Anthropic shipped Record a Skill in Claude Cowork on Monday, July twenty first, and it answers a plain question, how do you teach an AI a repetitive job without writing a spec for it. You open the plus menu in the Claude desktop app, record your screen while you do the task once, talk through your decisions as you go, and Claude turns that demonstration into a reusable Skill it can run again. It is available on the Pro, Max, and Team plans. For anyone who has tried to capture a colleague's tacit workflow in a document, the interesting part is that you no longer write the instructions, you perform them, so here is what landed and how to use it well.
The short answer
Anthropic shipped Record a Skill in Claude Cowork on July twenty first. You screen record a task once, narrate your decisions, and Claude turns the demonstration into a reusable Skill it can run again. It lives in the plus menu of the Claude desktop app and is available on the Pro, Max, and Team plans. Skills can be shared across a workspace, with sharing off by default, and Anthropic warns you to keep passwords, access keys, and card details out of the recording.
The hardest part of automating a workflow has never been the automation, it has been writing down what the workflow actually is. Every team has a job that lives in one person's head, full of small exceptions nobody wrote down. Record a Skill, which Anthropic shipped on Monday, July twenty first, goes at that problem from the side. Instead of asking you to document the process, it asks you to do it once on camera, and it writes the documentation for you. For working teams that is a lower barrier than any prompt guide.
What Anthropic shipped
Record a Skill is a new feature inside Claude Cowork, the workspace in the Claude desktop app. You reach it from the plus menu, pick Record a Skill, then work through a task on screen while explaining your steps out loud. The recorder watches your screen activity, mouse clicks, and keystrokes alongside your narration. When you stop, Claude processes the demonstration into a structured Skill and files it in a library.
The output is worth understanding, because it is not a video. A Claude Skill is a reusable package of task specific instructions that Claude loads when the relevant task comes up. So the recording is raw material, and the Skill is the clean, rerunnable result. Anthropic says the feature is available on the Pro, Max, and Team plans.
Why show beats tell
The reason this matters is the barrier it removes. Writing a Skill by hand meant translating an experienced person's actions, standards, exceptions, and reasoning into clear documentation, and that translation is exactly where most people give up. There is judgment in a workflow that is easy to perform and painful to write.
Record a Skill lets the demonstration carry that judgment. You do not author any Markdown and you do not engineer a prompt, you perform the task and explain your choices, and Claude turns the evidence into the instructions. For a senior engineer or an operations lead whose knowledge is trapped in muscle memory, that is a faster path from I know how to do this to the team can now do this.
Sharing, and the privacy discipline
Skills can be shared across a workspace, so one recording can become a standard process for everyone on the team. Sharing is off by default, which is the right default and the detail to remember. A recorded workflow captures whatever was on your screen and whatever you said, so a Skill can carry more than you meant to publish. Review it, then turn sharing on, not the other way round.
That leads to the one caution Anthropic is explicit about. Do not capture sensitive information while recording, specifically plaintext passwords, access keys, API keys, and card details. Because the tool watches your screen, keystrokes, and voice, anything visible or spoken can land in the Skill. Close sensitive tabs before you start, prefer test data, and review the result before it goes anywhere, the same care you already take with any screen recording.
How to get value from it this week
Pick a task you repeat and dread documenting, a release checklist, an onboarding setup, a report you rebuild every month. Record it once, narrate the parts a newcomer would get wrong, and let Claude produce the Skill. Then run the Skill on a fresh instance of the same task and correct where it drifts, because the first pass is a draft, not a finished process. Keep sharing off until you have watched it work.
The broader shift is the one to note. Skills turn Claude from something you prompt each time into something that carries your team's procedures, and recording is simply the cheapest way yet to load those procedures in. If your knowledge is stuck in a person rather than a document, this is a practical way to get it out.
Sources and further reading
- Anthropic newsroom
- Search Engine Journal: Anthropic's Claude can now watch a video and learn your job
- Dataconomy: Anthropic adds screen recorded teaching feature to Claude AI
- AlphaSignal: Claude Cowork lets you teach AI by recording your screen
Frequently asked questions
What is Record a Skill in Claude Cowork?
It is a feature Anthropic shipped on July twenty first that lets you teach Claude a task by showing it rather than describing it. You record your screen while completing a workflow and narrate your decisions out loud, and when you stop, Claude processes the demonstration into a structured Skill file and saves it to a library. A Skill is a reusable package of task specific instructions that Claude loads when the task comes up again, so one recording can become a repeatable process.
Which plans include Record a Skill?
Anthropic says the feature is available on the Pro, Max, and Team plans. You find it under Record a Skill in the plus menu of the Claude desktop app, inside the Cowork workspace. Because it lives in the desktop app, it can watch your actual screen activity, mouse clicks, and keystrokes while you narrate, which is what lets it capture the steps rather than just the words you type.
How is this different from writing a Skill by hand?
A Skill has always been a package of instructions Claude can load, but writing one meant translating an expert's actions, standards, and exceptions into clear documentation, which is the hard part. Record a Skill removes that step. You perform the task and explain it once, and Claude does the writing, producing the structured file for you. There is no Markdown to author and no prompt engineering, the demonstration is the source material.
Can Skills be shared with my team?
Yes, Skills can be shared across a workspace so one recording becomes a standard process for everyone, but sharing is off by default. That default matters, because a recorded workflow can capture details you did not intend to publish, so you should review a Skill before turning sharing on. Keeping it off until you have checked it is the safe order of operations.
What should I avoid capturing while recording?
Anthropic warns against capturing sensitive information during a recording, specifically plaintext passwords, access keys, API keys, and credit card details. Because the recorder watches your screen, keystrokes, and voice, anything visible or spoken can end up in the Skill. Before you start, close anything sensitive, use test data where you can, and review the result before sharing it, the same discipline you would apply to any screen recording.