Claude Skills: Create, Test, and Share Across Apps

David DeWinter walks through creating a reusable Claude skill that summarizes email threads, identifies action items, and drafts replies. The tutorial uses Claude's skill creator, answers clarification questions, and tests the result against an example email before saving it. DeWinter says creating a skill does not require a paid plan and recommends invoking it explicitly with a slash command rather than relying on automatic selection.

The same Thread Reply skill appears in Claude Desktop's Chat and Cowork environments. In Cowork, the demonstration adds business context from a local folder. Access to local files is the workflow shown here; the tutorial does not demonstrate running a model locally or offline.

Claude Code handles installation separately. DeWinter downloads the skill, renames the download to .zip, extracts it, and copies the containing folder into .claude/skills. A new session then recognizes it. He also explains the distinction between global skills and project skills.

Sharing options include file exports, organization skills for Team or Enterprise accounts, an experimental synced-drive setup, and Git version history. Exported copies can drift apart after edits. The shared-drive example requires files kept on the device and a preload workaround for a dot-folder limitation that DeWinter attributes to OneDrive; its skill does not appear in autocomplete.