A Claude Code skill you install is a skeleton. It has the right bones and none of your context, so the output comes back generic and you assume you’re prompting it wrong. To customize a Claude Code skill, paste in the paragraph you’re tired of typing, swap the generic criteria for the ones you judge by, and name what it should refuse. I have 123 installed. The 47 I reworked or built myself are the ones I use.
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I’ve never used a skill the way I found it
When I come across a skill and think it might fit something I do, I don’t install it and see how it goes. I open Claude Code and start pulling it apart in the same sitting. What would this look like if it knew my blogs? What would it stop asking me? By the time it’s saved it isn’t the thing I found any more.
I know how it goes when I don’t do this, because it’s how it went with the first ones I installed. The output is fine. Fine is forgettable. The folder sits there untouched for two months and I go back to typing the thing out by hand. The skill did nothing wrong. It was written for a stranger, and I was a stranger to it.
The way I think about it now is skeleton and body. Someone else worked out the bones, the order of operations, the questions worth asking. I take those and turn them into a full body of my own, one built for exactly what I do. The bones are the part I’d never have gotten right on my own. The body is the part nobody else can give me.
What does a customized Claude Code skill do?
It starts where you already are instead of asking you to explain yourself again. A stock skill opens every session from zero, so you spend the first three exchanges describing your audience, your stack, your rules, the same way you did yesterday. A customized one already holds all of it and gets straight to the work.
One of mine is a critique skill I’m fairly sure came out of AI Automation Society Plus, Nate Herk’s Skool community, though I couldn’t tell you if that’s 100% true. I’m going to start keeping track of the skills I find out in the wild and end up tweaking. Out of the box it convened a panel of personas to attack an idea from every side, which is a genuinely good structure, and then it asked me four questions before it would start. Who’s it for. How does it make money. What’s your edge. What are your constraints. Reasonable questions. Also the same four answers every single time, because I have the same blogs, the same email list, and the same build stack I had last week.
So I wrote my answers into the file as standing context, with a line telling it to assume all of it unless I say otherwise. Now I hand it an idea and it goes. Same bones, no warm-up. The panel structure was never the problem, and I’d never have invented it. The repetition was the problem, and nobody else was going to fix it for me.
Who is a customized Claude Code skill for?
It’s for you if you’ve installed a few skills already and came away underwhelmed. If the output reads like a competent stranger wrote it, nothing is broken and you aren’t prompting it wrong. It doesn’t know you, and it was never going to figure you out on its own.
It’s also for you if you keep retyping the same background paragraph into a fresh chat. Anything you’ve explained more than twice is a thing a file should be holding.
It isn’t for you yet if you’ve never opened a skill file. Start with what a Claude Code skill is and how to make one, because customizing assumes you already know what you’re editing. And it isn’t for you if the task changes shape every time you do it. A skill pays off on work with a stable spine, so if there’s no repeat, there’s nothing to encode.
What do you need to customize a Claude Code skill?
Less than you’d think. Three things, and the one that matters costs nothing but honesty.
- Claude Code, or any AI chat window. Claude Code reads a saved skill file. If you’re on Claude.ai or ChatGPT, you can’t install a skill at all, so you want the prompt version instead. Paid plan.
- A skill worth starting from. Something public, or one you already installed and left alone.
- The paragraph you’re tired of typing. This is the actual requirement and it costs nothing but honesty. Write out the background you keep re-explaining, in your own words, badly. Tidying it up comes later.
That last one is the whole job. Everything else is formatting, and I don’t do the formatting either. I paste the skill I found into Claude Code, tell it what I want different, and it writes the file and puts it where it belongs. I have never typed one of these files by hand, and you don’t have to either.
How does customizing a Claude Code skill work?
You sort what you want into two piles, and only one of them needs writing from scratch.
The rule I use: if the skill has to know me, I write it. If it’s a way of thinking, someone already wrote a decent version and I rework theirs. A critique panel, a decision framework, a way of interviewing yourself about a plan, those are general shapes and smart people have already built them. But nothing public knows my WordPress categories or which of my products belongs on which post, so those I build.
This is how my 123 skills fall out against the rule.
| What the skill does | Does it need to know me? | What I did | How many |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thinking work: critique, decisions, focus, teardowns | No | Reworked someone else’s | 17 |
| My blogs, my products, my data, my deploys | Yes | Wrote from scratch | 30 |
| Framework and language helpers | No | Left completely alone | 76 |
The 76 surprised me when I counted. Most of what I have installed I’ve never touched, because most of it does work with no opinion in it, and a stock version handles that fine.
