A Project holds standing context, a Skill holds a repeatable process; this guide shows how to set up each, what to put in, and how to turn five manual steps into a Skill.
Every new chat starts from zero. Whatever you explained carefully last week, whatever correction you made, whatever format you finally settled on, none of it carries forward unless you retype it. If you have pasted the same background into a chat for the third time this week, you have a memory problem that two features address in different ways.
The advice here reflects Claude's Projects and Skills as described in September 2026. Check the current product before relying on specifics, but the underlying habit holds whichever tool you use: say things once.
A blank slate is usually fine, because most requests really are one-off. It only hurts on requests you make again and again. There, retyping the same context, caveats and corrections adds up to real, repeated effort, and you end up re-deriving a good result slightly differently each time, hoping you remember the phrasing that worked before.
| Project | Skill | |
|---|---|---|
| What it holds | Standing context and a few core references | A process you repeat, with its format and corrections |
| The problem it solves | Re-explaining your situation | Re-explaining how to do a task |
| Good example | Your team's writing style and the reports you work from | Weekly status update, donor correspondence first pass, notes into action items |
A Project is not a smarter model. It is the same model with better memory of your specific situation. A Skill is where a good chat's lessons go to stop being forgotten.
The habit that makes a Project worth the setup: the first time you catch yourself making the same correction twice, update the instructions. That is the signal the Project is missing something it should already know, and fixing it once saves every conversation after.
One limit: a Skill does not remember what you never wrote down. A correction that lived only in your head is not in the Skill either. The memory is not automatic. It is just durable once captured.
Most recurring tasks already have an informal process. If you could talk a new colleague through it without thinking hard, it is ready. Choose your most repeated task, not your hardest: a weekly status update, a first pass at donor or board correspondence, or cleaning meeting notes into action items.
Run the Skill on a real example, not a hypothetical one, and compare the result with what you would have written by hand. Where it is off, do not just fix that one output. Fix the instruction that caused it. That correction is permanent, which is the point: the second run should already be better than the first, and the tenth should need no correction at all.
A tool, a skill and an agent cost very different amounts to build, run and govern. One question, whether the task must decide what happens next, tells you which one to choose.
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