Summary
- Advanced skills produce better results when you give them specific inputs about your brand, products, or audience.
- Primitives like brand voice profiles are reusable building blocks that feed into more complex skills.
- Most AI platforms let you save skills to your account for automatic use across conversations.
In the Getting Started guide, you tried a basic skill: copy, paste, and go. Advanced skills work the same way, but they produce better results when you give them specific inputs about your brand, your products, or your audience. That takes a little more setup, but the payoff is significantly higher quality output.
Simple vs. advanced skills
All skills fundamentally work the same way. You’re providing the AI tool with a detailed set of instructions and context.
The difference is that advanced skills require a bit more setup. They’ll ask you to provide specific context about your brand, your products, or your goals so that the tool can produce more accurate and tailored output.
Example workflow of an advanced skill
Show
Say you want to use a product description writing skill. A simple version produces a generic description from a few bullet points. An advanced version asks for your brand voice profile, examples of descriptions you like, and details about your target customer. The output will be much closer to something ready to go live on your site. You do that preparation once and reuse those inputs across multiple skills. The good news is all of those inputs can also be generated with skills on SkillShelf.
Building your foundation
In software engineering, primitives are small, reusable building blocks used to create more complex functionality. The same concept applies here. There are certain pieces of information you’ll use over and over again as inputs to different skills:
- A description of your brand voice
- A description of your business and target customer
- An overview of your tech stack
- Examples of content you like
SkillShelf has skills specifically designed to help you generate these primitives. Once you have them dialed in, you can reuse them across more complex workflows without starting from scratch each time.
Setting up your workflow
As you build out your primitives, store them in an easily accessible folder on your computer. Skills on SkillShelf are designed to work together. When a skill needs your brand voice or business overview, it will ask for the exact primitive you’ve already created. The more primitives you build, the more value you get from every new skill you try.
Most AI tools let you store files within your account, but in our experience it gets messy fast. A simple local folder keeps everything organized and ready to go.
Saving skills to your account vs. one-off use
Most AI platforms let you save skills directly to your account. The benefit is that the tool can automatically use them when they’re relevant, without you having to upload or paste anything. For skills you use frequently, like a product description writer or an email copy skill, this is worth doing.
If you’re on a shared company account, your admin can make saved skills available to the entire organization. A copywriting skill that uses your brand voice and positioning can be shared across the team, so everyone produces more consistent output without having to set anything up themselves.
For skills you only need once or infrequently, like generating a brand voice profile or running a site audit, there’s no need to save them. Just drop the skill into a conversation, use it, and keep the output.
How to save a skill in Claude
Show
- Make sure Code execution and file creation is enabled in Settings > Capabilities.
- Navigate to Customize > Skills.
- Click the ”+” button and select “Upload a skill.”
- Upload the ZIP file. Your skill will appear in your Skills list.
- Toggle it on. Claude will automatically use it when it’s relevant to your conversation.
Custom skills are private to your account. If you’re on a Team or Enterprise plan, your admin can provision skills for the entire organization through Organization settings.
What’s next
You’ve got the foundation. Start building your primitives, organize your inputs, and try a few advanced skills from the library. The more you build, the faster every new skill becomes.
Browse the skill library or learn how to create a skill if you’re interested in contributing your own.