31 mins: Build an AI skill for your repeatable tasks

What you'll learn:

If you give AI the same instructions every week (here’s my draft, use my tone, pull in last week’s notes, no, shorter), you’re doing work that it could remember for next time. A ‘skill’ is a set of instructions for a task you repeat, saved once so AI can follow it every time you ask.

This step-by-step walkthrough will teach you how to build a Claude skill from scratch (the equivalents are Gems in Gemini, custom GPTs in ChatGPT, and agents in Copilot), using the example of a thought-leadership post for LinkedIn.

💡 Pick a repeatable task you’d gladly hand over: Anything you do more than once a week that follows a consistent format, like a LinkedIn post, weekly updates or turning meeting notes into a list of actions. A skill captures your process so AI can run it the same way every time.

💡 Do it once, then type ‘create skill’: Go through your step-by-step process once so your robot knows how you do it. With the LinkedIn post done, Karen stays in the same chat and asks Claude to turn what she just did into a skill that she can trigger any time by typing ‘create a LinkedIn post’. In a fresh chat with a new article, that one line gets her the same steps in the same order for creating a new post.

💡 Your first version won’t be perfect: You’ll use your skill, notice something and want to tweak it – so go for it! Skills are a set of instructions you can open and edit like any document, or you can just tell AI what to change. When Karen’s posts kept coming out too long, she asked it to keep them under 250 words and wanted hashtags – now that’s part of the skill.

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