AI Guides › Step-by-step guides
By Nigel Guy · 7 min read
Most people write documentation for their own app by sitting down afterwards and trying to remember what they clicked. The memory is wrong in the places that matter: the step you do without thinking, the setting you always check first, the reason you never press the obvious button. Claude's "Record a skill" feature attacks exactly that gap, but it does not hand you finished documentation. It hands you a draft, and the draft is only as good as the recording and your review.
The rule: record once with the narration on, then treat what Claude proposes as a draft to check against the real app, not as documentation to publish.
One honest note on scope. Anthropic describes this feature as a way to build a reusable skill from a recording. Turning that skill into a human-readable guide is a follow-up step, which this guide gives you as a prompt. Anthropic does not describe that second step as a built-in feature, so it is a workflow, not a product promise.
Before you touch the record button, write down the task name, the starting screen and the finishing screen. Add one line for each decision you make along the way ("I choose Monthly unless the customer is on a trial"). You will not read it aloud, but it stops you wandering. Open the app, log in, and put it on the starting screen.
Either route works, according to the help centre:
Click Start recording. If macOS asks for Accessibility or Screen recording access, grant it, restart if prompted, and begin again.
Leave the microphone on and talk through what you are doing. Narration carries what the screen cannot show: why you skip a step, how you choose between two options, what "done" looks like. Use the microphone control to mute or pick another input if you need to.
Say the unglamorous things out loud: "I always check the date format here because the import fails on US dates." That sentence is the documentation. The clicks alone are not.
Do not type passwords or secrets, and do not open anything private. Anthropic is blunt on this point: everything on your screen is captured.
Click Done to send the recording to Claude, or Discard to throw it away. If the timer runs out, recording stops and everything captured so far is sent, as if you had clicked Done. A countdown appears when about a minute is left.
Claude then proposes either a new skill (marked "NEW", with Save or Dismiss) or updates to an existing skill (Update or Dismiss). Expand Content to read the whole thing before you decide. Do not click Save on the strength of the title.
Staying in the same Cowork task, where Claude still has the session in context, paste this. Fill in the bracketed parts.
You are a technical writer producing end-user documentation for [APP_NAME],
a [ONE_LINE_APP_DESCRIPTION]. The reader is [READER_TYPE, e.g. a new
support agent] who has never used it.
Use the screen recording I just made and my narration as your only source
of truth. The task shown was: [TASK_NAME].
Produce a guide with this structure:
1. One sentence on what the task achieves and when to do it.
2. "Before you start": accounts, permissions and data needed.
3. Numbered steps. One action per step, using the exact button and menu
labels as they appeared on screen.
4. "Check it worked": what the reader should see at the end.
5. "Common mistakes": only mistakes I mentioned or that the recording
clearly implies.
Rules:
- Do not invent labels, settings, or behaviour you did not see. Where a
step is unclear, write "[CHECK: <what is unclear>]" instead of guessing.
- Mark every decision I explained out loud as a "Decision" line with my
stated reason.
- Do not include anything that looks like a credential, email address,
customer name or other personal data; use [EXAMPLE_VALUE] instead.
- If you need information that was not in the recording (for example
what happens on an error), list it as a question for me at the end.
Before answering, check that every step maps to something visible in the
recording, and list any step you could not confirm.
Take the output to a second screen, or a colleague who does not know the app, and follow it step by step without improvising. Every place they hesitate is either a wrong label, a missing step or a "[CHECK]" you left unresolved. Fix those in the guide, and ask Claude to apply the corrections.