If you’ve ever opened Claude, typed out your entire context, style preferences, and instructions, only to do the exact same thing the next day… you’re not alone. Most people get stuck in this loop and don’t even realize there’s a way out.
I came across a fantastic breakdown from a LinkedIn creator that lays out the exact progression from basic prompts to full-on Claude Skills. It’s one of those posts that makes you wonder why you didn’t set this up sooner. The whole framework fits into four clear steps, and each one builds on the last.
🔁 Why Most People Stay Stuck at Level 1
The original poster makes a brilliant analogy. Using plain prompts is like telling a stranger your job every single morning. You explain your role, your tone, your preferences. Claude delivers. But the next chat? Gone. Blank slate. You start over.
That’s fine for one-off questions. But if you use Claude for recurring work, like writing reports, drafting emails, or building content, it becomes a real time sink. The expert behind this post calls it “Level 1,” and most people never leave it.
📋 Step 1: Start With a Prompt, But Don’t Stay There
Every journey with Claude begins here. You open a chat, type your task, and get an answer. Simple enough.
But here’s the thing most people miss: prompts are disposable. They don’t carry over. Tomorrow, Claude has zero memory of what you told it today. You re-explain your context, your format, your voice. Every. Single. Chat.
The takeaway? Prompts are a starting point, not a destination. Recognize when you’re repeating yourself, because that’s your signal to move up.
📁 Step 2: Move to a Project
This is where things start to click. The contributor explains it like giving a new hire a binder on day one.
- Go to Claude.ai and create a Project
- Upload your voice file, style guide, or instructions
- Every chat inside that Project now knows your context
- Your tone, format, and preferences stick across conversations
Projects are a huge upgrade. Instead of re-explaining yourself, you set your context once, and Claude references it automatically within that project.
But there’s a catch the author points out: you still have to open the right project every time. And sometimes you still need to nudge Claude to actually read the uploaded files first. It’s better than raw prompts, but it’s not hands-free yet.
🎓 Step 3: Graduate to Skills
This is the real unlock, and the step most people don’t know about. The innovator behind this post describes Skills as “training an employee once, for forever.”
Here’s the process the creator walks through:
- Open Claude Cowork
- Select Opus 4.6 with Extended Thinking enabled
- Use this prompt: “Use the skill-creator to help me build a skill for [your most repeated task]”
- Claude will interview you about the task, so answer with maximum detail
The post’s author makes a critical point about specificity. Saying “I write reports” gives Claude nothing useful to work with. But saying “I write weekly reports that start with the headline metric, 3 sections max, next steps as bullets” gives Claude everything it needs to build a proper Skill.
The specificity is the skill. The more precise your description, the better Claude performs every single time it fires.
This is the part I found most valuable. A Skill isn’t some fancy configuration file. It’s your expertise, captured in a format Claude can reuse forever. You invest the time once, and it pays off on every future interaction.
⚡ Step 4: Install and Test
Once your Skill is built, getting it running is straightforward:
- Save the Skill folder that Claude generates
- Go to Settings, then Capabilities, then Skills, and upload it
- Open a brand new chat and type your task normally
- The Skill fires automatically with no slash command needed
That last point is worth highlighting. You don’t have to remember to activate anything. Claude detects the relevant task and applies the Skill on its own. That’s the difference between a Project (where you still manage context manually) and a Skill (where Claude just knows).
🧠 Why This Progression Matters
What I appreciate about this breakdown is how clean the mental model is:
- Prompts = telling a stranger your job every morning
- Projects = giving a new hire a binder on day one
- Skills = training an employee once, permanently
Each level removes friction. Prompts require you to repeat everything. Projects require you to organize and point Claude to the right files. Skills require nothing after the initial setup.
If you’re someone who uses Claude daily for the same types of tasks, moving from prompts to Skills could save you hours every week. And the setup process itself takes maybe 15 to 20 minutes per Skill, which is a pretty incredible return on investment.
🛠️ Practical Tips to Get the Most Out of Skills
- Start with your most repeated task. Don’t try to build 10 Skills at once. Pick the one thing you do most often and nail that first.
- Be absurdly specific during the interview. Claude’s skill-creator asks you questions. Treat it like onboarding your best employee. The more detail, the better the output.
- Test in a fresh chat. After uploading, open a completely new conversation. Don’t test inside the project where you built it.
- Iterate. Your first version won’t be perfect. Use it for a few days, note what’s off, then update the Skill with corrections.
Check out the full LinkedIn post for the complete walkthrough and additional details on working with Claude’s skill-creator.