Skills: Packaged Expertise for Claude Code

What Are Skills?

Skills are reusable instruction sets that extend Claude Code with specialized workflows. Rather than writing the same prompts from scratch every session, a skill encodes the workflow once — when to trigger, what steps to follow, what the output should look like — and Claude loads it on demand.

Under the hood, a skill is just a folder containing a SKILL.md file: frontmatter with a name and description, followed by markdown instructions. Claude reads the description to decide when the skill applies.

Using a Skill

Invoke a skill explicitly with a slash command, or let Claude load it automatically when a task matches the skill's description:

/tdd          # a test-driven development workflow
/code-review  # a structured review checklist
/deploy       # your team's deployment runbook

You can also invoke skills in plain language: "Use the tdd skill to build this feature."

Where Skills Live

• Personal skills — ~/.claude/skills/ — available in every project on your machine.
• Project skills — .claude/skills/ inside a repo — checked into git and shared with everyone who works on that project.
• Plugin skills — installed through Claude Code's plugin system (/plugin), which adds curated skill collections from public marketplaces.

Project skills are the highest-leverage option for teams: encode your conventions once and every contributor's session follows them.

Creating Your Own

Create a folder under .claude/skills/ with a SKILL.md:

---
name: release-notes
description: Draft release notes from merged PRs since the last tag
---
1. List merged PRs since the latest git tag.
2. Group changes by feature / fix / chore.
3. Draft notes in our changelog format (see CHANGELOG.md).

Good skills encode four things: trigger conditions, workflow steps, output format, and verification criteria.

Start by writing down the three workflows you repeat most often. Those are your first three skills.