From prompt to skill

I have 39 meetings this week. That is not a typo.

My calendar does not mess around. And for a while, my end-of-day ritual looked like this: open a new Claude Code session, type something like "pull my Granola meeting notes from today and give me a summary with action items," wait for it to ask clarifying questions, answer them, get a summary that was fine but formatted differently every time, then wonder if I missed anything because I hadn't told it to look for urgent items specifically.

It worked. But it was a lot of words for something I did every single day.

Then I learned about skills — and now it's just /daily-digest.

What even is a skill?

A Claude Code skill is a saved set of instructions that Claude follows every time you run a specific command. You write it once, store it in a file, and from then on you just type /skill-name and Claude knows exactly what to do, in what order, in what format.

Like having a usual. Before my skill existed, I'd type something like:

After:

/daily-digest

Same result. Every time. Zero explanation required.

What the skill actually does

Here's what happens when I type /daily-digest:

1. Figures out the date automatically. Default is yesterday. If it's Monday, it grabs Friday and the weekend. I can override it — "today," "Friday," "March 1-3" — but I almost never have to.
2. Pulls my meetings from Granola. Granola is the AI meeting notes tool I use. Claude skips junk entries — unnamed notes, unidentified phone calls — and only brings in real meetings.
3. Fetches AI summaries. It uses Granola's already-processed summaries rather than raw transcripts. I'll be honest — this irritates me a little. I wanted the full verbatim transcripts. Claude talked me out of it: too slow, too noisy, summaries are already good. The jury is still out for me on whether trusting an AI summary of an AI summary is actually fine. But it's been working so far.
4. Synthesizes a digest in a consistent format. Themes and key decisions across all meetings. Action items grouped by owner — what I need to do vs. what I'm waiting on. 🔴 flags for anything time-sensitive. A 2-3 sentence recap per meeting.
5. Asks if I want to save to Notion. If yes, it creates a page automatically.

Why this is better than just asking every time

The obvious answer is fewer words. But the real answer is consistency.

When I typed a custom prompt every day, the output was different every day. Sometimes action items were bullet points, sometimes a table. Sometimes it flagged urgency, sometimes it didn't. Always good — never a system.

A skill is a system. Once you define the format, you get that format forever. And when you want to change something — I added the Notion save step later — you add four lines to the file and it's part of the flow from that point on.

How to make your own

Skills live in a folder on your computer: ~/.claude/skills/. Each skill gets its own subfolder with a SKILL.md file inside.

~/.claude/skills/
└── daily-digest/
    └── SKILL.md

The file has two parts: a header that tells Claude when to trigger the skill, and the instructions it follows when it runs.

---
name: daily-digest
description: Synthesize Granola meeting notes into a daily digest.
Use when the user says "daily digest", "summarize my meetings",
"what do I need to follow up on", etc.
---

# Daily Digest Skill

[Your instructions here — written in plain English.]

The description matters. It's how Claude knows to reach for this skill when you ask for it. Write it to match the natural language you'd actually use.

The instructions are just... instructions. Tell Claude what to do, in what order, exactly how to format the output. Be specific. The more specific you are, the more consistent the results.

A shortcut for making your first one

Claude Code has a built-in skill called skill-creator — which is very meta. You run /skill-creator and it walks you through building a skill interactively. It asks what you want to automate, figures out the structure, and writes the SKILL.md file for you.

I'd recommend starting there. Getting the format right on your own the first time is annoying. Having Claude structure it for you and then editing from there is much easier.

When to make one

• You're typing a long prompt more than twice a week. If you're explaining the same thing repeatedly, Claude should already know it.
• You care about consistency. If the output needs to look the same every time — same format, same sections, same structure — a skill locks that in.
• You're combining multiple steps. Pull data → process it → format it → save it somewhere. Any multi-step workflow is a great skill candidate.

/daily-digest took about 20 minutes to set up. I've never had to think about how to ask for my meeting digest again.

Questions? Find me on X.