Section 7: Skills, Plugins & Chat Power Features
By this point in the course, you’ve built a solid foundation: you prompt well, you work with documents, you use connectors, you’ve organized your work into Projects, and you can produce useful Artifacts. Section 7 is about taking what you do repeatedly and making it reusable, and about getting more control over long conversations.
Why this section matters
Repetition is the enemy of efficiency. If you’ve written the same type of prompt fifteen times, it’s time to turn it into a Skill. If you’ve been onboarding each new Project context from scratch, Plugins might be a better answer. And if long Claude conversations have ever gone sideways and you didn’t know how to recover, the power features in this section fix that.
What you’ll learn
What Skills are and how to create, browse, and install them. A Skill is a reusable instruction set that tells Claude how to approach a specific type of task. Creating a Skill for a repeated task saves setup time and produces more consistent outputs than writing prompts from scratch each time.
Plugins and the plugin marketplace. Plugins bundle Skills, connectors, and knowledge into a single installable package. Where a Skill teaches Claude one behavior, a Plugin installs a whole workflow: a set of Skills, a connector, and the reference knowledge Claude needs to use them. The Plugin marketplace is where you find and install these bundles.
The hierarchy: prompt < Skill < Plugin < Project. Understanding which layer of instruction takes precedence, and which is the right tool for each type of instruction, prevents confusion and ensures Claude behaves as intended.
Power features: Fork, /rewind, /recap, /btw. Four features that give you control over long or complicated conversations: forking to explore a different direction without losing the original, rewinding to a previous point, recapping to get a summary of a long thread, and using /btw to give Claude a side note without it becoming part of the main response.
Output Styles for consistent formatting. How to tell Claude how to format its responses consistently across all conversations, without repeating the instruction every time.
Choosing the right tool for a repeated task. A decision framework for when to use a prompt, a Skill, a Plugin, or a Project instruction.
The mini project
You’ll identify a repeated task from your own work and outline how it becomes a reusable Skill: what the task is, what inputs it needs, what the output should look like, and what standing instructions would make it consistent. This exercise forces clarity about what you actually repeat and how to encode that into a reusable form.
How to approach this section
The concepts in this section build on everything in Act 1. If you’ve been working through the course in order, you have enough Claude experience to recognize what you repeat and what would benefit from a Skill or Plugin. If you haven’t, read through and return to this section once you have more usage to draw from.
The power features are best learned by using them once in a real conversation where they’d be helpful. Don’t try to memorize them; just know they exist and what they do so you reach for them when the need arises.