AI is evolving beyond a vending machine that simply spits out answers into a 'teacher' that develops a student's thinking power and a 'customized colleague' that perfectly understands your workflow.
Imagine this. It’s 11 PM, you’ve finished your day and lie in bed, habitually turning on your smartphone. Without a purpose, your fingers move mechanically, endlessly scrolling up your social media feed, and before you know it, an hour has flown by. This is the so-called ‘Doomscrolling’ phenomenon (the act of endlessly reading depressing or stimulating content) that many of you can relate to. Rubbing tired eyes and regretting, “Ah, I wasted time again,” before falling asleep is a common routine for people today.
But what if, instead of this meaningless waste of time, artificial intelligence told you about new knowledge every night in a fun way, tailored exactly to your level? From the origin of the universe you’ve always been curious about, to the chemical principles of how the coffee beans you drink every morning are roasted.
Recently, there was a very interesting experiment. A user created a workflow where, instead of infinitely scrolling through social media, they entered a simple prompt into Claude: “Teach me something.” By actively utilizing what Large Language Models do best—’Non-determinism’ (the unique characteristic of AI to generate diverse, non-mechanical text every time depending on the way it’s asked or the situation)—he transformed the AI into an excellent, customized liberal arts instructor. Claude, Teach Me Something
This case is a symbolic scene showing that our attitude toward artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing. In the early days of using AI like ChatGPT or Claude, we usually treated AI like a ‘vending machine.’ We hoped that if we threw in a question like a coin, an answer can would drop out. However, as of 2026, developers, educators, and general users are engaging in much deeper interactions with AI. We learn new things from AI, and conversely, we meticulously teach AI ‘the way we work.’
Today, we will take a detailed and easy look at the latest ways to use Claude, which is evolving beyond a machine that simply spits out answers into a ‘teacher’ in the true sense and a ‘customized colleague’ that perfectly understands my work.
Why It Matters
The impact of these changes on our daily lives and the professional world is truly immense. Just a few years ago, if there was something you didn’t know, you had to enter words into a search engine, click on numerous blue links one by one, and assemble the information yourself. The advent of AI drastically shortened this process, but early AI stopped at unilaterally notifying, “The answer is this.” While this was convenient, it also raised deep concerns that it could diminish humans’ own ability to ponder and think.
However, the direction in which AI is developing now is completely different. AI has now started to act as a ‘pacemaker’ that runs alongside users to help them develop their own thinking power. Students build knowledge and sharpen their logic by debating with AI. Conversely, office workers ‘transfer’ their work know-how and procedures accumulated over years in the field to AI, infinitely replicating smart assistants that perfectly understand them.
In simple terms, humans are moving beyond being mere consumers of information to newly defining the status of AI as a partner for actively exchanging and training knowledge.
Easy Understanding: How AI Teaches Us
Anthropic (the AI company that developed Claude) has recently made a major change in the way AI teaches humans. They have introduced a new ‘Learning mode’ to Claude for education. Introducing Claude for education \ Anthropic
From an Answer Vending Machine to ‘Socrates’
When you asked a traditional AI to “solve this math problem,” it kindly wrote out the entire solution process and the answer. For students, it was a perfect all-purpose cheat key for copying homework. However, the newly introduced ‘Learning mode’ is different. Instead of handing over the answer right away, it induces the reasoning process itself so that students can develop critical thinking skills. In short, instead of spoon-feeding the answer, it helps them chew and digest it themselves.
To use an analogy, a truly excellent, top-tier personal trainer (PT) at the gym doesn’t lift heavy barbells for the member. Instead, they correct the member’s posture and constantly provide motivation so that the member can lift the barbell themselves while feeling the muscle stimulation with correct form. Claude’s Learning mode is just like this veteran trainer. It asks back, “Where did you get stuck?”, “What does x represent in this formula?”, helping the student find the answer through their own sweat.
