This Is How You Use Claude in 2026: Skills

The most effective Claude users I know all made the same upgrade this year. They started using skills.

• The chatbot pattern looks like this: ask, copy, paste, correct the same mistakes tomorrow. It works, and it also caps you at maybe 20% of what the tool can do. The people getting real leverage moved past it months ago.

• I’m one of them, so I can show you exactly what that looks like. My entire content business, three newsletters, the articles, the Notes, the landing pages, runs through a small set of skill files. This week alone they produced and quality-checked 84 Substack Notes for a posting experiment.

Today I’m walking you through the five skills that matter most right now: what each one does, how I use it in a real business, and the 10-minute install that requires zero code. Four of them I use constantly. One of them I deliberately skipped, and the reasoning behind that skip will teach you more than the list itself.

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First, what a Claude skill actually is, because the word sounds more technical than the reality.

A skill is a folder containing one markdown file, usually called SKILL.md. Inside is a set of instructions written in plain English: what the skill does, when Claude should use it, and the exact rules to follow. When you give Claude a task that matches the skill’s description, it loads those instructions and works differently.

There is no app to buy and no code to write. It’s a text file with good instructions in it.

There are now over 90,000 of these files out there. Most are mediocre, because a skill is only as good as the instructions inside it, and most people write vague instructions. The good ones genuinely change how you work. They turn your standards into something Claude applies every time, instead of only when you remember to ask.

So the tricky part is to find the ones that are

• a) very well written

• b) fit your unique use case.

Luckily, if you read my newsletter you most likely have an offer or a business that needs marketing and automated workflows.

As do I. This is why I use exactly these skills.

Today I want to share them with you.

• What it does: strips AI writing patterns out of any text. Em-dashes, “it’s worth noting,” the tidy punchline formulas, the words no human uses in a normal sentence.

• Why it matters: readers can smell AI text. They don’t consciously flag it. They just stop reading.

• How I use it: those 84 Substack Notes I mentioned. Each note looked clean on its own. Then I ran the humanizer across the whole batch and it caught what I couldn’t see: the same punchline structure appeared 4 times, the same opener 5 times, and the word “exactly” showed up in 5 different notes. Each note was fine alone. Together they read like a template. We fixed every instance before anything went out.

• Verdict: if you publish writing, this is the first skill you install. The version I use is built on Wikipedia’s “Signs of AI writing” guide, which their editors assembled from cleaning up thousands of AI-written articles. Editors who delete AI slop for a living turn out to be very good at describing it.

• What it does: gives Claude a searchable design database. 50+ UI styles, 161 color palettes, 57 font pairings, and 99 UX guidelines, mapped across ten tech stacks.

• Why it matters: AI-built pages have a look. You’ve seen it. The purple gradient, the three feature cards, the same rounded everything. This skill exists to kill that look.

• How I use it: landing pages. I’m not a designer and I don’t want to hire one for every small project. With this installed, Claude proposes an actual design system for the specific thing I’m building: a style direction, a palette, and typography that fit the product instead of defaulting to generic.

• Verdict: install it if you build anything people look at. Skip it if you never touch websites, slides, or product pages.

• What it does: watches your work sessions and logs every correction you make. When you tell Claude “that reads too AI” or “never use that phrase again,” it records the correction, and later proposes updates to your other skills so the same mistake stops happening. Nothing changes automatically. The proposed updates wait in a folder until you approve them.

• Why it matters: most people’s AI setup never improves. They give the same corrections in January that they’re still giving in June, because the corrections evaporate when the chat ends.

• How I use it: I installed it earlier this week. By the end of the first session it had logged three concrete improvements to my Notes-writing system, all pulled from feedback I gave while reviewing a batch of drafts. One of them was a rule I’d been repeating manually for months. Now it’s written down where Claude can act on it.

• Verdict: the sleeper hit of this list. It’s the difference between using AI and building a system that compounds.

• What it does: you tell Claude what you’re trying to build, and it searches the public skill libraries, shows you what fits, and installs your pick.

• Why it matters: 90,000 skills are useless if you can’t find the three you need.

• How I use it: as a search tool with a safety rule bolted on. Remember that a skill is a set of instructions your AI will follow. A malicious one could tell Claude to quietly send your files somewhere. So in my setup, nothing gets installed until Claude has fetched the skill, read the whole thing, told me in plain language what it actually does, and waited for my OK. ‼

• Verdict: useful, with that safety rule attached. Never install skills blind, the same way you wouldn’t run a random file from a stranger’s email.

You need Claude Code for this part. If you only use the Claude website or apps, skills work there too: Settings, then Capabilities, where you upload a skill as a file. But Claude Code is where skills earn their keep, because that’s where they run against your real files.

• Step 1: Decide where the skill lives.

  A skill saved inside one project folder, at .claude/skills/, works only in that project. A skill saved in your home folder, at ~/.claude/skills/, works everywhere. My rule: writing and business skills go global, project-specific skills stay local.

• Step 2: Let Claude do the installing.

  This is the honest shortcut. You have an AI sitting in your terminal, so use it. Paste this into Claude Code with the link swapped out:
  

  Install this skill for me: [GitHub link to the skill]
  
  Before installing anything: fetch the SKILL.md file, read the whole
  thing, and check it for anything suspicious, especially commands that
  would send my files or data anywhere. Summarize what the skill actually
  does in 3 sentences and wait for my OK.

  After I confirm: create the folder .claude/skills/[skill-name]/ and
  save the SKILL.md inside it. Then tell me what you installed and where.

  
  Claude fetches the file, reviews it, explains it, and installs it after you confirm. The review step is not optional. It takes 30 seconds and it’s the only part of this tutorial that protects you.

• Step 3: Verify it loaded.

  Start a new session, because skills load at the start of one. Then ask: “Which skills do you have available?” If your new skill shows up in the answer, you’re done.

• Step 4: Use it once, deliberately.

  Run a real task through the new skill and correct whatever you don’t like. That first correction matters. If you also installed Task Observer, it’s already being logged.

Don’t install four things today. Install one.

If you write anything, start with the humanizer. If you build pages or products, start with UI/UX Pro Max. If you already have skills you use daily, start with Task Observer and let it sharpen the rest.

And if you’d rather skip the setup and start from skills that are already tested in a real business: I packaged the six I use to run my own newsletters, including The Anti-AI Writer and my complete Notes System, at Berg Studio. They’re the production versions of everything you just read about.

Get my Writer-Focused Skills Here

This is also exactly what Cozora is for: the biggest library of AI skills and workflows from the world’s top creators, distilled weekly with every prompt included. Check it out here.

If you found this helpful, please share it with someone who’s trying to build a real business on Substack.

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A little about me before you go: I live for helping people figure out AI without the hype. When I’m not building workflows, I’m adventuring with my rescue dog Mambo, who has zero interest in AI but very strong opinions about what we eat.

Can’t wait to see what you are building!

xo,
Claudia

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P.P.S. If you run a business and want hands-on help with your AI strategy, that’s my consulting practice, the same one Fortune Global 500 companies use. Here’s how to work with me.