The carousel at the start of this video went from a story in my Notion inbox to finished slides in my Canva template, built by a Claude skill I never wrote. I did the job once with Record a skill running, talked Claude through every decision… and it turned what it saw into a skill it can run again.
The whole recording is below, plus what I’d tell you before you hit record.
Jump to a bit of the video:
0:40 What you need to record a skill
0:55 Narrate decisions, not clicks
1:14 Live demo: Notion to Canva
3:18 Editing the hook mid-recording
5:41 How to save a Claude skill
6:17 The 10-minute limit
7:07 Can it handle complex workflows?
7:43 How to improve a Claude skill
The short version
To create a Claude skill without writing it, open Cowork in the Claude desktop app, click the plus icon and choose Record a skill. Then do the job once while Claude records your screen and your voice, and say why you make each decision as you go. Claude turns the recording into a skill you can tweak, save and run again.
- You need the Claude desktop app and a paid plan (Pro, Max or Team).
- Narrate the decisions, not the clicks. It sees what you do, but not why.
- Say out loud where Claude should stop and wait for you, so those pauses are part of what it learns.
- Plan the job before you start: my recording stopped at ten minutes.
- Treat the first skill as version one, and correct it every time it runs.
What is Record a skill in Claude?
A Claude skill is a saved set of instructions Claude follows whenever you ask it for a particular job, so you explain that job once instead of in every chat. Record a skill is a feature in Claude Cowork that builds a skill by watching you do a job, so you never have to write the instructions yourself. Anthropic added it to the Claude desktop app in July 2026.
You do the job once from start to finish. Claude watches your screen and listens to you… then packages what you did into a skill it can run on its own. So the next time you need the same process, it’s one command.
It doesn’t have to be a big job, either. Pulling the numbers out of Google Search Console into a report for a client is a perfectly good first recording, and you’d need almost nothing set up for it.
And if you’d rather build skills by describing them, I’ve walked through the five I use in Claude Skills for social media. Record a skill is for the jobs you can do but can’t quite put into words.
What do you need before you can record a skill?
You need Cowork in the Claude desktop app and a paid Claude plan. Record a skill isn’t in the web version, and it isn’t on the free plan; it’s available on Pro, Max and Team. When I checked in October 2026, it was also Mac only.
The first time you hit record, it asks for permission to see your screen and hear your microphone. Say yes, or it has nothing to learn from.
Anything your job ends in has to exist before you start, too. Mine ends in a designed carousel, so my Canva template and my folders of background photos had to be ready first. Claude filled in a template that already existed. It wasn’t designing one from scratch.
How do you record a skill, step by step?
Start the recording, tell Claude what you’re about to do, do the job once while explaining yourself, then stop and save the skill it hands back. In order:
- Open Cowork in the Claude desktop app.
- Click the plus icon and choose Record a skill.
- Check the right microphone is selected, then start recording.
- Tell Claude what you’re about to do, and that you want a repeatable skill out of it.
- Do the job once, start to finish, saying why you make each choice.
- Stop the recording. Claude shows you the skill it has written; tweak anything that’s wrong in the chat, then save it.
For mine, I sent Claude into my content inbox in Notion, filtered to stories marked Personal Story with a status of new or triaged, and asked for up to five ideas with a one-line summary of each. I picked the burnout story and pasted it across.
Then I asked it to open my carousel template in Canva and read the layout (where the hooks go, where the body text sits, where the images are) and give me the copy for each slide, ten slides at most. Then the background image, then the slides, then back into Notion to mark the story as briefed, drop in the Canva link and hand over to my caption writing skill.
Three tools and a LOT of small decisions… and I never wrote a single instruction down.
Why should you talk out loud while you record?
Because Record a skill captures what you do, not why you do it. Click through in silence and you get a skill that clicks through in silence, with no idea why you made any of your choices.
It feels a bit silly talking to your computer… do it anyway. These are three things I said during mine, and every one of them is a rule I’d never have thought to write down:
- “Anything that’s promoted or briefed has already had content created around it.” (So it never picks a story I’ve already used.)
- “We’re not actually building anything in Canva yet… we need to revise the copy before we actually create anything.”
- “I want you to actually show me the images, not just tell me the file names.” (I do NOT know my own photos by their file names.)
The more of your reasons it hears, the more the finished skill works the way you do.
How do you stop Claude building before you’ve said yes?
Tell it, out loud, while you’re recording. Say exactly where it should stop and wait for you, and what it isn’t allowed to do yet.
I asked it to wait for me three times: once it had found the stories, once it had written the copy, and before any image went into the design. This is how I asked for the stories, and you can borrow it:
Give me a maximum of five ideas that you think would be good for me to use for a carousel, with a brief one line about each one. And then let me choose the one that we’re going to be using.
Correcting it while it watches counts too. Its first hook missed: slides one and two were all about me, and even a personal story needs to speak to the person reading it. So I told it why while the recording was still running, and made it a rule: every personal story it writes from now on has to feel relevant to my audience.
Is there a time limit on Record a skill?
Yes. When I recorded mine in October 2026, the recording stopped at ten minutes. I only know that because I hit it.
Ten minutes sounds like loads, doesn’t it? It goes quicker than you’d think.
A lot of my ten minutes went on waiting for Claude’s output, so I talked the last couple of steps through as the clock ran down. If your job doesn’t involve waiting on Claude’s output, it’ll fit far more comfortably.
Either way, get a little bit organised before you start. And if you do run out of time, you’re not stuck: before you save the skill, you can keep going in the chat and say “let’s add this to the skill”.
Can it handle a process across Notion, Canva and Claude?
Yes. Mine moves between Notion, Canva and Claude itself, and Record a skill still turned it into one skill. You don’t have to start with something tiny.
Most demos of this feature use one simple job… the kind that spits out a report at the end. I picked something WAY more complicated on purpose, to show it can handle a proper multi-tool process (as long as it fits in the ten minutes). If the job that eats your week jumps between three apps, that’s the one worth recording.
What do you do after you’ve saved the skill?
Run it, edit what it makes, then tell Claude what you changed and why so it can update the skill. No skill in Claude is perfect straight out of the box, so think of your first one as version one.
Full disclosure: all I changed while recording was the hook on the first two slides. I haven’t added my own stories or personal touches yet, which is exactly what I’d do if you weren’t sitting there watching. That part’s still my job… and it should be.
So every time it runs, I’ll tweak what it makes and go back to Claude with something like:
Here’s how I would change your version. Now learn from this so we don’t make these mistakes again.
Because here’s the thing: a skill like this has to think, talk and create like me, and that’s something AI finds hard. It gets a little bit better every time I correct it. If getting AI to sound like you is the bit you’re stuck on, I’ve written up why AI doesn’t sound like you, and the five fixes that helped.
Now go and pick the job you could do with your eyes shut (yes, even the complicated one), record it once, and see how much quicker you can get it done.
And if you’re not sure how much Claude knows about your business yet, the free Blind Spots quiz shows you which bits it’s still guessing at.
Originally published October 2026.
