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Teaching Claude Some Skills

Over the past few weeks, I've been having fun vibe-developing iOS apps with Claude Code and Sonnet 4.5. I've built 6 apps and several more are in the pipeline. For each of them, I want to do certain things the same way.

For example, creating a workflow that builds and deploys the app to TestFlight.

The first two times, I simply asked Claude to implement this workflow for each app. I got a different implementation each time. It used different tools to accomplish the same thing. I didn't know which was the right approach – I'm not actually a real iOS developer! 😅 I needed to solve the same problem multiple times and it took a lot of time.

Becoming an Expert

Now that I've done it twice, I can call myself an expert! Of the two ways to build the workflow, I chose the one that gave me the most control. For each new app I create, I want the workflow to be done the same way. But no app is exactly the same, so I need some kind of template that Claude can adjust for each app, while maintaining the same structure and environment variables, etc.

The solution is Claude Skills.

Claude now supports specifying through Skills how Claude should handle specific tasks. And Claude Desktop has a skill that helps me create a new skill. Cool, right?

But I want to use it in Claude Code Web and on mobile, and there's no support for skills there – or at least not in the same way. I need to use the CLAUDE.md file and include other markdown files that contain instructions for each skill.

I can ask Claude to generate this type of skill instead, and it works great!

Next Steps

This enables having a template repo in GitHub that contains all the skills for Claude Code that are universal for every app I create. And the next time I start building a new app, I can focus more on functionality and less on infrastructure.