Practical guides for building, distributing, and operating Claude Code skills. Everything here is hand-written reference material — no AI-generated filler. Tutorials cover the SKILL.md spec, design patterns from the catalog's top-scoring skills, and how Claude Code skills relate to neighbouring concepts like MCP servers and Claude API tools.
Two destinations keep coming up: Awesome Claude Code on GitHub and ClaudSkills here. They're both legitimate, both useful, and both serving overlapping audiences — but structurally very different products. 226 hand-curated entries with a CC BY-NC-ND license, vs 88,000+ Claude Code skills auto-mined under CC BY 4.0. Scale, license, install flow, quality signals, and a decision tree.
Most content teams I work with install too many Claude Code skills. They grab anything tagged "writing," wire up seven different SEO helpers, and then wonder why their drafts come back sounding like a committee wrote them.…
Sales is the highest signal-to-noise category in the entire skill catalog. There are 1,300+ skills under sales/ and most of them solve the same three or four problems badly. This page is the opposite of a roundup — it's the…
Growth work lives or dies on the loop: spot an opportunity, write the thing, ship the thing, look at what happened, repeat. Claude Code is unusually well-suited to that loop because most of the artefacts — briefs,…
Security work breaks differently from other engineering work. A wrong refactor produces a failing test; a wrong security call produces a quiet breach six months later. That asymmetry is why I run a deliberately narrow stack…
Three AI coding agents, three different answers to the same question: how do you give an agent persistent behavioural instructions that survive across sessions? Claude Code uses SKILL.md files with auto-discovery. Cursor…
You've written a SKILL.md file. Maybe it works for you, maybe a teammate has tried it once. Before you publish to GitHub, push to a catalog, or share the link in a Discord — run it through this checklist. None of these…
Claude Code skills are not subscription products. The SKILL.md format is open — a YAML frontmatter block on top, prose underneath, dropped into ~/.claude/skills/ or ./.claude/skills/ , and Claude picks it up at the next…
If you are running an early-stage company alone or with one co-founder, your scarcest resource is not money or time — it is the cost of switching mental contexts. You move from debugging a SQL query to drafting an investor…
Solo developers face a different problem than teams. You don't need scaling diagrams or RFC templates — you need help getting the thing out the door before your motivation drains. This page is thirteen Claude Code skills…
Data work has a peculiar shape: half of it is writing SQL or Python that anyone could write given an afternoon, and the other half is the judgement calls that decide whether the query answers the right question, whether the…
Skills and MCP servers are the two halves of every interesting Claude Code workflow. Skills tell Claude what to do and how to think about a problem ; MCP servers give Claude the actual hands and eyes to touch your systems.…
A SKILL.md file is source-available the moment you publish it. Anyone who reads your skill can copy the prompt scaffolding, the anti-trigger rules, the tool allowlist, even the example invocations. That makes licensing more…
You wrote a skill. You dropped it in ~/.claude/skills/ . You restarted Claude Code. And then nothing happened — Claude either ignored the skill entirely, fired the wrong one, or invoked yours but failed halfway through. This…
Most of the friction people hit with Claude Code skills — the SKILL.md format Claude Code uses to learn task-specific behaviour — comes from a foggy mental model of what the loader actually does. Why did my skill not fire?…
The dirty secret of every open catalog — including this one — is that most entries shouldn't be installed. Not because the authors are careless, but because the bar for "a skill exists" is far lower than the bar…
SKILL.md files — the markdown bundles that teach Anthropic's Claude Code agent how to perform a specific task — are plain text. That fact, more than any branding decision or growth strategy, dictates what kinds of businesses…
If you've been shipping with Claude Code's SKILL.md format for any length of time, you've already noticed the distribution question forming. Where do skills live? Who decides which ones are good? What stops a single vendor…
Skills, MCP servers, and plugins solve different problems and compose well together. A practitioner’s deep dive: what each one actually is at runtime, when to reach for which, three worked scenarios, and how to migrate between them. The answer to “skill or MCP?” is almost always “both.”
