Creating Custom Claude Skills

Build two real Claude Code Skills from scratch — a simple one and a more advanced one with a bundled script. Starting with a Skill that automates spinning up new projects from a GitHub template using the CLI, you'll see the full process of creating a SKILL.md, understanding the frontmatter options, and invoking it with a slash command.

Then, working inside that new project, you'll build a few quick features to generate some commit history before creating a more complex Changelog Builder Skill. This second Skill includes a custom shell script that does the heavy lifting — parsing git history, categorizing commits, and generating a formatted changelog file. Together, these two builds show the range of what Skills can do, from simple saved prompts to mini-applications with their own scripts and logic.

• Creating a personal Skill in ~/.claude/skills/ so it's available across all projects
• Writing SKILL.md with frontmatter: name, description, and invocation control flags
• Using the Skill Creator skill from Anthropic to follow best practices automatically
• Building a Skill that uses the GitHub CLI to create repos from a template
• Programming Skills to ask clarifying questions when required info is missing
• Understanding disable-model-invocation and user-invocable settings and when to use each
• Building a more complex Skill with a custom script in a scripts/ subfolder
• Running the Changelog Builder Skill to generate a formatted changelog from git history
• How Skills load into context only when invoked, keeping things efficient