Skills

Skills are folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude loads dynamically to improve performance on specialized tasks. Skills teach Claude how to complete specific tasks in a repeatable way, whether that's creating documents with your company's brand guidelines, analyzing data using your organization's specific workflows, or automating personal tasks.

Each skill is self-contained in its own directory with a SKILL.md file containing the instructions and metadata that Claude uses. Browse through these examples to get inspiration for your own skills or to understand different patterns and approaches.

The example skills in this repo are open source (Apache 2.0). We've also included the document creation & editing skills that power Claude's document capabilities under the hood in the document-skills/ folder. These are source-available, not open source, but we wanted to share these with developers as a reference for more complex skills that are actively used in a production AI application.

Enterprise & Communication

• brand-guidelines - Apply Anthropic's official brand colors and typography to artifacts
• internal-comms - Write internal communications like status reports, newsletters, and FAQs
• theme-factory - Style artifacts with 10 pre-set professional themes or generate custom themes on-the-fly

Try in Claude Code, Claude.ai, and the API

Claude Code

You can register this repository as a Claude Code Plugin marketplace by running the following command in Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills

Then, to install a specific set of skills:

1. Select Browse and install plugins
2. Select anthropic-agent-skills
3. Select document-skills or example-skills
4. Select Install now

Alternatively, directly install either Plugin via:

/plugin install document-skills@anthropic-agent-skills
/plugin install example-skills@anthropic-agent-skills

After installing the plugin, you can use the skill by just mentioning it. For instance, if you install the document-skills plugin from the marketplace, you can ask Claude Code to do something like: "Use the PDF skill to extract the form fields from path/to/some-file.pdf"

Claude.ai

These example skills are all already available to paid plans in Claude.ai.

To use any skill from this repository or upload custom skills, follow the instructions in Using skills in Claude.

Claude API

You can use Anthropic's pre-built skills, and upload custom skills, via the Claude API. See the Skills API Quickstart for more.

Creating a Basic Skill

Skills are simple to create - just a folder with a SKILL.md file containing YAML frontmatter and instructions. You can use the template-skill in this repository as a starting point:

---
name: my-skill-name
description: A clear description of what this skill does and when to use it
---

# My Skill Name

[Add your instructions here that Claude will follow when this skill is active]

## Examples
- Example usage 1
- Example usage 2

## Guidelines
- Guideline 1
- Guideline 2

The frontmatter requires only two fields:

• name - A unique identifier for your skill (lowercase, hyphens for spaces)
• description - A complete description of what the skill does and when to use it

The markdown content below contains the instructions, examples, and guidelines that Claude will follow. For more details, see How to create custom skills.