How to Create a Custom Claude Skill

Creating a custom Claude Skill is one of the best ways to turn Claude into a more consistent tool for your own workflows.

This guide shows you how to create a custom Claude Skill step by step, from deciding what the skill should do to structuring the instructions so Claude can use it reliably.

If you are new to Claude Skills, start here first: How to Set Up Claude Skills: Beginner Guide.

What you’ll learn:

How to create a simple custom Claude Skill

Who this is for:

Claude Code beginners who want to utilise Skills better
Claude Code power users who want to use Claude with maximum efficiency

0. Before creating a custom Claude Skill..

In this post I’m going to create a custom Claude skill that can replicate my exact social media content persona.

How I’m going to use this skill is that every time I want to generate a content, for example for LinkedIn or Reddit, I’m going to tell Claude to always use this skill.

So the expected outcome is when Claude uses this skill, Claude will fully understand my persona. It will understand my social media audience, my goals, and my content pillars.

Therefore whenever I’m generating a new content, my content persona and pillars stay consistent, by simply calling this skill we’re about to create.

1. Prepare resources

First let’s start by gathering resources and references that we want Claude to use when creating a custom Claude skill.

I’ve already done some brainstorming sessions with Claude about how to set my social media persona and content pillars so I’m going to start feeding this information to Claude.

To keep the resources organised, I created a new folder called ‘docs’ and within, another folder called ‘persona’.

In the ‘persona’ folder, I created a ‘selene-linkedin-persona.md’ file.

Here, I copy and pasted my discussion notes from Claude.

Similarly, I added in a few more .md files that could be useful.

These are conversations with AI, transcripts of meetings, quotes from books I liked etc.
‼️ Don’t forget to save your file (ctrl+S or cmd+S).

2. Create a custom Claude skill

We can use the /skill-creator skill to create a custom Claude skill.

Claude terminal using skill-creator to build a custom Claude skill

Then Claude will ask what we want to work on.

Claude asking what type of custom skill to create

I’m going to answer ‘1’. And Claude will ask what would you like to create.

Providing detailed context for persona skill to Claude Code

Here, I have given more context about the persona skill I want to build. I’ve also given the ‘selene-linkedin-persona.md’ file so Claude has details.

📌 To give Claude files to read, simply drag & drop the file to the terminal.

Dragging files into Claude Code terminal for skill context

Claude gave some follow up questions – answer these appropriately.

Note that I have explicitly told Claude that I’ll be calling this skill manually.
When we create a content writing agent later, we’ll ensure to include this skill as the first step.

Claude generated selene-persona skill file in the project

Claude generated this ‘selene-persona.skill’ file.

📌 Note: This .skill file in your project root is a packaged copy for distribution (e.g., sharing with others or installing on another machine).

Custom Claude skill successfully installed in skills folder

If skill is successfully installed, it should pop up in the ‘skills’ folder.

Testing the selene-persona skill by typing slash command in Claude

We can test this skill now by restarting Claude and typing /selene-persona (/your-skill-name).

‼️ Note: If your skill doesn’t show up in the skills list in Claude (even after you re-started Claude), it is probably an issue with symlink. So ask Claude to fix the symlink for that skill.

Just for completeness, let’s ask Claude to make the .skill file into a separate .md file as well so we can reference it later in other skills.

Converting Claude skill file to separate markdown reference file

Now when we start to build more complex agent like ‘writing LinkedIn content’, we can include an instruction to the skill /selene-persona and then start writing.

Creating a custom Claude skill is super simple using the /skill-creator skill.

Once you start testing out and using the skill, you might identify rooms for improvement and optimisation. On our next post we’ll go through how to optimise and edit your custom Claude skills.

Also in the following posts we’ll discuss how we can create an agent that can use these skills to perform specific tasks.

Make sure to check out our previous posts!

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