects:

• Projects: Static background knowledge, always loaded

• Skills: Dynamic procedures, load only when relevant

Skills vs. Custom Instructions:

• Custom Instructions: Apply broadly to all conversations

• Skills: Task-specific, activate when needed

Skills vs. MCP (Model Context Protocol):

• MCP: Connects Claude to external services and data sources

• Skills: Provides procedural knowledge (how to do tasks)

You can use both together. MCP gives Claude access to tools. Skills teach Claude how to use those tools effectively.

6. What This Unlocks: Claude as Your Operating System

Most people still think of Claude as a smart assistant.

Something you talk to. Something you prompt. Something that helps you write faster.

But when you start building a Skill library, something clicks:

Claude stops being a chatbot. It becomes your operating system.

From Conversational AI to Operational AI

Here's the shift:

Conversational AI: You ask questions. Claude answers.

Operational AI: You install workflows. Claude executes them consistently at scale.

With the right Skills installed, Claude can:

• Write your reports (following your format, tone, and data standards)

• Summarize your meetings (extracting action items using your framework)

• Respond to customer tickets (applying your brand voice and resolution guidelines)

• Draft playbooks and SOPs (maintaining your documentation structure)

• Repurpose your webinars (into blog posts, social content, email sequences)

• Generate campaign assets (brand-compliant, platform-optimized, compliance-checked)

All without you explaining how to do any of it. Every. Single. Time.

Each Skill becomes an executable function. Stack them together and you're building something that’s similar to agents. You’re building systems and infrastructure.

What You Can Run Today (Real Examples)

• A content engine that repackages every blog, podcast, or video across five channels—automatically formatted for each platform, maintaining brand voice across all of them.

• A customer success system that reads tickets, categorizes issues, recommends retention plays, and drafts responses following your support guidelines.

• A founder workflow that turns Loom rants into strategic memos, executive emails, and presentation decks—structured, polished, and ready to send.

• An onboarding system that converts raw SOPs into full internal training guides with your company's formatting, examples, and assessment questions.

You don't need five tools to do these things. You need five Skills Claude can load when it matters.

The real unlock is consistency, clarity, and scale without the overhead.

Also, Anthropic has a great set of best practices here, they’re worth reading.

7. The Human Judgment Question (What Skills Can't Do)

Field testing shows a consistent pattern:

AI reaches 80% solution quality quickly but struggles with the final 20% requiring nuanced judgment, contextual awareness, or creative insight.

Skills optimizes the 0-80% journey through consistency and knowledge application.

Humans remain essential for the 80 to 100% refinement.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's framing: Skills enables "powerful assistants but poor autonomous agents."

Exceptional as copilots amplifying human expertise.

But potentially dangerous as autopilots replacing human oversight entirely.

Successful implementations maintain this balance:

• Automate repetitive, well-defined workflows aggressively

• Require human review for nuanced, high-stakes, or creative work

That's the pattern across every implementation I've seen. Skills accelerate. Humans refine.

Don't try to make Skills do everything. Use them for what they're good at: consistent execution of known workflows.

8. The Billion-Dollar Solo Company Question

Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO) made a prediction:

There’s a 70-80% probability of a billion-dollar single-person company by 2026.

Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger confirmed he and Kevin Systrom "could have built Instagram alone with Claude 4."

Is this realistic? I don't know.

But the directional truth is clear:

The barriers preventing solo operators from building large-scale businesses historically included:

• Limited bandwidth (can't do everything)

• Inconsistent quality (wearing too many hats)

• Lack of specialized expertise (can't hire everyone)

• Inability to scale (time constraints)

Skills addresses each barrier by capturing and applying specialist knowledge automatically, enabling consistent quality at scale without team expansion.

Whether this enables billion-dollar outcomes or "merely" 10-100x productivity improvements for solo operators, the impact on small business economics is substantial.

I'm not betting on billion-dollar solo companies. But I am betting on 5-10x productivity multipliers for competent operators who capture their workflows as Skills.

That's already happening.

Why? Because Skills make something visible that we often either take for granted or aren’t paying attention to.

What Skills Makes Explicit

It’s pretty simple, and you can think of your business as being, in a sense, “modular”: 

Organizational knowledge and workflows are assets that can be packaged, versioned, shared, and improved systematically.

Most companies treat this knowledge as implicit. It lives in people's heads. It gets lost when people leave. It's inconsistent across teams. Even SOPs don’t seem to solve the knowledge capture problem inside a business.

Skills makes it explicit.

Companies that treat Skills as strategic assets—documenting workflows, capturing expertise from senior employees, continuously refining based on outcomes—will build durable competitive advantages.

Those treating Skills as prompting shortcuts will see incremental efficiency gains but miss the transformative opportunity to operationalize institutional knowledge at machine speed and scale.

Start Capturing Your Workflows

Every repeated task is one Skill away from disappearing.

Most operators try to work faster by writing better prompts. But the real move is upstream:

Capture how you do the task. Install it once. Reuse it forever.

Every Skill you create saves a future version of you from rework, context-switching, and drift.

This is how you:

• Systematize your best thinking

• Train AI to work like you do

• Build processes instead of tasks

• Scale without proportional headcount

Start here:

1. Write one Skill this week (pick your most annoying repeat task)

2. Add one example, one instruction, one file

3. Save it. Test it. Iterate once.

Then do it again next week. And the week after.

Soon, your AI won't just "help." It will run the system you already built.

9. The Future (What's Coming)

The community-driven Skill ecosystem is already emerging. GitHub repos with dozens of Skills. Early marketplace formation. Rapid experimentation.

This mirrors the early days of the iOS App Store. Rapid growth. Quality variance. Gradual emergence of best practices and trusted creators.

Some predict a commercial Skills marketplace within 6-12 months where specialists sell industry-specific Skills (legal contract review, medical documentation, real estate analysis) to practitioners without development resources.

To be honest, I’m not sure we’ll see a true Skills marketplace for a couple of reasons:

First, they’re incredibly simple to make on your own, especially if you use Anthropic’s Skill maker.

Any outside Skill you might buy, you’ll have to tweak and adjust for your business anyway, so why not just make it yourself (or someone on your team)? 

Second, we’ve seen these kind of “app store” predictions for Plugins and GPTs (remember those?), and for a number of other tools and features. None of them have happened. 

Instead, I predict we'll see:

• Skills as competitive IP (companies protecting their best workflows)

• Skills as products (selling packaged expertise to specific industries)

• Skills as recruiting tools (attract talent by showing your operational maturity)

• Skills as knowledge transfer (capturing expertise before retirement)

The companies building Skill libraries now will have 12-18 months of compounding advantage over those who wait.

Not because the technology will change (it probably won't, much).

But because building a comprehensive Skill library takes time.

You can't shortcut institutional knowledge capture.

Pick the workflow that annoys you most.

The one you re-explain three times a week.

Open Claude. Enable Skills. Use the skill-creator tool.

Spend 15 minutes building it.

Test it once. Edit if needed. Save it.

Then do it again next week. And the week after.

Within a month, you'll have 4-5 Skills running.

Within three months, you'll have 10-15.

That's when it clicks.

You're not prompting anymore. You're loading capabilities.

Claude stops being a chatbot. It becomes your operating system.

Claude Skills isn't about writing faster or something silly.

It's about scaling you.

Not prompt engineering. Not clever chat tricks.

Think of it as workflow engineering.

It starts now.

Until next time,
Sam Woods
The Editor

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