Use your first Skill

Introduction

In February 2026, Anthropic made Skills free on all plans.

You may or may not know what Skills are, what they can do, or how much they are already impacting the world, but the good news is you’re in the best place to find out.

The fact that you can get this now means that there are no barriers to learning some of the big secrets driving the global disruption we are seeing.

In my opinion, this could be the single biggest learning revolution since YouTube.

I have always had a passion for teaching, especially sharing what I have learnt over many years with others, and I feel that now is more important than ever.

Using the first skill

1. Download the .skill file attached
2. Create an account on Claude
3. Complete the onboarding
4. Go to Settings and click Capabilities
5. Click add skill
6. Upload the .skill file you downloaded
7. Create a new Project named Claude Academy
8. Copy and paste this description

This is my personal learning space with Claude. Claude Academy helps me build real skills using AI — starting from where I am and growing over time. Claude should remember my progress, adapt to my level, and help me get genuinely good at working with AI.

Once you have created your project, open a new chat in the project and ask Claude.

Hey Claude, can you start Claude Academy?

Follow all of the steps end-to-end and carefully, then come back here to read the rest of the course.

What is a skill?

I personally think Agent Skills are the most disruptive thing to have happened in AI over the last 12 months.

It’s maybe not the biggest technical innovation, for example, yes, OpenClaw is cool (if you’re here, chances are you’ve heard of this) - but Skills are a foundation to this, and they will start to enable global AI adoption.

We will be publishing more skill-based courses in the future, but hopefully, this is enough for now.

A good lesson plan means any substitute teacher can walk in and deliver it.

Agent Skills are just knowledge and processes written into documents. They are the lesson plan.

It doesn't matter which AI picks it up - the quality stays the same.

Skill-based learning

Earlier, I said this could be the biggest disruption to learning since YouTube. Why is that?

Here, you don’t learn by watching - you learn by doing.

In traditional ways, a human tutor would stand in front of the classroom, and you’d be limited to how many people that single person would cope with; now with Claude, that’s unlimited.

If I were running one of my bootcamps, 5 people could run into a single problem locally on their machine, and I’d have to go and help them one-by-one; now with Claude, everyone gets the same attention.

People (like me) can provide real-world examples, based on real experience, and then ask AI to create lessons and bundle our knowledge into skills.

Quickly, simply and efficiently. This gives a simple framework that not only gives everyone an expert teacher, based on expert knowledge, but it also gives a system which allows people to track their progress.

Positive Disruption

All of the above is disruptive, but I don’t think every disruption needs to be negative at all.

You can use Skill-based learning on Claude’s free plan for general cases.

You can use our Skill-based learning for Coding with Claude’s Pro plan (currently just $17 a month).

If you’re considering paying tens of thousands for University, or thousands for a bootcamp, you simply don’t need to anymore.

In fact, I think it’s actually more counterproductive than it’s ever been.

Put this into perspective: it’s been a full year since the release of Claude (February 2025).

One year on, we are questioning the prospects of Junior Developers.

Where will they go? What will they do?

You spend 2-3 years at University for a basic Computer Science degree.

Not enough people are talking about this publicly, and hopefully, this could be a spark that ignites that conversation.