The other half of the rule I had to work out myself. The skill that ships this post is mine end to end. It takes a markdown file, turns it into WordPress blocks, generates and places the images, writes the meta, sets the featured image, and opens a task for me to review. No public version of it exists, and none can. It needs my site, my categories, my image conventions, my review habits. When I said the bones are worth taking, this is the exception: sometimes there are no bones to take, and you’re writing the whole skeleton yourself.
Both examples come out the same place though. What made each one work wasn’t the structure. It was the context sitting inside it.
Make your own
The generator below asks you five things about your own situation and writes you a skill built around your answers, not mine. Pasting my files in here would hand you my blogs and my judgment calls, which is the thing this whole post is arguing against.
It asks for the paragraph you’re tired of typing, what you judge the output by, whether it should leave a file behind, what you’d say out loud to start it, and what it should refuse to do. Then you pick your format.
You get a SKILL.md if you’re in Claude Code, a paste-in prompt if you’re on Claude.ai or ChatGPT and can’t install anything, or both. The skill file goes in a folder named after the skill inside .claude/skills in your home directory, or you can hand the whole thing to Claude Code and ask it to save it for you. The prompt goes wherever you paste prompts.
What this costs you
Two things go wrong with this approach and I’m in the middle of both.
I have more skills than I can hold in my head. 123 of them. One is a skill whose entire job is finding my other skills, which tells you everything about how that went. Every time I rework a skeleton instead of using it as-is, I add something only I understand to a pile only I maintain. I don’t regret any single one. The pile is another matter, and if you follow this post you’re walking toward the same pile. A brake worth having, which I didn’t have: don’t build the second version of something until the first one has earned its place.
I lost track of where the bones came from. Writing this post, I had to stop and work out where that critique skill even came from, and the best I have is fairly sure. I narrowed it to a community I’m in. I still can’t name the person whose structure I’ve been using for months. That bothers me more than the count does. If you take this approach, have Claude write the source into the file on day one, at the top, before you change a thing. I didn’t, and now I’m guessing.
Frequently asked questions
Should I write a new Claude Code skill or customize an existing one?
Customize, unless the skill needs to know your specific setup. General thinking work like critique, prioritizing, or pulling ideas out of your own head has good public versions already, and starting from someone’s working structure beats starting from a blank file. Write from scratch when the job depends on your tools, your data, or your rules, because no public version can know those.
Can I edit a Claude Code skill someone else wrote?
Yes. A skill is a plain text file, and editing it is the intended use. You don’t have to edit it by hand either. I paste the skill into Claude Code, say what I want different, and let it do the writing. Check the license if you plan to republish it, and get the source noted at the top of the file while you still remember it.
What do I put in a skill so it knows my context?
Write the background paragraph you keep retyping into fresh chats. Your audience, your tools, your constraints, your non-negotiables. Then add a line telling the skill to assume all of it unless you say otherwise, so it stops asking. This one change does more than every other edit combined.
How many Claude Code skills is too many?
You’re past the line when you start forgetting what you have, and I passed it somewhere before 123. There’s no number, but there’s a test: if you’d rather write a new skill than go look for the one you already wrote, the folder has stopped helping you. Prune before you add.
Where does the customized skill file go?
In .claude/skills in your home directory, inside a folder named after the skill, saved as SKILL.md. Claude Code will put it there for you if you ask it to, so you never have to go find the folder. It reads the description line to work out when the skill applies, so the description matters more than the length of the file. Write that description in first person, since it’s yours now.
Try it yourself
The fastest version of this is one skill and one paragraph. Take a skill you installed and never warmed to, paste it into Claude Code along with the background you’re tired of explaining, and ask it to fold the second into the first. Run it once. The difference shows up immediately, and it isn’t subtle.
If you want somewhere gentler to start, my voice skill post walks through building one from a blank template, and the screenshot one has a generator like the one above.
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Related reading
- What a Claude Code Skill Is, and How to Make One
- Claude Code Skill for Writing: Stop Pasting Your Style Guide
- How to Organize Screenshots You Save and Never Open Again
- Turn Your Blog Post Checklist Into a Claude Code Skill
- Is It Cheating to Use AI to Write Your Blog?
This one sits alongside Claude Code for Bloggers, my series on building your own tools without being a developer. Subscribe if you haven’t already, and go rewrite something somebody else built.
