Stuff nobody tells you about Claude skills
By Kaia Colban
I thought I understood skills. I didn't. Here is everything I learned through breaking a lot of shit.
My two skills cancelled each other out
I had two writing skills. One called "no em dash”, which I made months ago and a newer one called "don't write like AI" with all my writing rules in it.
I asked Claude to draft something. It came back with no em dashes, but reading exactly like AI.
Turns out Claude only reads the name and description of a skill when it picks one. My "no em dash" skill had a sharper description, so it ran every time, and the improved skill never got used. Since Claude doesn’t provide any analytics showing how often my skills are run, it took me a while to figure this out.
Two lessons in one: the description is the whole thing Claude sees, and if two skills sound like they do the same job, only one fires and you won't know which. I deleted the old em-dash skill and the problem seems fixed. I also started using Lore to see analytics on my skills. Now I can see when a skill fires and how often, so when I build one that never fires, I catch it early.
Skills don't all live in the same place
I'm still trying to figure this one out. "My skills" isn't one list. It's a few lists that look identical but live in different spots.
Some live with your account (the ones in the desktop app). Log in anywhere and they follow you.
Some live on your actual computer (local files, plugins). Those don't go anywhere, and if you jump from one computer to another, these skills won't follow you home. Which leads me to point 3.
I borrowed a laptop and my Claude went crazy
I crashed at a friend's one night and used their laptop to finish some work stuff since I didn't have mine. I logged into my Claude and did everything like normal, but the results were all off and I was so confused. At first, I thought maybe Claude was testing something new on me, but then I realized it was because half my skills weren't being read, since they all lived as local files on my laptop. Claude didn't tell me anything was missing. It just did everything wrong.
Now I make sure all my skills (the local ones too) are backed up. So if I'm ever on a friend's computer, or god forbid, I break mine, I won’t need to rebuild anything from scratch.
A scheduled task isn't the same as the skill
I set up a workflow to automate blog posts as a scheduled task, but toggled it to only run when I trigger it instead of on a schedule. Later, I asked Claude to “run the blog post skill”, and it couldn't find it, kept saying it didn't exist. I figured the task hadn't saved right and started rebuilding it. Halfway through, Claude asked how this was different from my existing blog post task. That's when it clicked: I had it saved as a task, not a skill, and Claude won't go looking through tasks when you ask for a skill. I'd assumed the task auto-ran the skill. It doesn't.
Just remember what's a skill and what's a task. I made this easy by building an artifact that shows all my skills and tasks in one spot, so I can see everything at a glance.
How to actually change a skill
When you're in a chat, Claude reads a copy of your skill, not the real one. I have edited that skill so many times and for a moment it seemed to be working, but the next day when I would rerun the same skill it was back to the old version. Turns out you can’t just ask Claude to update your skills. Instead, follow this process:
- Account skill? Edit it in the app, in Settings under Capabilities. Saves everywhere.
- Local or plugin skill? Edit the file on your computer.
The actual point
They say it takes 100 hours to get good at any new skill. I'm hoping it doesn't take everyone that long to figure out how Claude skills actually work. Here is the TLDR: a skill is a description fighting other descriptions, a body that loads only when needed, and a file that could be anywhere. Once you get that, the surprises stop.
Skills do 1/3 of my job for me, so I'm not going to stop using them. I want my whole team to use skills so they can work more efficiently, but there's no reason all of us should build the same skill from scratch. So instead, I use Lore to share my skills, or steal theirs, and then watch the analytics: is it actually any good, who's using it, how often, what's it costing each time it runs, how are others tweaking it to make it even better (I want those improvements pulled back into my version too), etc.
But real question… do you actually know where all your skills live? Or are you one dead laptop away from the early-2000s panic of your computer crashing right before you hit save on a fully completed Word document?