If you explain your business, your audience and your preferences at the start of every single chat, you are doing a job a Project is supposed to do for you. This interviews you once, using the PROJECTS framework, and hands back the name, the description, the instructions, the files to add, and a prompt to test it with. Already have a project? It reviews that one and tells you what to improve.

This is the full tutorial on using Claude Projects to reach your goals, so the Designing Claude Projects skill makes sense.

Without one, you start every chat by re-explaining who you are and what you're working on, and pasting the same background in again. When Claude doesn't have enough context, it fills in the gaps a little differently every time, so the answers drift and you end up redoing work. And when the chat ends, everything you explained goes with it.

Think of a project as training up a coworker to help you with one goal. You give them the instructions they need to be an effective contributor on the team: what the goal is, the role they play, and what to work from. From then on, every chat starts with that knowledge already in place, and Claude works towards the same goal you are, because you told it what the goal is. There's a name for this: context engineering, deciding what Claude should already know instead of explaining it over and over in each new conversation.

The truth is, most people don't know the Claude projects feature even exist. Most of those who do put something like a project description where the actual project instructions go, because they have no framework for what a good project design looks like. This skill designs yours with the PROJECTS framework based on your input, and keeps it current as your project evolves.

It starts by asking whether this is a new project or one you already have. Then nine questions, in one message: one for each letter of the PROJECTS framework, in order, and one about where the project will live.

Every set of instructions this skill writes has the same eight sections, and their first letters spell the thing you are building.

Purpose and Success are the bookends. Start with the purpose and end with success, to know the project achieved its purpose and outcomes at the quality that mattered.

Then it creates your project design. The name, the description, the instructions under the eight headings of the PROJECTS framework, the files to add, and a starter prompt, each in its own block, ready to copy.

Already have a project? It reads it, files included, scores your project design against the PROJECTS framework, asks only about the gaps, then hands you back your redesigned project with what changed and why.

And it comes back for tune-ups. When you keep repeating yourself, add or remove files, or the purpose changes, it reads the project fresh and updates the design, without starting over.