AI as a Foreign Language Conversation Partner
In fact, the field of education is making full use of these characteristics. Professor Canavan, who teaches beginning and advanced Spanish at Northeastern University, created a very special customized chatbot using the free premium Claude access provided to students and staff. How This Professor is Using Claude to Teach Spanish
Instead of memorizing stiff and dead dialogues in textbooks, students engage in real-life conversations in vivid Spanish with this chatbot the professor made with Claude. Imagine practicing a situation where you order coffee at a virtual Madrid cafe in Spanish with an AI; you don’t have to feel embarrassed even if you make a grammatical mistake. This is because the AI waiter naturally continues the conversation while very kindly pointing out the correct expression. It’s as if you’ve gained the world’s most patient native friend you can call anytime, anywhere.
Easy Understanding: How We Teach AI
If AI teaches us knowledge, what can we teach AI in return? It is the ‘way of working’ that contains our expertise.
‘Skills’ Beyond One-off Instructions
When we usually use AI, we mostly make one-off requests. Like “refine this email” or “summarize these meeting minutes.” AI works perfectly for these one-time tasks or exploring ideas if you explain the context well and refine the output format a bit. Teach Claude your way of working using skills | Claude
| But what about complex weekly team meeting preparations or writing weekly reports with strictly defined formats and rules? Typing out long prompts and adding conditions every time is actually more cumbersome. That’s why the core concept of ‘Skills’ emerged. Skills are specific instructions that clearly provide Claude with ‘Procedural knowledge’ (knowledge of how to do something in sequence) on how to complete a particular task or workflow. [What are skills? | Claude Help Center](https://support.claude.com/en/articles/12512176-what-are-skills) |
Toolbox (MCP) and Cooking Recipe (Skills)
Recently, in the AI industry, the ‘Model Context Protocol (MCP, a link that allows AI to directly access a user’s computer files or external tools)’ has been a hot topic. Then, what are the specific differences between MCP and Skills, which seem functionally similar?
Let’s use a very easy analogy. Imagine you’ve opened a new restaurant and hired a chef (AI) who just graduated from a top-tier culinary school. Informing this chef of the locations of cooking tools like knives, cutting boards, and ovens in the kitchen and giving them the authority to use them freely is MCP. In other words, you’ve handed them a physical ‘toolbox’ they can use to cook. However, just because you have good tools doesn’t mean you can immediately cook the incredible kimchi stew unique to your restaurant. You absolutely need a ‘secret recipe’ that meticulously lists the order, such as whether to stir-fry the meat first, when to put in the kimchi, and exactly how many minutes to control the heat. This secret recipe is Skills.
When the physical toolbox (MCP) and your own know-how-filled recipe (Skills) are combined, Claude finally goes beyond a simple text generator to become a true colleague who perfectly understands our team’s complex planning workflow and performs it independently. The Complete Guide to Building Skills for Claude
Where We Stand
These ‘Skill’ features have moved out of the laboratory and are already rapidly permeating our daily lives and work. Anthropic first introduced the Skill format in October 2025, and after confirming its potential, they quickly released it as an open standard (a common specification made to be compatible across various devices, much like a smartphone charger port) in December for anyone to use freely. GitHub - ComposioHQ/awesome-claude-skills: A curated list of…
| The result has been an enormous ripple effect. Currently, this Skill standard is not limited to Claude’s official website (Claude.ai) or API. It is widely supported across various coding and work platforms like Cursor, Gemini CLI, and Windsurf—AI assistant programs loved by countless developers around the world. [10 Must-Have Skills for Claude (and Any Coding Agent) in 2026 | by unicodeveloper | Medium](https://medium.com/@unicodeveloper/10-must-have-skills-for-claude-and-any-coding-agent-in-2026-b5451b013051) Users can now take their carefully crafted work automation secret recipes (Skills) and use them as they are in other programs or services. |
In line with this trend, people are now seriously studying ‘how to properly teach and handle AI’ rather than just throwing random questions at it. Professional education courses (Claude Code in Action, Introduction to Claude Cowork, etc.) that go beyond simple command entry to understand the fundamental structure of AI coding assistants and handle multi-step work coordination responsibly are appearing one after another and receiving great responses. Claude Code in Action - Anthropic Courses, Introduction to Claude Cowork
| General users are no exception. The most positive landscape of 2026 is that users are building healthy collaboration skills with AI by learning from the basics, such as when and how to divide the basic way of entering commands in a text box and the conversational mode that autonomously helps with work, and how far to allow access to their important files for safety. [Claude Code Learning Path: a practical guide to getting started | by Daniel Avila | Medium](https://medium.com/@dan.avila7/claude-code-learning-path-a-practical-guide-to-getting-started-fcc601550476) |
What’s Next
“What if AI takes my job?” This is a vague yet enormous fear that many people harbored when artificial intelligence first appeared. However, looking at the process where ‘Learning mode’ shown by Claude in the field of education and the user-customized ‘Skills’ feature that innovates the work environment develop in tandem, the future we will face seems likely to unfold a bit differently.
