Build Your Own Claude Skills and Agents
Know when you need a Skill and when you need an agent, and leave with one of each
Level 2. Skills that hold up, agents that run on their own, and a way to hand both to your team
Every morning around 8, I get a short email from Claude. It's read my calendar, my inbox and my CRM, and it tells me the three things that matter today and what I'm not ready for yet. I didn't write a line of code to build it.
It's a Skill, plus a few connectors, plus a schedule. Getting it from "works when I ask" to "runs every day without me and I trust it" is the part nobody teaches. That's this session.
Level 1 got you set up and handing Claude real work. Level 2 is where you stop doing the same handoff every week.
→ A Skill is a recipe. Claude does the job your way, the same way every time.
→ An agent is a hire. You give it a goal, your tools and some limits. It works out the steps, gets what it needs and reports back, without you starting it.
What you'll do
→ Build a Skill properly. Instructions, examples of what good looks like, and reference files it can check against. The difference between a Skill that works once and one that works every time.
→ Test it like you mean it. Run it against good and bad inputs, compare two versions side by side, and make sure it kicks in when it should and stays quiet when it shouldn't.
→ Chain Skills together. Research, then draft, then review against your standards, so one job runs start to finish instead of in three separate chats.
→ Turn it into an agent. Connect it to your tools, give it a goal, and let it hand parts of the work to helpers (subagents) so it can do more than one thing at once.
→ Put it on a schedule, safely. Decide what it can do on its own, what it has to check with you first, where it reports back, and how to keep it from burning through your usage.
→ Package it for your team. Bundle your Skills and agent into a plugin your team can install, so they get your standards without waiting on you.
Who it's for
You've taken Level 1, or you already use Projects, Cowork and connectors most weeks and want to go further. No coding. This one doesn't cover Claude Code.
Bring
A laptop, a paid Claude plan, and one piece of work you hand off every week, with 2 or 3 examples of it done well. Ideally it's something you already started in Level 1.
You'll leave with
A tested Skill, an agent running on a schedule with clear limits, and a plugin you can share with your team.