"It's So Easy to Lose Your Job": Claude's Record a Skill Feature Sparks Debate

Anthropic has added a feature to Claude Cowork that allows users to teach a task to the assistant simply by showing it. It's called Record a Skill: the user records their screen while performing an operation, comments on it verbally as they proceed, and Claude transforms the demonstration into a skill that it can run on its own later. You can find it under Record a skill in the + menu of the desktop application, and it is reserved for subscribers of the Pro, Max, and Team plans.

New in Claude Cowork: teach Claude a skill. Record your screen while you do a task, talk through it as you go, and Claude turns it into a skill it can run again. Find it under Record a skill in the + menu of the Claude desktop app. Available on Pro, Max, and Team plans.

— Claude (@claudeai)
July 21, 2026

The principle is to show instead of describe: instead of explaining a repetitive procedure in words, you perform it once in front of the model, which derives a block of instructions that can be recalled later. This is the most natural approach for workflows that depend on personal preferences or are simpler to perform than to narrate in a prompt.

On Codex, the same idea emerged in June. OpenAI has long offered a similar function on Codex called Record and Replay, available since June 18. On that front, the documentation is more detailed and helps understand how this category of tools works. Codex observes the actions and content of the windows necessary to learn the workflow, then drafts a skill that explains when to use it, what inputs it requires, what steps to follow, and how to verify the result. In a new conversation, it can be recalled by providing only the values that change each time: the file to upload, the report to open, the date range of the summary.

However, Codex's terms of use are stricter than those implied by Anthropic's announcement for Claude. Record and Replay works only on Mac, requires the Computer Use function to be active, and, at least in this initial phase, excludes the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. In organizations managing Codex through a requirements.toml file, disabling the Computer Use requirement also makes skill recording unavailable.

Anthropic, for its part, has not communicated any equivalent platform or geographical limitations.

The announcement has also gathered some concerned reactions on social media, where more than one user interpreted the feature as a shortcut to their own replacement: "the easiest way to get replaced and lose your job," summarized one comment. This is an understandable reading for a tool designed to replicate procedures previously assigned to a person, even if recording a workflow is quite different from automating the judgment with which that workflow should be adapted to real cases.

For now, Record a Skill is reserved for paying subscribers of Claude Cowork and is activated from the + menu of the desktop app. OpenAI's documentation on the sibling feature Record and Replay adds a piece of common sense advice: use realistic inputs in the demonstration, but keep passwords and sensitive data out of the recording.