| In the future, we will arrive at work in the morning, leisurely drink coffee, and kindly teach AI our company’s complex settlement tasks or email writing procedures in the form of ‘Skills,’ just as we would hand over work to a newly hired employee. [Introduction to Claude Skills | Claude Cookbook](https://platform.claude.com/cookbook/skills-notebooks-01-skills-introduction) |
And after returning home from a hard day’s work, instead of doomscrolling through social media late at night, we will ask, “Claude, can you teach me the principles of quantum computers I saw in the newspaper today using a fun analogy that an elementary school student could understand?” and satisfy our own pure intellectual curiosity that we had forgotten.
As Skills containing our know-how are progressively loaded into multiple devices and move freely between smartphones, work laptops, and tablets through open standards, AI will become like a vast sea of knowledge and a one-and-only dedicated coach perfectly tailored just for me. In this warm, two-way interaction of teaching and learning, humans and AI will walk a path of beautiful symbiosis as partners who grow each other to be better, rather than as competitors.
AI’s Take
Artificial intelligence is no longer a mechanical encyclopedia that coldly provides fixed answers to our questions. As we’ve explored in this article, artificial intelligence is simultaneously acting as an excellent coach that patiently trains us on how to think and a capable junior who absorbs our work know-how and philosophy like a sponge.
What’s interesting is that the level of answers provided by AI ultimately depends on ‘how good the questions we ask are, and how sophisticatedly we teach it.’ In the process of teaching AI how to think logically (Skills), humans actually end up reflecting on and optimizing their own work methods. In other words, a virtuous cycle occurs where we ourselves grow as better teachers to teach AI well. The tool of learning is leading us to become better subjects of thought.
References
- Claude, Teach Me Something
- Introducing Claude for education \ Anthropic
- How This Professor is Using Claude to Teach Spanish
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[Teach Claude your way of working using skills Claude](https://claude.com/resources/tutorials/teach-claude-your-way-of-working-using-skills) -
[What are skills? Claude Help Center](https://support.claude.com/en/articles/12512176-what-are-skills) - The Complete Guide to Building Skills for Claude
- GitHub - ComposioHQ/awesome-claude-skills: A curated list of…
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[10 Must-Have Skills for Claude (and Any Coding Agent) in 2026 by unicodeveloper Medium](https://medium.com/@unicodeveloper/10-must-have-skills-for-claude-and-any-coding-agent-in-2026-b5451b013051) - Claude Code in Action - Anthropic Courses
- Introduction to Claude Cowork
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[Claude Code Learning Path: a practical guide to getting started by Daniel Avila Medium](https://medium.com/@dan.avila7/claude-code-learning-path-a-practical-guide-to-getting-started-fcc601550476) -
[Introduction to Claude Skills Claude Cookbook](https://platform.claude.com/cookbook/skills-notebooks-01-skills-introduction)
- To pass a foreign language certification exam in a short period
- To replace 'doomscrolling'—mindlessly scrolling through social media
- To calculate complex mathematical formulas
- It outputs the most accurate answer in one second as soon as it receives a question.
- It temporarily suspends the account if a student gives a wrong answer.
- It does not provide the answer immediately but guides the student through the reasoning process so they can think for themselves.
- MCP provides access to tools, while Skills provide specific procedures for using those tools.
- MCP is a paid feature, while Skills is a free feature.
- MCP is a feature for generating images, while Skills is a feature for generating text.