This is in Claude's desktop app, and specifically in Cowork, not the regular chat. When you open the app you get both options; pick Cowork. Click the + icon and you will see the new choice: Record a skill.
Before it records anything, Claude tells you plainly what it is about to do: your screen, clicks, typing, and voice are recorded, then sent to Claude and turned into a repeatable skill. Pick your microphone from the dropdown, click Start Recording, and do the task once while you talk through it. The talking is not decoration. You are explaining the job the way you would to someone looking over your shoulder, and Claude uses your words to understand what you meant, not just what you clicked.
For the video I picked the simplest real task I had: open Obsidian, create a new note, type a few words into it. While I worked, a counter at the bottom kept climbing as Claude logged every action it saw. By the time I stopped, it had captured around 79 actions: every click, every scroll, every word I typed, with screenshots along the way.
When you finish, Claude processes the recording and shows you the whole demonstration step by step: your spoken narration first, then each action in order. Mine even showed me clicking over to OBS at the start, because I was filming the video at the same time. And here is the first smart moment: Claude dropped those steps on its own. It left a note saying the OBS and screen-permission clicks were recording setup, not the task, so it removed them. That is exactly what I wanted, and I never had to say it.
The one safety rule: never type a password while recording, and keep sensitive information and private conversations off the screen. Everything you do and say goes into the recording. If you are the type to talk to yourself while you work, this is the moment to not say your password out loud.
The second smart moment is the reason I made the video. Instead of saving a skill that replays my clicks inside the Obsidian app, Claude keyed the skill on the outcome. It worked out that an Obsidian vault is just a folder of markdown files, so the skill creates a note by writing a markdown file straight into the vault. The title becomes the file name. No window opens, no cursor moves.
Then it flagged what it still needed: the location of my vault. I connected the folder in the desktop app, told it to always file new notes into one specific subfolder, and asked it to run a real test. A moment later the test note was sitting in Obsidian. The note even describes itself: created by writing a markdown file into the vault, no clicking in the app.
That detail matters more than it sounds. Because the skill never takes over the mouse, it can run in the background while you keep working. Claude found a better way to do the task than the way I showed it.
One catch that trips people up: the skill does not exist until you click Save skill. The recording gives you a preview with the whole skill laid out, but if you close it without saving, there is nothing in your skills folder to run. Save it once and you can run it two ways: type a slash command, like /obsidian, and pick the skill, or just say it in plain words, like "run the skill obsidian note." Record a better version later and the same button reads Update skill, replacing the old one.
One timing note: Cowork usage is doubled until August 5, so if you have been meaning to experiment, this is the window to do it in.
Every business has tasks that live in one person's hands and nowhere else. The way invoices get filed, the way a note gets written up, the way a report gets pulled. Training a person takes a screen share and an hour. Training Claude now takes one recording: do the task once, narrate it like you are showing a new hire, and it becomes a skill you can run by name whenever you need it.
It is the same principle as why AI needs a second brain to be useful: the value shows up when AI works with your real files, your real folders, and your real way of doing things, instead of a chat box guessing at them. Record a skill is the fastest on-ramp to that I have seen so far.
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