Lesson 12 / 26

Personal, Project and Plugin Skills

Put a skill in the right place for who should use it.

Choose the location by audience

Claude Code looks for skills in specific folders. Personal skills live in your home directory (~/.claude/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md) and are available in every project on your machine: good for your own habits and tools. Project skills live in the repository (.claude/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md), are committed to git, and so are shared with everyone who clones the project: good for team procedures, release steps and repo-specific checks. Plugins can bundle skills together with commands, agents and hooks for distribution across many projects or organisations. When skills with the same name exist in several places, a precedence order decides which is used; check the documentation for the current rules, and avoid duplicate names. Folder locations and plugin mechanisms evolve between versions, so confirm in the docs of the version you use.

Install, trigger, share

Personal and project skills live in known folders, trigger by description or by name, and are shared through version control or plugins.

Three questions: where, how invoked, how shared.
Figure 4.1 — Where, how invoked and how shared.

Where to put a skill

Paths follow current Claude Code conventions; verify for your version.

Audience               Location                                   Shared how
just me, all projects  ~/.claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md           not shared (your machine)
my team, one repo      <repo>/.claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md      committed to git, reviewed in PRs
many teams / org       a plugin that bundles skills (+ commands,   installed from a marketplace or
                       agents, hooks)                             repository

Rule: put team procedures in the repo so they are versioned and reviewed like code.

Avoid duplicate names

The same name in personal and project folders can cause confusion about which one runs.

Quick check: Where should a skill used by the whole team on one repository live?

  • Only in one person's home folder
  • In the repository's project skills folder, committed to git
  • In a chat message
  • Nowhere; skills cannot be shared
Answer

In the repository's project skills folder, committed to git — Project skills travel with the repo and get code review.