Claude's New 'Skills' Just Made It 10x Smarter

The End of AI Amnesia

Every modern chatbot has shared one fatal flaw: amnesia. You spend 15 minutes explaining your role, your tone, your house style, your client’s weird constraints—and next session, the model greets you like a stranger, demanding the same wall of instructions all over again.

Professionals work around this with duct tape. They keep sprawling prompt docs in Notion, paste boilerplate into every new chat, or scroll back through old threads to copy the “good version” of their instructions. The model never truly learns; it just replays whatever you can cram into a single context window.

Claude just took a swing at that entire ritual. In Ethan Nelson’s video, he describes a new feature called Claude Skills as “permanent memory for specific tasks” baked directly into Claude. Instead of re-teaching the model how you like a proposal or a code review, you install a Skill once and Claude behaves as if that expertise lives inside it.

Claude Skills act like reusable, task-specific “brains” on top of Anthropic’s new long‑term memory system. A Skill can encode your templates, approval criteria, formatting rules, and domain knowledge, then sit there as a one-click option whenever you start related work. Claude stops feeling like a goldfish and starts acting like a colleague who actually remembers the last project.

Crucially, these aren’t just fancy prompts. Nelson frames Skills as entire workflows: sequences of steps, decision trees, and structured outputs that previously required hours of back-and-forth in chat. One Skill can compress a multi-hour guidance session into a single invocation that “just knows” how to execute.

That shift matters for real jobs, not just novelty demos. Imagine a consultant with a Skill tuned to a client’s 40-page brand bible, or a founder with a Skill that always models cash flow using their exact spreadsheet schema. You no longer burn time re-establishing context; you start from a shared, persistent baseline.

Anthropic and Nelson both point to scale. Hundreds of free Skills already target tasks like writing proposals, organizing finances, or managing ongoing projects. For knowledge workers, that moves Claude from a disposable Q&A tool to a persistent partner that compounds value every time you use it.

Why 'Skills' Are More Than Just Prompts

Skills reframe how you think about prompts entirely. Instead of a clever one‑off instruction you paste into a text box, a Claude Skills setup behaves like an “installed” feature: a bundle of templates, constraints, and domain knowledge that Claude can call on instantly. Ethan Nelson describes it as a permanent “brain” for a task, not just a line or two of guidance.

Consider a Proposal Writer Skill. You teach it your company’s house style once: section order, required legal boilerplate, pricing format, and that you always lead with customer outcomes instead of features. From then on, you click one button, feed it a client name and a few deal details, and Claude generates a full proposal that already sounds like it came from your sales team.

Previously, getting to that level of alignment meant hours of back and forth. You would paste a rough template, correct the tone, rewrite the intro three times, remind Claude about your no‑discount policy, and manually reinsert the same case studies. A Skill compresses that entire negotiation into a single reusable configuration that fires on demand.

This is why calling Skills “saved prompts” undersells them. A robust Skill can encode: - A multi‑step workflow (research, outline, draft, polish) - Specific templates for structure and formatting - Embedded expertise about your product, audience, and constraints

Once installed, those ingredients behave more like an app than a chat. You are not just telling Claude what you want; you are selecting a pre‑built capability that already knows how to get there. The friction of “training” the model each session evaporates because the training lives inside the Skill.

That shifts the mental model from a blank‑slate chatbot to an AI with installed capabilities. Instead of re‑creating a financial analysis setup, a content calendar system, or a QA test‑case generator from scratch, you pin those Skills and trigger them as needed. The underlying model stays the same, but its behavior snaps into a specialized mode with a single click.

Viewed this way, Claude starts to look less like a generalist assistant and more like a platform. You curate a toolkit of Skills that reflect how you actually work, from proposal writing to onboarding docs to bug triage. Each one replaces a fragile, one‑off prompt with a durable, shared workflow that anyone on your team can reuse.

