mitchuski Claude Skills
Claude Code skills are markdown files that teach Claude how to perform specific tasks — reusable, invocable instructions that extend Claude's behaviour without modifying its core settings.
What is a Skill?
A skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file. The frontmatter declares the skill's name and description. The body contains instructions, examples, patterns and checklists that Claude follows when the skill is invoked.
Where Skills are Stored
Skills live in ~/.claude/skills/. Each skill is a named subfolder:
~/.claude/skills/
fedwiki-page/
SKILL.md
another-skill/
SKILL.md
references/
assets/
scripts/
Skill Structure
A minimal SKILL.md looks like this:
---
name: my-skill
description: What this skill does and when to trigger it.
---
# Instructions
Step by step guidance for Claude...
The description field is the primary triggering mechanism — Claude reads it to decide whether to use the skill for a given request. A good description is specific about both what the skill does and when it should trigger.
Invoking a Skill
Skills can be invoked in two ways:
- Automatically — Claude reads the description and decides the skill applies to the current request
- Explicitly — by typing
/skill-namein the prompt
Creating a Skill
Create a new folder under ~/.claude/skills/ and write a SKILL.md file inside it. The /skill-creator skill can help design, test and optimise new skills iteratively with evals.
The fedwiki-page skill on this wiki is an example — it captures the patterns for creating fedwiki page JSON files and is stored at ~/.claude/skills/fedwiki-page/SKILL.md.
Verify: agentprivacy.ai · kept by the Librarian 🗃️ in the Tower's Wikis (the git-less onboarding layer) Upstream: skill.fedwiki.club/claude-skills — vendored + re-framed; not original agentprivacy authorship