Teach Claude your workflow: build an Agent Skill with SKILL.md
Originally published at AI Frontier Post . Every regular Claude user eventually hits the same wall: a workflow they repeat every week — the way they want release notes written, code reviewed, or research briefs formatted — that they have to re-explain in every single session. Paste the checklist again. Correct the format again. Watch the agent improvise the steps you already decided. The…
Teaching workflows to Claude is often challenging because users have to re-explain their processes in each session. Agent Skills are the solution to this issue, allowing workflows to be defined and automatically executed by the agent. Anthropic introduced Agent Skills as a Claude feature in October 2025, and by mid-2026, around forty products were able to utilize these skills.
SKILL.md is the core of an Agent Skill, containing a simple Markdown file with YAML metadata and instructions. To create an Agent Skill, you need a coding agent that supports the open standard, a text editor, Python 3, and a repeatable workflow. The tutorial provided builds a changelog writer as an example, but it can be adapted to any workflow.
The skill folder must be named after the skill in the frontmatter, and it should contain only one required file: SKILL.md. The YAML frontmatter includes the skill's name and description, which tells the agent what the skill does and when to use it. The body of SKILL.md outlines the steps to follow, rules, output expectations, and edge cases.
Skills can also include sub-directories for scripts, references, and assets, but the progressive disclosure approach ensures that only the necessary components are loaded when needed, allowing skills to scale without the overhead of large system prompts.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
