Anthropic just released Skills for Claude, and everyone’s missing what this actually is.
Skills aren’t a Claude feature. They’re the answer to the question I get asked most: “How do I stop rewriting the same massive prompts every single time?”
You know the drill. You want to create a financial presentation. Or evaluate an AI vendor. Or build a comprehensive job search strategy. And you sit down to write the prompt, and suddenly you’re explaining everything:
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How you want the analysis structured
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What frameworks matter to you
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Your preferences for formatting and style
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The domain context the AI needs
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Oh yeah, and what you actually want this time
You end up with a 500-word prompt just to get started. And next week when you need something similar? You’re doing it again. Copy-pasting from old prompts, modifying them, hoping you didn’t forget something important.
It’s exhausting. And it’s why most people never get past basic Q&A with AI—complex work requires too much setup.
Skills change this completely. They let you package up all that methodology once. Your frameworks. Your preferences. Your domain expertise. The stuff you’ve learned over years that’s way too nuanced to cram into a prompt. All of it goes into a skill, and then your actual prompt is just about what you want: “Create a Q3 financial presentation focused on customer retention, using this data.”
The skill handles everything else.
But here’s the part nobody’s talking about: these work everywhere. Not just Claude. Yes, you can use the exact same skill files in ChatGPT. In Gemini. Anywhere that reads files. Claude’s automatic invocation is slicker, but the portability is the real story. We finally have a way to package complex expertise that works across every AI platform.
Think about what that means. All those hard-won insights about how to structure a great pitch deck? How to evaluate vendors without getting burned? How to build financial models that actually work? That knowledge has been trapped in your head because it was too complex to turn into prompts. Now it has a home.
So what am I giving you? Ten super prompt skills I built that cover the complex work eating most of our time. I picked these to illustrate the sheer range of these skills.
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Prompting Pattern Library – The 25+ patterns that actually work, with examples—a huge help for building your own prompts and understanding what makes AI tick
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Pitch Deck Builder – Investor presentations that tell the right story—focused on narrative, data, and lots of best practice around deck building
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AI Vendor Evaluation – A framework to avoid the costly mistakes 95% of AI projects make—get your build vs. buy correct!
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Excel Editing – How to modify complex existing workbooks without breaking everything—lots of specific guidance to avoid common AI mistakes
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Excel Big File Automation – Building complex multi-tab financial models the right way
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Resume Builder – Complete system for ATS-optimized resumes that get past the robots
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Job Search Strategist – A strategist tool that treats job search like a go-to-market problem, not spray-and-pray—super thoughtful about targeting jobs
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Requirements Elicitation – Bridging the gap between PM docs and engineering implementation—surfaces missing technical details before they become problems
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Vibe Coding – A conversational builder to help you vibe code with tools like Cursor and Lovable (pitfalls included)
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Agentic Development – How to actually build software with AI agents without losing your mind
These represent years of expertise I’ve accumulated that was way too complex to put into a prompt before. The financial modeling approaches I learned the hard way. The vendor evaluation frameworks from watching too many bad deals. The job search strategies from helping dozens of people land roles. All of it finally has a place to live.
And the time savings? They’re real. Presentations that used to take 45-60 minutes of back-and-forth? Now 15 minutes. Financial models that ate up 90 minutes? Down to 30. Vendor evaluations that took half a day? Under an hour.
This article breaks down:
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Why this is the biggest leverage gain for AI work this year
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How Skills work in Claude (automatic) vs ChatGPT/Gemini (manual but still powerful)
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The principles for building your own Skills
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Real numbers on time saved across different types of work
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How this is completely different from Custom GPTs and Gemini Gems
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What’s actually inside each of the 10 skills
In six months, everyone doing knowledge work will have skill libraries. You’re getting a head start with 10 production-grade skills that handle the most time-intensive work.
This is how we stop rewriting the same prompts and finally get real leverage from AI on hard problems. Let’s go.