Get the Skills Starter Kit

Inside Anthropic, the finance team built 70+ Claude Skills and one of them — the MFR, or monthly financial review — is produced 90 to 95 percent automatically before a human looks at it (their CFO, on the record). Their legal team cut review from days to about 24 hours. The trick is not better prompts; it's encoding each procedure ONCE, as a Skill — Anthropic's own analogy is that building a Skill is like writing an onboarding guide for a new hire. This field guide is the copy-paste version, beat for beat with the video: the mental model (why a Skill beats a prompt, and the three-level progressive-disclosure architecture that lets you install 100 Skills for almost zero context cost — about 100 tokens each until one is actually used); THE FINANCE MOVE — a ready-to-edit SKILL.md that turns any recurring report into a Skill so you review instead of rebuild (Alice Fong reclaimed 10 to 20 hours a week this way); THE LEGAL MOVE — a SKILL.md that reviews any draft against your rules and returns LOW / MEDIUM / HIGH risk with the fix, exactly like the self-service tool Anthropic's legal team pinned in Slack; YOUR FIRST SKILL in 5 minutes — the summarize-changes example with live data injection via git diff, where the files live (~/.claude/skills vs .claude/skills vs a .zip on claude.ai), and how to invoke it (auto-match or /slash); plus skill-creator, how Skills pair with MCP, the anthropics/skills repo, and the one security rule Anthropic insists on (only install Skills from sources you trust — a Skill can run code). Every claim verified against anthropic.com/engineering, claude.com/blog, platform.claude.com/docs and github.com/anthropics/skills.

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