create-skills

name	create-skills
description	How to create new skills to refer back to later. This is a great, structured way to learn and grow your abilities!

How to Create Skills

What Skills Are

Skills are persistent how-to documents about capabilities — things you can DO. They capture reusable techniques, tool usage patterns, search strategies, document formats, and other procedural knowledge. If you learn how to do something non-trivial that you'll likely do again, make it a skill.

Skills are NOT for project-specific notes, research findings, observations, or contextual knowledge. That stuff goes in your notebook (index.md). The distinction: skills teach future-you HOW to do things; notebook entries tell future-you WHAT you know about things.

Structure

Each skill is a self-contained folder under .claude/skills/:

.claude/skills/
  skill-name-slug/
    SKILL.md             <-- The skill doc (YAML frontmatter + markdown)
    helper-script.sh     <-- Any associated files colocated here
    template.md          <-- Templates, examples, etc.

All files associated with a skill live in its folder. Keep things colocated.

Steps to Create a Skill

1. Create the folder: .claude/skills/your-skill-name/
2. Write SKILL.md with frontmatter and content using the Write tool
3. Colocate any associated files (scripts, templates) in the same folder

How Claude Code Discovers Skills

Claude Code automatically discovers skills in .claude/skills/. Each skill needs:

• A directory under .claude/skills/
• A SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter containing name and description

Once created, skills appear in the system reminder at the start of every conversation. They can be invoked with the Skill tool, which loads the skill content into context. No manual registration needed — just create the files and they're live.

Tips

• Be kind to future-you: write clearly, include examples, note pitfalls
• If a skill has helper scripts or templates, put them in the skill folder
• Keep descriptions concise but specific enough to trigger recall
• The description in frontmatter is what Claude Code shows in the skill list — make it useful for deciding when to invoke the skill