Let's talk about skills

Okay. Confession time.

I started this blog to teach the actual technology. How to use Claude, how to use AI, the real mechanics of the thing. And somewhere over the last few entries I drifted into the why. Methodology, thought process, the philosophy of how I build and the reasons behind it.

I’ve loved writing those. I don’t regret a single one. But I looked back at the last stretch and realized I’ve been talking about the work more than I’ve been teaching the work, and that’s not where I meant to live.

So consider this a course correction. Back to the technical. Back to here’s a thing, here’s how it works, here’s how you do it yourself.

Also, fair warning while we’re being honest: there will be many a side quest. I cannot help it. It is how my brain works. I am a two-hundred-tabs-open-at-any-given-moment kind of girl and the blog is going to reflect that. Buckle up.

Today’s actual thing: skills.

so what is a skill

A skill is a set of instructions you give Claude once that it can pull up and follow whenever the situation calls for it. Think of it as teaching Claude a repeatable job. Instead of explaining the same process from scratch every single time, you write down how the job should be done, and Claude knows to reach for it when the moment fits.

That’s the whole concept. It’s a saved playbook Claude runs on demand.

The part that took me a while to understand is that you don’t need to know how to build one to have one. You can make a skill by talking to Claude. Which is exactly how I got my first.

i didn’t know that was an option

I had an idea and no clue how to execute it.

I wanted something that would look at a job description, tell me honestly whether I was a good fit, and if I was, build me a resume tailored to that specific posting. I did not want a generic resume I tweaked by hand a hundred times. I wanted something that thought about fit first and only built when it was worth building.

I did not know that was a skill. I just described what I wanted in a chat. And Claude said, this sounds like it should be a skill, want to build it that way.

Reader, I did not even know that was on the menu.

So we built it. By talking. I answered questions about how I wanted it to work, what mattered to me, what it should never do, and at the end I had a working skill. That became resume-builder, and it is still one of the most useful things I have.

what resume-builder actually does

Here is how it thinks, because the how is the interesting part.

It reads my master career record first. That record is the ceiling. Everything the skill knows about me lives there, and it is not allowed to write anything a resume can’t support. No inflating, no stretching a claim to fit a posting, no inventing a skill I don’t have to match a job. If a posting wants something I can’t back up, it flags it as a gap instead of papering over it. That rule matters more to me than almost anything else it does.

Then I paste a job description and it scores me. It checks comp against my floor, location against my preferences, and the actual requirements against what I can honestly claim, and it returns a tight verdict. Yes, soft yes, soft no, or no. Not a vibe. A real read with the matches and the gaps spelled out.

If it’s a yes, it doesn’t ask permission, it just builds. It picks from one of four resume templates depending on what the role is targeting. They have different colors and a slightly different voice, sorted roughly by creative versus executive, and it chooses based on the role. Then it writes a two-page resume tailored to that specific job.

The thing I want you to notice is that it’s making judgment calls. Fit, template, emphasis. I built the judgment in once, and now it runs every time without me re-explaining it.

you can build your own, right now, by talking

This is the part I actually want you to take away.

You do not need to write code. You do not need to know the file format a skill lives in. You can open a chat and say, I want to build a skill that does X, and here is how I want it to work. Then you answer questions, you go back and forth, and you come out the other side with a working skill.

That’s it. That’s the unlock. If you find yourself explaining the same process to Claude over and over, that process wants to be a skill, and the way you make it one is by describing it out loud.

And here is the part that makes this genuinely for everyone: once Claude agrees to build it, you can ask, okay, what do I do with this now? Walk me through it step by step like I have never made a skill before. And it will. So if your first instinct is that this is too advanced for you, it is not. It really is not. All you need is an idea, a task you find yourself repeating, the kind of thing you would run through a template. Tell Claude what your problem is. It will give you different ways to solve it, and the two of you work through them together.

two more from my actual life

Resume-builder isn’t the only one I lean on.

There’s a remote control skill I use constantly to push work to my phone so I can stay connected while I’m running errands, or out in the garden, or down on the floor with the kids. The work doesn’t stop because I stepped away from the desk, and I don’t have to be chained to the desk to keep it moving. That one changed how my days actually feel.

And right now I’m building one that runs a full check on a website. QA, SEO, security, and yes, vibes, and hands back a branded report at the end. The plan is to run it at the start of a build to get a baseline, at the end to see where we landed, and then over time to watch the scores move as a site grows and changes. It’s for my own site and for the sites and systems I build for clients. It is very much in progress, which feels like the right note to end on, because that’s the whole point of this blog. I’m building it as I write this, and I’ll tell you how it goes.

your turn

While I have you: is there a skill you have been using that you find helpful? Or is there something you do over and over that you think would make a good one? Tell me. I am genuinely curious what other people are building.

---

find me on LinkedIn if the vibes feel right: linkedin.com/in/oliviakeiter