Your First Skill in 5 Minutes
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Your First Skill in 5 Minutes
Section titled “Your First Skill in 5 Minutes”You already have an AI IDE. You already have a task you do often. That is everything you need to build your first factory component.
This walkthrough mirrors the Do the Work, Then Capture It pattern from Article 1, distilled to the shortest possible loop. Five minutes from now, you will have a working skill saved in your repository.
What you need
Section titled “What you need”- An AI IDE you already use — Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, Kilo Code, Antigravity, or Codex.
- A repeatable task you do often. Anything works: writing a unit test, drafting a PR description, formatting a config file, generating release notes from commits.
- A repository to save the skill into.
No installs needed for this exercise.
A note on IDE folders. This guide saves the skill to
.claude/skills/, the de facto canonical location across the ecosystem. Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot read it directly. Windsurf, Kilo Code, Google Antigravity, and OpenAI Codex look in their own folders and need a one-time copy or symlink before they will load the skill — see the sharing strategies on the Skills page, or your IDE guide, once you finish the exercise.
The five-minute loop
Section titled “The five-minute loop”1. Open your AI IDE
Section titled “1. Open your AI IDE”Open the project where you would normally do this kind of work. The skill will live in this repository so your teammates get it on their next pull.
2. Ask the assistant to do the task
Section titled “2. Ask the assistant to do the task”Pick something concrete and small. For example:
Write a unit test for the
calculateInvoiceTotalfunction insrc/billing/invoice.ts.
Or:
Draft a PR description for the changes on this branch.
Or:
Format
config/staging.yamlto match the project’s style.
The first answer will be roughly right. It will not match your team’s standards.
3. Correct the output until it matches your standards
Section titled “3. Correct the output until it matches your standards”Push back on what is wrong. Be specific. “Use describe/it, not test. Mock the database with our createTestDb helper, not Jest’s jest.mock. Assert on the return value, not on side effects.”
Iterate until the output is something you would happily commit. Do not compromise. The corrections you make in this step are the standards you are about to capture.
4. Ask the assistant to capture what it just learned
Section titled “4. Ask the assistant to capture what it just learned”Once the output is right, say:
Create a skill that captures the standards you just followed. Save it to
.claude/skills/my-first-skill/SKILL.md. Use a cleardescriptionso the assistant knows when to load it.
The assistant will write a SKILL.md containing the rules it followed during the corrections.
5. Save and commit
Section titled “5. Save and commit”Verify the file exists at .claude/skills/my-first-skill/SKILL.md. Read it. Tighten the description if it is vague. Commit it with the rest of your changes.
git add .claude/skills/my-first-skillgit commit -m "Add my-first-skill"6. Test it in a fresh session
Section titled “6. Test it in a fresh session”Start a new session in the same IDE. Give the assistant a similar task — a different function to test, a different config file to format. Do not mention the skill by name.
If the description is good, the assistant will load the skill on its own and follow your standards without further prompting.
If it does not, there are two possible reasons:
- The description is not specific enough. Edit the
description:line inSKILL.mdso it names the trigger: when this skill should fire. Test again. - Your IDE does not read
.claude/skills/. If you use Windsurf, Kilo Code, Antigravity, or Codex, mirror the skill into your IDE’s folder using one of the sharing strategies on the Skills page, then test again.
7. Celebrate
Section titled “7. Celebrate”You just built your first factory component. The next teammate to clone this repo gets it for free.
What you actually built
Section titled “What you actually built”A SKILL.md is a tiny file with YAML frontmatter and a body. The frontmatter declares when the skill should load; the body explains what to do. The assistant reads the description before every task and loads the skill when relevant — that is what makes the standards consistent across the team.
For the deeper version of this loop, with worked corrections and the full reasoning behind each one, read Article 1: Do the Work, Then Capture It.
Where to go next
Section titled “Where to go next”Continue to Where to Go Next → for the recommended path through the rest of the site.