Behind the Curtain: Anthropic's Memory Engine

Marketing talks about Claude Skills, but under the hood they ride on Anthropic’s new persistent memory system. Instead of wiping its brain at the end of every chat, Claude now keeps a structured record of who you are, what you’re doing, and how you like to work.

Anthropic’s memory engine tracks four big buckets of context: professional role, current projects, work patterns, and style preferences. That means Claude can remember that you’re a “product marketing manager at a fintech startup,” that you’re “launching a Q1 payments campaign,” that you “prefer bullet‑first summaries,” and that you “write in a concise, analytical voice.”

Those details don’t just sit in a black box. Claude surfaces them in a visible, editable Memory summary that acts like a public profile for its internal brain. You can open it, see line‑by‑line what Claude believes about you, and prune anything that feels outdated, wrong, or too sensitive.

Control runs deeper than a single settings pane. Anthropic exposes toggles for: - Generating memory from chat history - Letting Claude search and reference past chats - Turning memory off entirely for an account or workspace

For sensitive work, you can jump into incognito chats that never touch memory or history at all. That mode lets you brainstorm layoffs, M&A plans, or personal documents without polluting the long‑term profile Claude uses for your day‑to‑day tasks.

Anthropic originally shipped this memory stack to Team and Enterprise customers to support multi‑week projects and shared workflows. As of 2024, the company has extended automatic memory to Pro and Max tiers, pushing Claude closer to a “continuous collaborator” than a disposable chatbot.

Skills sit on top of this substrate. A proposal‑writing Skill, for example, can automatically pull your role, typical audience, house style, and favorite frameworks from memory, then skip straight to a tailored draft instead of asking 10 setup questions. Install multiple Skills and they all tap the same persistent context, so Claude behaves like one coherent assistant, not a drawer full of unrelated bots.

Anthropic’s own Claude Memory Announcement details how this engine works and how organizations can govern it. Skills simply weaponize that memory for very specific jobs.

From Enterprise Powerhouse to Your Personal Copilot

Persistent memory started as a quiet enterprise feature. Anthropic first shipped long‑term recall to Team and Enterprise customers, targeting consultants, agencies, and internal product teams juggling dozens of clients. Claude could remember project names, approval workflows, brand guidelines, and recurring report formats across weeks of chats.

That early rollout focused on hard productivity metrics. Teams used memory so Claude could auto‑apply a company’s tone of voice, pull in recurring KPIs, or follow a specific QA checklist without re-prompting. For large orgs, shaving 5–10 minutes off every content draft or data summary at scale adds up to hundreds of hours per quarter.

Then Anthropic pushed the same infrastructure downmarket. Pro and Max subscribers now get access to persistent memory and Claude Skills, turning a feature built for Fortune 500 workflows into something a solo YouTuber or indie dev can use. A single creator can have Claude remember their upload cadence, sponsorship rules, and editing style as reliably as a marketing department.

That democratization matters because Skills ride directly on top of this memory layer. A freelance designer can install a proposal‑writing Skill, have Claude remember their pricing tiers, contract quirks, and tools, and reuse that across clients without touching a prompt. A startup founder can keep investor updates, pitch angles, and product roadmap shorthand “loaded” in Claude all month.

Early versions required explicit commands like “remember this” or manual pinning of details. Now Anthropic leans on automatic memory capture, where Claude quietly learns what stays important over time: job role, main projects, preferred file formats, even how you like feedback structured. Toggles such as “Generate memory from chat history” and an editable “Memory summary” keep that process transparent.

Instead of a static chat log, your conversation history becomes training data for a personal copilot.

Your AI, Your Rules: Unpacking the Privacy Controls

Privacy sits at the center of Anthropic’s pitch for Claude Skills, and it shows up not as a marketing slide, but as knobs you can actually turn. Instead of treating memory as a black box, Claude exposes enterprise-grade controls that feel closer to SaaS admin dashboards than consumer chat apps.

Memory itself is optional. Users can flip a single toggle to disable persistent memory entirely, stopping Claude from learning anything from new chats while still keeping the model fully functional for one-off tasks.

Organizations get a second, deeper layer of control. Admins on Team and Enterprise plans can disable memory across the whole workspace, restrict who can use it, or narrow which data types Claude is allowed to remember, mirroring the kind of policies IT already enforces on email retention and document sharing.

Claude also surfaces what it knows. A live Memory summary shows the distilled profile Claude has built: role, current projects, tools, style preferences, and recurring workflows, all editable or deletable line by line.

That editability matters more than it sounds. Instead of hunting through weeks of chat logs, you can prune a client that churned, update a job title after a promotion, or wipe a project that moved to a different vendor in a few clicks.

For people handling sensitive work—legal, medical, M&A, or just HR drama—Anthropic adds a third leg to the stool: Incognito chats. These sessions bypass memory and long-term history entirely, so nothing from them feeds back into Claude’s stored context.

Incognito mode also solves a quieter problem: model bias from old instructions. If your default Skills are tuned for “aggressive growth marketing,” an incognito chat gives you a clean slate to ask for “conservative, compliance-first language” without fighting the existing persona.

Practically, that creates three distinct modes: - Normal chats that can feed memory - Memory-off accounts or orgs that act stateless - Incognito chats for truly ephemeral, sensitive, or experimental work

Instead of one monolithic brain, you get a controllable system that can remember when you want—and forget when you absolutely need it to.

The Project That Never Forgets

Projects rarely fit inside a single chat window, and Claude finally behaves like it understands that. With persistent memory, it stops treating every conversation as a reset and instead tracks your work like a colleague who actually reads the shared doc before meetings.

Picture a multi‑week marketing campaign. You define the brand voice, target personas, launch dates, and performance KPIs once. Two weeks later, Claude can still reference the April 15 launch, the “no discounts in subject lines” rule, and the TikTok-heavy channel mix without you pasting a brief every time.

That continuity matters when you are juggling dozens of assets. Claude can remember which audience segment responded best to last week’s A/B test and propose new variants tuned to that data. It can keep a running backlog of ideas, status notes, and post‑mortems as the campaign evolves.

For engineers, memory turns Claude into a codebase‑aware copilot instead of a glorified autocomplete. You can walk it through your architecture, module boundaries, and gnarly legacy constraints once, then ask, “How risky is refactoring the payments service?” and get an answer grounded in your actual system, not generic boilerplate.

Long‑form writing benefits even more. Draft a 100‑page policy report over a month and Claude can remember chapter outlines, citation styles, stakeholder sensitivities, and the exact framing your director hated in the first draft. You can say, “Rewrite section 4 to mirror section 2’s tone and structure,” and Claude knows what that means from prior sessions.

This is where long‑term memory and Claude’s huge context window work in tandem. The context window—tens of thousands of tokens depending on the model—lets Claude ingest giant chunks of your repo, research corpus, or Notion workspace on demand. Memory then selectively persists the critical bits: goals, constraints, preferences, recurring entities.

Synergy between the two unlocks workflows that used to break chatbots. For a living product spec, you can have Claude: - Track feature decisions across weeks - Flag when a new idea conflicts with earlier requirements - Maintain a consistent glossary and UX copy style

Anthropic’s own roadmap around Introducing Claude 4 - Anthropic highlights how larger contexts and smarter retrieval make this feel less like chatting with a bot and more like managing a shared brain. Instead of dragging an AI up to speed every day, you get a project partner that actually remembers yesterday’s work.

Unlocking the Skill Library Ecosystem

Hundreds of free Claude Skills already exist, according to Ethan Nelson’s demo, and that changes how people will approach AI configuration. Instead of hoarding one-off prompts in Notion, users can browse a library of prebuilt “brains” for tasks like proposal writing, podcast post-production, or cash-flow modeling and install them with a click.

Imagine a Skill Store that feels closer to an app marketplace than a prompt gallery. You could sort by category—sales, law, design, coding, education—or filter for “finance workflows tuned for US GAAP” or “grant-writing for EU research calls.” Ratings, install counts, and version history would surface which Skills actually compress hours of back-and-forth into one clean workflow.

Discovery becomes critical once “hundreds” turn into thousands. Expect curated collections like “starter pack for solo founders” or “agency operations toolkit,” plus staff-picked Skills that showcase advanced use of persistent memory and multi-step templates. Power users will likely chain multiple Skills together: one for research synthesis, another for drafting, a third for QA and compliance checks.

Third-party creators sit at the center of this ecosystem. Prompt engineers, consultants, and boutique firms can encode their proprietary playbooks as Skills and distribute them to clients as reusable, updatable assets. A niche tax consultancy could ship a “2025 small-business filing copilot,” while a game studio could publish Skills for narrative design bibles or level design documentation.

Monetization feels inevitable once the ecosystem matures. Today’s “hundreds of free skills” could evolve into tiers: - Free community Skills - Verified partner Skills - Paid premium Skills with ongoing support

For Anthropic, this turns Claude from a single generalist model into a host for thousands of specialized, persistent experts. Instead of one AI that tries to know everything, users assemble a personal stack of Skills tuned to their industry, tools, and weird edge cases.

Claude vs. The Titans: A New Arms Race for Memory

Call it the memory wars. Claude Skills drop Anthropic directly into a fight with ChatGPT’s Custom GPTs and Google’s Gemini agents, but with a sharper thesis: continuity, not gimmicks. Where OpenAI leans into personality-driven GPTs and Gemini experiments with multi-modal agents, Claude quietly wires in long-term memory as a first-class system feature.

Custom GPTs let users bundle instructions, files, and tools, but each GPT still lives in its own silo. Gemini’s early agent features promise task routing and automation, yet feel more like a lab than a workstation. Claude Skills, by contrast, sit on top of Anthropic’s persistent memory, so the model doesn’t just follow a script; it actually remembers how you work across projects.

Claude’s biggest advantage lands squarely in professional workflows. Memory launched first on Team and Enterprise, tuned for things like client accounts, product roadmaps, and editorial calendars rather than trivia. A single skill can encode an entire proposal workflow, then reuse your company voice, pricing rules, and approval steps every time without re-prompting.

Privacy is where Anthropic swings hardest at its rivals. Memory is optional at the org level, granular at the user level, and paired with incognito chats that never touch long-term storage. Compared with Custom GPTs that often blur the line between personal and shared data, Claude’s controls read like they were written for compliance teams and security officers.

Context window size quietly amplifies all of this. Claude already handles hundreds of pages in a single conversation, and memory means it can stitch that giant context to weeks of prior work. Competitors can store snippets of preference data, but they frequently choke on large documents or multi-step workflows that span dozens of chats.

This update also closes a glaring narrative gap. ChatGPT had Custom GPTs, Gemini had agents, and Claude looked like the “just a chatbot” option, even as its raw model quality impressed power users. With Skills plus memory, Anthropic now fields a credible answer to “What is your agent story?” without bolting on a separate product.

Arms races evolve around whatever becomes scarce. Yesterday it was raw model size; today it is context and continuity. Claude Skills signal that the next competitive frontier is not who talks the most like a human, but who remembers enough to actually work like one.

How to Build Your First 'Skill' Today

Start by deciding exactly what job you want your first Skill to own. Think in terms of a narrow, repeatable role: “You are a concise technical writer who formats responses in Markdown, summarizes in under 200 words, and always proposes 3 alternative headlines.” Specificity turns a vague assistant into a consistent tool.

Now open Claude and write that role out as a clear system message or first prompt. Include constraints, style, and domain: audience level, tone, formatting, and what to ignore. Treat it like a mini spec sheet for a contractor you never want to brief again.

Next, wire this into Claude’s memory. Explicitly say: “Claude, please remember these instructions about how you should write for me and apply them in future chats.” Add your ongoing projects, company name, tech stack, and preferences for citations or code comments so they land in the memory summary.

You can also front‑load recurring context: “I’m a frontend engineer using React, TypeScript, and Vite,” or “I write for a newsletter about AI policy and developer tools.” Claude’s memory system tends to prioritize work, projects, and patterns, so frame details that way. The goal is a reusable profile, not random trivia.

Once you’ve given those instructions, open Claude’s memory panel or Memory summary. You should see a compact paragraph capturing your role, projects, and style rules. Edit aggressively: cut anything noisy, tighten wording, and add missing non‑negotiables like “avoid hypey marketing language” or “prefer RFC links over blog posts.”

Now stress‑test your emerging Skill across multiple fresh chats. Ask for a product teardown, a documentation rewrite, and a 500‑word explainer; check whether Claude keeps the Markdown, tone, and length without reminders. If it drifts, tweak both your original instructions and the memory summary, then try again.

Treat this like versioning a config file. Create separate Skills for: - Code reviews - Release notes - Investor updates - Academic‑style literature summaries

Each one becomes a persistent, task‑specific brain you can invoke on demand, no re‑prompting required.

The Dawn of the Specialist AI

General-purpose chatbots that forget everything start to look primitive once Claude Skills enter the picture. Instead of one shapeless assistant, you now get persistent, task-specific “brains” that remember how you like your code reviewed, your briefs structured, or your budgets modeled, week after week. The shift is from a single, amnesiac generalist to a constellation of specialist AI partners that accumulate context over time.

Professionals will effectively assemble AI teams the way they assemble software stacks today. A lawyer might run with: - A motion-drafting Skill tuned to their jurisdiction - A discovery-review Skill optimized for specific clients - A research Skill that remembers prior case strategies

A product manager could maintain Skills for roadmap grooming, PRD drafting, and stakeholder comms, each trained on different templates, acronyms, and org politics.

Workflows start to look less like chats and more like a mesh of reusable, shared capabilities. Inside companies, you can imagine org-wide skill catalogs: finance-approved forecasting Skills, brand-locked copywriting Skills, compliance-vetted policy Skills. New hires spin up on day one with the same institutional “memory” that previously took quarters of osmosis and shadowing.

Next comes deeper integration. Claude will not just remember projects; it will hook into calendars, task trackers, CRMs, and code repos, updating its memory as work actually ships. Skills could auto-tag decisions, summarize sprint retros, or flag when a proposal drifts from the last approved version without anyone asking.

Proactivity is the logical endpoint. Instead of you pinging Claude to recall context, a project-aware Skill could surface, “You used this pricing structure in Q2; want to reuse it?” or “Legal updated the template yesterday; here’s the new clause.” At that point, the most impactful “coworker” on a project might not be a person, but a lattice of always-on, context-rich AIs quietly steering work in the background.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Claude Skills?

Claude Skills are a new feature that gives the AI persistent, task-specific memory. They function as reusable workflows, templates, and instructions that you install once, allowing Claude to perform complex tasks perfectly without being re-prompted every time.

How is Claude's memory different from ChatGPT's?

Claude's memory is heavily optimized for professional workflows and projects, offering more granular, user-editable privacy controls and an 'Incognito' mode. It's designed for continuity in work contexts rather than general conversation recall.

Are Claude Skills available to all users?

The underlying persistent memory feature was first launched for Claude Team and Enterprise plans and has since expanded to Pro and Max subscribers. This enables a growing ecosystem of 'Skills' for a wider audience.

Can I turn off Claude's memory?

Yes. Anthropic provides strong privacy controls. You can disable memory in your settings, edit what Claude remembers about you, and use 'Incognito' chats for any conversations you don't want saved to memory or chat history.