What happened to Claude Styles? How to keep your style as a skill

Anthropic is replacing Styles in Claude with skills. If you set up a custom style to make Claude answer the way you like, it isn't lost: Anthropic converts it into a skill for you. But it won't switch itself on, and it's called a different way. Here's what changes and what to do, based on Anthropic's own help pages.

Anthropic is rolling this out gradually, and menu names in Claude change often. Follow what you see in your own account, and treat menu names as signposts.

What's changing

Custom styles become skills automatically. After the migration runs in your account, each style you created shows up as a skill.
They start switched off. Migrated styles are disabled by default. Go to Customize > Skills and turn on the ones you want.
Most default styles are gone. Concise, Explanatory and Formal aren't carried over. Learning survives as a skill you add yourself.
The styles menu goes away. Until the migration finishes, your old styles keep working alongside skills, so you can switch at your own pace.

How to use a migrated style

Type a slash command in the chat box in this format: /your-style-name-style. Anthropic builds the command from your old style's name by:

Making every letter lowercase.
Replacing spaces with hyphens.
Removing punctuation, emoji and accent marks.
Adding -style to the end.

Anthropic's example: a style named "concise pirate" becomes /concise-pirate-style. Very long names get trimmed, and if two styles would end up with the same command, one gets a number added.

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Getting the Learning style back

Learning is the one default style that lives on, as a skill in Anthropic's directory. Go to Customize > Skills, click +, choose Browse skills, search for "Learning" and install it. Then activate it in any chat.

A style and a skill don't behave quite the same

A skill is a saved set of instructions (plus optional files) that Claude loads when it's relevant. Anthropic says Claude reviews your available skills when you ask for something and loads the ones that fit, based on each skill's description. Calling a skill by name with its slash command is the reliable way to make sure it's used. A few practical notes from Anthropic's help pages:

Plans: skills are available on Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise.
A setting has to be on: skills need code execution. On individual plans, check Settings > Capabilities for Code execution and file creation (called Create and edit files in the newer settings layout).
Work accounts: on Team and Enterprise, an owner controls whether skills are allowed for the organization.
Making your own: a custom skill is a folder with a skill.md file that starts with a name (up to 64 characters) and a description of when to use it (up to 200 characters). You zip the folder and upload it under Customize > Skills.

The simpler option: put it in your instructions

If you'd rather skip skills, Anthropic says you can describe the same tone, format and approach in Instructions for Claude instead. Instructions apply to every conversation, so you don't have to remember to switch anything on. Anthropic's current guidance is to use profile instructions for account-wide preferences, project instructions for one project, and skills when you want to change how Claude formats and delivers answers on demand.

Keep your preferences somewhere you control

If your style mostly told Claude who you are and how you like answers, copy that text into a document of your own. That's a personal context file: a short document about you that you write once and keep. It doesn't depend on styles, skills or any one app. Put the short version in Instructions for Claude, turn a specific answer format into a skill if you want one on demand, and reuse the same file in ChatGPT, Gemini or Grok. In any new chat, you can also paste this line with your file underneath:

Here is my personal context file. Read it and use it for everything in this chat. You don't need to summarize it back to me. Just reply "Got it" and wait for my first request.

[paste your context file here]

Sources: Anthropic Help Center, Styles are moving to skills (currently published in Chinese; the English edition was taken down), Understanding Claude's personalization features, Use skills in Claude, What are skills? and How to create custom skills.

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