Introduction to agent skills

In this course, you'll learn how to stop repeating yourself and start teaching Claude once. You'll discover what Skills are and how they differ from other Claude Code customization options like CLAUDE.md, hooks, and subagents. You'll create your first Skill from scratch — writing the SKILL.md frontmatter, crafting effective descriptions that reliably trigger matching, and organizing your skill directory with progressive disclosure to keep context windows efficient. You'll also explore advanced configuration options like restricting tool access with allowed-tools and using scripts that execute without consuming context. Beyond building individual Skills, you'll learn how to share them with your team by committing them to a repository, distribute them more broadly through plugins, and deploy them organization-wide using enterprise managed settings. You'll see how to wire Skills into custom subagents for isolated, expert task delegation, and you'll walk through a complete troubleshooting guide for diagnosing issues — from skills that won't trigger to priority conflicts and runtime errors. By the end, you'll have the knowledge to build a full Skills-based workflow that keeps Claude consistent, context-efficient, and aligned with your team's standards.