The kitchen-table guide — minimum-viable skill in five lines, frontmatter walkthrough, body structure, and the anti-trigger discipline that separates well-authored skills from the rest. Plus a copy-paste starter template and the iteration loop for getting auto-discovery to actually fire.
From “found on the catalog” to “Claude is actually using it.” Compare install methods (manual curl, ClaudSkills desktop app, plugin manifest, project-local vs global), handle updates and removal, troubleshoot five specific failure modes with diagnosis steps.
Every YAML frontmatter field, what Claude Code does with each one, valid values, common mistakes, catalog-coverage notes. Goes deeper than the quick reference: parser quirks, multiline string semantics, the distinction between Claude-Code-read fields and catalog-only fields.
The opinionated “day one” stack — 10-12 hand-picked skills that make Claude Code dramatically more useful for software engineers, with rationale and install commands. Includes the anti-stack (skills that look tempting but actually hurt your workflow) and when to write your own.
Where the SKILL.md format sits six months in. Catalog observations, quality patterns, gaps worth filling, format evolution predictions, and how to participate. Written by a long-time practitioner — opinions clearly flagged.
The canonical definition — what a SKILL.md file is, how Claude Code discovers and invokes skills, where they live on disk, and how the 67,000+ open catalog fits into the picture. Plus install instructions in 4 steps and the most-asked FAQs.
What the difference is between an MCP server and a skill, and the live directory of every skill in the catalog that wraps an MCP server into an invokable workflow. Filterable by quality, auto-refreshed every miner cycle.
Claude Code doesn't have a formal plugin system — "plugin" in the community almost always means a skill, a hook, or a slash command. Disambiguation + the live directory of plugin-shaped skills in the open catalog.
How PreToolUse / PostToolUse / Stop hooks work, what they can block, where they live, and the catalog's hook-using skills you can install today as working reference implementations.
The four ways Claude Code is extensible, side by side, with a quick decision tree for picking the right one. Plus the top-quality slice of all four ranked by the content-derived ClaudSkills score.
Step-by-step walkthrough — from ~/.claude/skills/<slug>/SKILL.md location to YAML frontmatter, anti-trigger discipline, and packaging for distribution. Includes a copy-pasteable starter template.
Complete reference for every YAML frontmatter field Claude Code recognizes — name, description, model, tags, allowed-tools, user-invokable, category, plus the optional metadata fields the registry indexes.
When to write a skill, when to write an MCP server, when both. Architecture trade-offs, deployment differences, and a decision tree for picking the right primitive for your use case.
How the open ClaudSkills catalog stacks up against the other directories, awesome-lists, and search indexes — feature parity, coverage, attribution policy, monetization stance.
An analysis of the live catalog — volume by category, the counterintuitive finding that Sales has the highest quality rate, top tags, author dynamics, and the gaps an outside contributor could fill. Pure data journalism from the open dataset.
The engineering story behind ClaudSkills — 24 discovery sources, the daily miner loop, content-only ranking signals (no popularity), the Cloudflare Workers + R2 + Netlify hybrid architecture, and five surprising things the catalog revealed about the SKILL.md ecosystem.
Leaderboard of the most prolific high-quality contributors to the open catalog. Patterns that compound across the top authors, mini-explanations of why they rank, and practical advice on landing on the list yourself.
Walk-through of the six-axis structural rubric every SKILL.md runs through. Point ranges per axis, the single-edit tightenings that move the needle most, and the things the rubric explicitly does NOT check (popularity, code quality, author identity).
The ten most common authoring patterns that drag SKILL.md quality scores down, with concrete before/after fixes for each. Companion piece to the rubric reference — practical authoring playbook.
If you've been finding Claude Code skills via awesome-list READMEs, here's a side-by-side comparison + practical migration paths. Includes the canonical URL pattern for awesome-list maintainers who want to cross-link.
More tutorials shipping soon. Suggest a topic at [email protected].
SKILL.md files, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthropic.