The end of Claude's "amnesia": how to teach it to work exactly the way you want
If every chat with Claude starts from scratch, you lose hours repeating tone, format and rules. This guide explains what Claude's Skills, connectors and plugins are, how to create your first Skill by talking to Claude, and when each tool makes sense.
By Yenny Astrid Londoño MonrroyReviewed
Key Takeaways of this Analysis
- A Skill is a set of instructions Claude loads when your request matches its description.
- You can create a Skill by talking to Claude, starting from a result that already worked, and review it before saving.
- Connectors give access to your tools; Skills provide the method; plugins bundle both for a complete role.
- Use a Skill for specific, repetitive tasks, and a plugin for multi-step workflows in external tools.
- Safety confirmations help, but they don't replace backups or your own review.
If every time you open Claude it feels like hiring a new assistant with amnesia, you are losing valuable hours every week.
Explaining again which tone to use, which format you prefer, which words it must never say or how to present a client report is exhausting. Many people get stuck in a loop of trial, error and frustration, convinced that the AI is the problem.
The problem is rarely the model: it is how we use it. Anthropic offers three pieces to solve this: Skills, connectors and plugins.
In this article I show you how to go from using AI as an advanced search engine to building a system that does real work for you.
1. What a Skill is and why it changes the game
A Skill is a folder of instructions, sometimes with templates or scripts, that teaches Claude to handle a specific task your way. Claude reads each Skill's name and description and loads it when your request matches, so you don't have to explain the process again.
Think of a Skill as your business's recipe:
- Ingredients: the data you hand over (a raw report, a draft, a screenshot).
- Instructions: your brand rules (visual style, tone of voice, structure of the deliverable).
- Result: a deliverable that follows your format from the first version. It is still worth reviewing.
The practical trick: create Skills while you work
You don't need to code. You can create a Skill by talking to Claude, starting from work that already turned out well:
- Work on a result until it is what you want. Give context, fix the format, adjust the wording until you reach the ideal version.
- Ask Claude to turn the process into a Skill. Right after, write something like the text below in the same chat.
- Review it and save it. Claude writes the instructions (a SKILL.md file) and gives you the packaged Skill. Read the instructions, fix anything that doesn't reflect how you work, and save it to your account. You can view your Skills and turn them on or off in Settings > Capabilities > Skills, where you can also upload a Skill as a ZIP file.
This result is exactly what I need. Create a Skill from what we just did so you can repeat the process the same way in the future. Before writing it, ask me anything you need to know about how I work.
You don't need to call it later: open a new chat, ask for the task and hand over the raw information. If the Skill's description matches your request, Claude applies it on its own, and you will see in its reasoning that it is using it. In Claude Code and in Cowork plugins you can also invoke it directly by typing a slash and its name (for example, /presentation-style).
Before you start, keep two requirements in mind: Skills are available on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans, and they need code execution turned on. Custom Skills you upload are private to your account.
2. Connectors, Skills and plugins: how they fit together
To avoid getting lost in the interface, remember one idea: plugins contain the other two.
- Connectors (the hands): give Claude access to your real tools, such as your email, Google Drive, calendar or task manager. What it can do in each one depends on the connector and the permissions you grant.
- Skills (the method): teach it how to process that information step by step.
- Plugins (the whole team): packages that bundle Skills, connectors, slash commands and sub-agents for a role or area of work, such as sales, marketing, finance or customer support.
In one sentence: a plugin is a set of connectors plus Skills, with commands and sub-agents, built for a complete role.
A real example with plugins
Plugins live in Cowork, Claude's mode for longer tasks in the desktop app. Anthropic publishes a collection of open-source plugins, and one of them is Productivity, designed to manage tasks, calendars, daily workflows and your personal context, connected to tools such as Slack, Notion, Asana or Microsoft 365.
With a plugin like that installed and your tools connected, you can ask in plain language:
"Review my tasks and meetings for today, tell me what is urgent and suggest an order for the morning."
The plugin handles the workflow: it checks the connected tools, applies its Skills and returns a plan, without you writing a single line of code.
Safety note
When you give a plugin permission to act on your apps (for example, deleting emails or changing files), you are expanding what Claude can do on your behalf. Cowork asks for your explicit permission before permanently deleting files, but there are modes that work without pausing for approval, and Anthropic itself warns that Claude can make mistakes. Don't take confirmation for granted: keep backups of what matters, test on duplicates first and review each action while you refine the instruction.
3. When to use each tool
Don't overload your workspace. Choose based on how complex the job is.
Create a Skill if...
You want Claude to do a specific, repetitive and frequent task the same way every time. For example:
- Formatting your LinkedIn posts with your structure and line breaks.
- Turning meeting notes or transcripts into executive summaries.
- Generating the starting structure of a project with your preferred stack.
Install a plugin if...
You need to cover a multi-step workflow that reads and edits information in external tools. For example:
- A customer support workflow: triaging cases, drafting replies and finding solutions.
- Organizing daily tasks, meetings and priorities.
- Content audits or marketing campaign planning.
Build your system, not just your prompts
The difference between people who feel artificial intelligence is overrated and those who turn it into a real advantage is method.
If you turn your best processes into reusable Skills and rely on well-configured plugins, you stop hunting for the perfect instruction in every chat and start building a system that fits you. It still needs your review, but no longer your repetition.
What is the repetitive task you do every day that you will turn into your first Skill today?
Keep reading
- Skills for coding agents: the same standard applied to Claude Code, Codex or Cursor.
- How to check an AI answer before you use it: to review what a Skill or plugin delivers before relying on it.
- Reverse engineering with AI using REA: how to understand a feature and build your own version with an agent.
Sources
This result is exactly what I need. Create a Skill from what we just did so you can repeat the process the same way in the future. Before writing it, ask me anything you need to know about how I work.