Stop writing prompts for Claude — you can now show it what you want done instead

Published Aug 31, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT Dibakar Ghosh is a tech journalist at How-To Geek, where he focuses on Linux, Windows, and productivity tools. His goal is simple—help readers at every skill level get more done with the tech they use every day. He began his writing career in 2016 with WordPress tutorials, later moving into digital marketing, where he spent years reviewing complex tools for marketers. His work has also appeared on Authority Hacker, where he’s shared in-depth guides on digital workflows and online productivity. That experience now shapes his journalism, blending analytical depth with practical, real-world advice. When he’s not writing or testing software, Dibakar is usually watching movies or playing video games. He’s a huge Christopher Nolan fan and a strong proponent of the theater experience. In gaming, he has sunk hundreds of hours into Insomniac’s Spider-Man series, Returnal, Prototype, Darksiders, and Final Fantasy titles. Claude has had SKILL.md files for a while now, and they’re one of the most useful things about it. That said, skills are only as good as the person writing them. If you describe your workflow poorly in a skill, Claude will also do the work poorly — it’s basically garbage-in, garbage-out. However, the new “Record a skill” feature seems to finally solve that problem. Instead of writing the skill yourself, you make Claude watch as you perform a particular workflow, and it documents the process for you. This gives it a much more precise and thorough understanding of how you want it to work, leading to better SKILL.md files. How Claude's "Record a skill" feature works Turns out the best way to explain something is not to explain it At the time of writing, the “Record a skill” feature is exclusive to Claude’s Cowork mode and is currently available only in the Mac desktop app. It’s not available on the web app, nor on the Windows or Linux versions of Claude desktop. So it’s a fairly narrow slice of Claude users who can use it today. But if you’re in that slice, it’s definitely worth trying out. To use it, open the Claude desktop app, switch to Cowork mode, click the + button inside the chat window, and you’ll see a “Record a skill” option. Hit it, and Claude will start recording your screen and microphone. From there, you just do the task — ideally, anything repetitive or boring that you’d like to stop doing yourself. Claude sees every item you click and every window you open, and it also hears whatever you say while you’re doing it. I strongly recommend narrating your thinking as you go through the workflow. While the video shows Claude where to click, the audio explains why you’re clicking there and your decision-making process. Once done, Claude will extract screenshots from the screen recording, combine them with your audio walkthrough, and produce a thorough, detailed SKILL.md file. Use one of the stronger models when you’re recording the skill. The point is to get the workflow understood and written down properly — and using a weaker model might produce a weaker skill. If the skill is written well enough, it should be able to walk something like Sonnet or Haiku through the process without much trouble. Why this feature is a game changer Show, don't tell Dibakar Ghosh | How-To Geek A SKILL.md file lives and dies by the prompt inside it. That said, writing a good-quality prompt is easier said than done. You have to be fully aware of every step in your own process, and be articulate enough to lay that process out in text, so an AI can follow it. Now, the thing is, just because you know how to do something doesn’t automatically mean you’re good at teaching it. Fortunately, the “Record a skill” feature takes the burden of teaching off your shoulders and instead forces Claude to be a better student, essentially absorbing the skill from you by watching and listening as you work. Three ways I'm using Claude's "Record a skill" feature Yours can look different, but the pattern holds Credit: Dibakar Ghosh | How-To Geek I've been using Claude skills since day one — long before recording was an option. As a writer, prompting has always come naturally. Before, I was writing detailed instructions for readers, and now I’m doing the same for AI. But even with that professional background, some skills were a chore to write. Especially anything where Claude needs to use my browser or control graphical apps through "Computer Use." You end up writing things like, "The button is in the top-right corner, click it — then a pop-up appears, click the second option," over and over. The level of detail required is exhausting. “Record a skill” removes that friction seamlessly. After it launched, I went back and redid several of my older skills, and these three categories of skills saw the biggest improvements. Dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s As someone who writes online content, I have to go through an SEO (search engine optimization) checklist before I hit publish on an article. This includes assigning articles to the right categories, adding tags, adding metadata to images, and a lot of other mundane stuff. None of it is intellectually demanding, but it eats 10 to 15 minutes per article. That's time I could spend writing, researching, or just relaxing. Now, I did try delegating this to Claude before, but it never worked. It either clicked the wrong box or added text to the wrong field. The result was a mess I still had to redo by hand. But with “Record a skill,” I could show Claude precisely where to click and why, and now it consistently hits the right boxes. It's easily one of the biggest productivity gains I've had in a long time. Granted, your version of this task will probably look different from mine, but almost everyone has some equivalent — routine data entry, administrative forms, clicking through the same interface in the same order every week. That kind of low-judgment routine work is now fully automatable. Graphically controlling your apps If you want Claude to work with another application, there have traditionally been two approaches. The more technical one is to give Claude API-level access to the app, either by connecting to an MCP server or wiring up the API directly using a tool like n8n. The other approach is to have Claude control the app graphically, using features like “Computer Use” or “Browser Use” to click around the interface the way a person would. Now, I personally prefer letting Claude control apps graphically because some of the stuff I use don’t have proper API implementations, and others don’t fully expose all their features through their APIs. That said, Claude can fumble when navigating graphical interfaces — clicking the wrong links and completely overlooking the correct interface element. Recording a skill completely fixed that for me. When Claude has seen you navigate the app, the resulting skill is specific enough that graphical control actually works. Finding deals and unique offers online Part of my job is reporting on deals. This has me hunting down discounts across different regions — not necessarily limited to my own country. I check storefronts in multiple markets, switch VPN providers to see local pricing, and browse region-specific stores. Now, if you were to ask Claude (or any AI, for that matter) to do this research for you, it’ll generally do a fairly shallow job. It’ll run a few searches, read some links, and report back — rarely coming back with anything useful. I've been doing this for over ten years, and my process is more thorough — going into forums, reading comment threads, cross-checking sources, and following tangents that a quick search would miss. With “Record a skill,” I can demonstrate that entire process once and have Claude replicate it. Now, in my testing, the depth of the research matches what I'd do myself. However, it’s still not as thorough. It tends to stop a bit prematurely, whereas I’d keep going a bit longer. But still, it’s an easy problem that can be solved by just saying, “Find more.” Overall, this skill has saved hours of research time. This completely solves "prompting" for the regular user If writing prompts has always felt like a chore to you, or if you've never been able to write a prompt detailed enough to make Claude actually do what you want, the “Record a skill” feature changes that completely. You no longer need to teach it anything. Just do the task once as you normally would, and Claude will learn by observing.