Claude Skills Guide
Transform Claude from a general assistant into a domain expert with reusable, on-demand workflows.
Skills capture your team's expertise, coding standards, and best practices — then load automatically when needed.
What Are Claude Skills?
Filesystem-Based Expertise
Skills are folders containing instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude loads on-demand to perform specialized tasks.
📦 What's Inside
- • SKILL.md with instructions
- • Workflows & best practices
- • Scripts & templates
- • Domain-specific context
🎯 How They Work
- • Load automatically when relevant
- • Stack together for complex tasks
- • Work across CLI, web, and API
- • No manual selection required
Progressive Disclosure
Claude sees skill names first, then loads full content only when needed for your specific task.
Auto-Stacking
Multiple skills combine automatically — like brand guidelines + financial templates + presentation formats.
Reusable Everywhere
Build once, use across CLI, web app, and API integrations automatically.
Installing Skills
Three Installation Methods
Personal Skills
Install in ~/.claude/skills/ for your own use
# Copy skill folder to personal directory
cp -r my-skill ~/.claude/skills/Project Skills
Install in .claude/skills/ to share with your team
# Copy to project directory (committed to git)
cp -r my-skill .claude/skills/Plugin Skills (One-Click)
Install via Claude Code plugins for instant access
/plugin https://github.com/anthropics/skills🛍️ Skills Marketplace
Browse 2000+ open-source skills at skillsmp.com
Community-curated collection with intelligent filtering by category, author, and popularity. All skills are free and open-source.
Pre-Built Skills
🏢 Official Anthropic Skills
Create formatted documents with branding
Generate presentations with templates
Build spreadsheets and financial reports
Generate and manipulate PDFs
🧪 Popular Community Skills
TDD workflows and best practices
CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation
Security audits for Rails applications
End-to-end testing frameworks
Custom Skills for Cloud & FinOps
Azure Naming Standards
Enforce resource naming conventions across your Azure infrastructure
Example SKILL.md
# Azure Naming Standards
## Purpose
Enforce consistent Azure resource naming conventions
## Naming Patterns
- Resource Groups: AZ-RG-{region}{env}-{service}
- Storage Accounts: azst{region}{env}{service}
- Virtual Machines: AZ-VM-{region}{env}-{service}-{number}
- Key Vaults: AZ-KV-{region}{env}-{service}
## Rules
1. All lowercase for storage accounts (Azure requirement)
2. Hyphens for resource groups and VMs
3. Region codes: eus (East US), wus (West US), neu (North Europe)
4. Environment: dev, stg, prod
## Usage
When creating or reviewing Azure resources, validate names against these patterns.FinOps Cost Review
Analyze infrastructure costs and recommend optimizations
Example SKILL.md
# FinOps Cost Review ## Purpose Identify cost optimization opportunities in cloud infrastructure ## Analysis Areas 1. **SKU Rightsizing** - Check VM sizes against utilization metrics - Recommend cheaper alternatives for underutilized resources 2. **Storage Optimization** - Identify Hot storage that should be Cool/Archive - Find unattached disks and orphaned resources 3. **Reservation Opportunities** - Calculate potential savings from Reserved Instances - Recommend commitment tiers ## Cost Thresholds - Flag resources costing >$1000/month - Prioritize quick wins (>20% savings potential) ## Report Format Generate markdown report with: - Total potential savings - Prioritized recommendations - Implementation steps
Terraform Best Practices
Review IaC for security, efficiency, and maintainability
Key Checks
Tag Governance
Validate and enforce tagging policies across all cloud resources
Required Tags
# Tag Governance ## Required Tags All resources must have: - `Environment`: dev | stg | prod - `Owner`: Team name or email - `CostCenter`: Billing department code - `Application`: Service or app name - `ManagedBy`: terraform | manual | automated ## Validation Check Terraform configs for missing tags before apply. Generate reports of untagged resources. ## Auto-Remediation For known resources, suggest tag values based on: - File path (infer environment from directory) - Git commit author (for Owner) - Project name (for Application)
Creating Your Own Skills
Use the skill-creator Skill
Claude includes a built-in skill-creator that guides you through the process interactively.
- 1Describe Your Workflow:
Tell Claude what expertise you want to capture
- 2Interactive Generation:
skill-creator asks questions and generates the folder structure
- 3Auto-Formatting:
SKILL.md is formatted with your instructions, examples, and resources
- 4Ready to Use:
Skill is immediately available — no manual file editing required
📁 Basic Skill Structure
my-skill/
├── SKILL.md # Main instructions
├── templates/ # Optional templates
│ ├── example.tf
│ └── README.template.md
└── scripts/ # Optional automation
└── validate.shBest Practices
✅ Do
- Keep skills focused on one domain
- Include clear examples and templates
- Version control project skills in git
- Document expected inputs and outputs
- Update skills as standards evolve
❌ Avoid
- •Overly broad skills (split into focused ones)
- •Hardcoding secrets or credentials
- •Skills that contradict each other
- •Stale instructions that don't match current practices
- •Installing untrusted skills without review
Resources
Start Building Your Skills Library
Transform Claude into a domain expert for your cloud infrastructure, FinOps processes, and development workflows.