Build Your Own Claude Skills: Teach Claude How You Work | AICHR
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Build Your Own Claude Skills: Teach Claude How You Work
Every session, you explain the same things. Your coding standards. Your review process. Your preferred format. Your tone of voice. Your deployment steps.
Claude doesn't remember between sessions. CLAUDE.md helps — it tells Claude who you are and what you prefer. But a preference list isn't a playbook. You need something that says: "When you encounter THIS situation, follow THESE steps, use THESE templates, and produce THIS output."
That's a Skill. You teach Claude once. It follows the process forever. And it can auto-invoke — Claude detects when to use a skill without you even asking.
This session is a live, demo-driven workshop. We'll build 10 real skills from scratch, covering everything from daily standups and code reviews to meeting notes and project scaffolding. By the end, you'll have a personal skill library that makes Claude work the way you work.
What we'll cover:
🧠 Why Skills Matter CLAUDE.md tells Claude who you are. Skills tell Claude how you work. The difference between explaining something every session and teaching it once.
⚡ Built-In Skills You Might Not Know /review, /simplify, /plan, /loop, /batch, /anthropic — what ships with Claude Code and how to use each one.
🔧 Anatomy of a Skill SKILL.md frontmatter, the markdown body, supporting files (templates, scripts, examples), auto-invocation, and the $ARGUMENTS system.
🛠️ 10 Skills We'll Build Live:
- Daily Standup Report — auto-generated from git history and calendar
- Code Review Checklist — your team's standards, enforced every time
- Meeting Notes Formatter — messy notes in, structured summary out
- PR Description Generator — Claude writes the PR description from the diff
- Bug Report Creator — plain language to structured report with GitHub issue
- Email Drafter — with voice matching from a style guide file
- Competitive Quick Look — one company name in, structured brief out
- Project Scaffolder — /scaffold react-app and everything is set up
- Weekly Reflection — end-of-week self-assessment that builds an archive
- Documentation Updater — catches stale docs before your users do
📁 Organizing and Sharing Skills Global vs project skills, sharing via git, keeping SKILL.md lean, and building a team-wide skill library.
Who this is for: Developers and technical professionals who use Claude Code and want to stop repeating themselves. If you've attended any of our previous events, this is the session where you turn everything you've learned into reusable, persistent workflows. Non-technical Cowork users will benefit from skills 3, 6, 7, and 9 (meeting notes, email drafting, competitive research, weekly reflection).
Who this is NOT for: If you haven't used Claude Code or Cowork yet, start with our earlier events and free setup guides. This session assumes you're comfortable with Claude and want to go deeper.
What you'll leave with: ✅ At least 2-3 working skills installed and tested ✅ A free homework doc with all 10 skill templates ready to copy ✅ Understanding of SKILL.md anatomy, auto-invocation, and supporting files ✅ A framework for building and sharing skills across your team
Prerequisites: — Claude Desktop installed with Cowork, OR Claude Code CLI installed — Claude Pro ($20/month) or Max ($100+/month) subscription — Basic familiarity with Claude from a previous event or self-study — Developers: a terminal open and a project folder ready to work in
🎙️ Your Speaker Andrew Stafford Co-Lead of The AI Collective Hampton Roads. 25+ years across technology, cloud architecture, and AI — including work with Amazon, NASA, healthcare platforms, and enterprise systems. Author of AI for Business. Currently building at the intersection of AI tooling, agentic workflows, and practical business automation.
🏢 For Businesses Want to bring AI automation training to your team? We offer private workshops (lunch and learn, half-day, full-day bootcamp), conference speaking, and technical consulting. Book a discovery call
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🤝 Organizers & partners
Organizers
The AI Collective Hampton Roads
Platinum partners
TechArk
Regent University
ECPI University
Hampton Roads Chamber Foundation
Retail Alliance & Retail Alliance Foundation
Bronze partners
Assembly
757 Collab
🌍 Our parent org
The AI Collective is a global non-profit community uniting 225,000+ pioneers – founders, researchers, operators, and investors – exploring the frontier of AI in major tech hubs worldwide. Through events, workshops, and community-led research, we empower the AI ecosystem to collaboratively steer AI’s future toward trust, openness, and human flourishing.
All attendees and organizers at events affiliated with The AI Collective agree to our privacy policy and are subject to our code of conduct. Additionally, by registering for this event, you agree to The AI Collective Hampton Roads chapter photo & video policy.