Chapter 7: Skills — Teach Your Agent Your Moves

Custom commands gave your routines names. Skills go further: they package know-how — instructions, reference files, examples, even scripts — into a versioned capability your agent can load when the situation calls for it. A Skill remains reusable and shareable while it is installed, compatible, and maintained.

This is one practice used in agentic engineering: giving a general-purpose agent a reviewable procedure for a recurring task.

What you will learn

• Explain what a Skill is, how it differs from commands and CLAUDE.md, and when each wins.
• Read and write the anatomy: SKILL.md, frontmatter, references, scripts.
• Build, test, and iterate your first real Skill.
• Grow a Skill library that compounds across projects, teams, and businesses.

Builder principle

Expertise you exercise is worth something once. Expertise you package is worth something every time anyone — or any agent — uses it.

Watch and read with this chapter

• Claude Code docs — Skills — the living reference for the current syntax and behavior.
• Anthropic Academy: Claude Code in Action — the Skills segments especially.

Real talk

A useful checklist or template lets someone else inspect and repeat a procedure. Skills apply that idea to agent instructions, references, and scripts. Their value must be demonstrated through repeatable use and maintenance, not assumed from the size of a library.

Lessons in this chapter

• 7.1 What Skills Are
• 7.2 Anatomy of a Skill
• 7.3 Writing Your First Skill
• 7.4 The Skill Library

Chapter checkpoint

Complete Chapter 7: Skill that earns reuse, save the evidence, then score your first attempt with the shared rubric.