Anthropic presents Claude Skills as a practical way to turn Claude into a specialist for concrete tasks: they're folders with instructions, scripts and resources that Claude loads only when it needs them. The company announced the feature on October 16, 2025, and promises that Skills work both in the apps and in the developer environment. (anthropic.com)

What Claude Skills are

Think of a Skill as an onboarding package that teaches Claude how to do a specific task well. It can include templates, examples, style rules, and even executable code for processes where programming is more reliable than generating text.

These Skills are designed to be reusable: create once, use in many places. Handy, right? (anthropic.com)

How they work in practice

While you work, Claude scans the available Skills and loads only the minimal information needed for the task. Less noise, more focused answers, and faster execution.