I copy-pasted the same review prompt 47 times last month. PRs, internal scripts, the README of a side project I was supposed to ship in 2024. The prompt was fine. I was the problem. Claude Code has had a feature for this since late 2025, and I'd been ignoring it because the docs page had a name I didn't understand: Skills . I finally caved when a teammate asked, "what's the difference between your custom commands and Skills?" and I realized I had no idea. So I read the docs, ported my entire .claude/commands/ directory over, and now my workflow is shorter, sharper, and 100% less copy-paste. Here's what I learned. The thirty-second version A Skill is a SKILL.md file inside a directory, plus optional helper files. You drop it in .claude/skills/<name>/ , and from then on /<name> runs that workflow.…