Skills

Introduction to Claude Skills

Every time you explain your team's coding standards to Claude, you're repeating yourself. Whether it is redescribing how you want PR review feedback structured or reminding Claude of your preferred commit message format, these repetitive tasks can be streamlined.

Skills fix this problem. A skill is a Markdown file that teaches Claude how to do something once, allowing Claude to apply that knowledge automatically whenever it is relevant.

How Skills Work

Agent skills are folders containing instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can discover and use to perform tasks more accurately and efficiently. In Claude Code, this is implemented via the skill.md file.

The Selection Process

The description within the skill.md file is how Claude decides whether to use a specific skill. When you ask Claude to review a PR, it matches your request against all available skill descriptions and activates the ones that match. This ensures that Claude only pulls in the relevant information for the task at hand.

Storage and Scope

You can store skills in different locations depending on who needs access to them:

Personal Skills

Personal skills are stored in the ~/.claude/skills directory. these follow you across all your projects and are ideal for individual preferences, such as:

• Your specific commit message style.
• Your preferred documentation format.
• How you personally like code to be explained.

Project Skills

Project skills are stored in the .claude/skills directory inside the root of your repository. Anyone who clones the repository gets these skills automatically. This is the ideal place for team standards, such as:

• Company brand guidelines.
• Preferred fonts and color palettes for web design.
• Shared coding conventions.

Skills vs. Other Customization Methods

Claude Code offers several ways to customize behavior, but skills are unique because they are automatic and task-specific.

Claude.md vs. Skills

• claude.md: These files load into every single conversation. If you want Claude to always use TypeScript strict mode, that belongs in your claude.md file.
• Skills: These load on demand. Claude only scans the name and description initially, so it doesn't fill up your entire context window. For example, your PR review checklist doesn't need to be in the context while you are debugging; it only loads when you actually ask for a review.

Slash Commands vs. Skills

• Slash Commands: These require you to manually type them to trigger an action.
• Skills: These do not require manual triggering. Claude applies them automatically when it recognizes the situation.

Best Use Cases for Skills

Skills work best for specialized knowledge that applies to specific tasks. If you find yourself explaining the same thing to Claude repeatedly, that is a skill waiting to be written. Common use cases include:

• Code review standards followed by your team.
• Specific commit message formats.
• Organizational brand guidelines.