Claude Code Skills: The Complete Guide

Claude Code skills are reusable folders centered on a SKILL.md file that provide on-demand instructions, scripts, templates, and references for repeatable workflows such as code reviews, releases, or deployments. Based on the open Agent Skills standard, they use YAML frontmatter to describe when they should be loaded and Markdown instructions that Claude accesses only when relevant or manually invoked through slash commands, helping limit context use. Skills can be stored at enterprise, personal, project, plugin, nested-folder, or session-specific locations, with higher-precedence locations overriding lower ones, and they complement rather than replace CLAUDE.md, subagents, MCP servers, and deterministic hooks. Effective skills should be concise, precisely described, tested against realistic prompts and multiple models, and restricted for side-effecting tasks through invocation controls and narrowly scoped tool permissions. The text emphasizes that skills are instructions rather than enforceable safeguards and may introduce significant supply-chain and execution risks because they can include scripts, dynamic shell commands, tool approvals, and hidden instructions while operating with a developer’s permissions. It recommends treating skills as executable dependencies by using trusted publishers, reviewing all instructions and scripts, scanning for hidden Unicode or encoded content, pinning versions, limiting allowed tools, applying hooks and runtime monitoring, and inspecting repository configuration files before opening untrusted projects.

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