Anthropic shipped plugins, marketplaces and skills in the last three weeks. I spent too time rebuilding my Claude Code setup after each release. Here's the mental model I wish I'd had from the start.
Regarding the topic of the article, this explanation clarifies Anthropic's features realy well. Skills as the missing piece makes total sense for managing complex AI state.
This is fantastic! When you put .claude/skills/, would Claude Code automatically identify the skills in the folder as skills? Looking forward to reading more of your writing!
Coming back to this @Ven Lee - it would seem that the skill.md either needs to sit directly in the skills folder, or it should be in a folder under .claude/skills where the name of the folder = the name in the frontmatter of the skill.md in the folder. So the file .claude/skills/personal-user-manual/skill.md should have name: john-conneely-user-manual
Im working off the assumption that you need to properly install the plugin via a marketplace for those skill in your own global settings to be properly referenced, so if you just dropped in a skill folder from someone else's settings it may not work.
Skills not part of a plugin should work as long as they follow this pattern in this testing step Claude have in their docs
Regarding the topic of the article, this explanation clarifies Anthropic's features realy well. Skills as the missing piece makes total sense for managing complex AI state.
This is fantastic! When you put .claude/skills/, would Claude Code automatically identify the skills in the folder as skills? Looking forward to reading more of your writing!
Coming back to this @Ven Lee - it would seem that the skill.md either needs to sit directly in the skills folder, or it should be in a folder under .claude/skills where the name of the folder = the name in the frontmatter of the skill.md in the folder. So the file .claude/skills/personal-user-manual/skill.md should have name: john-conneely-user-manual
good question!! https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills#plugin-skills - this portion of their guide shows how you can put skills in a plugin, and refer to/run other artifacts in the plugin directory when the skill is triggered.
Im working off the assumption that you need to properly install the plugin via a marketplace for those skill in your own global settings to be properly referenced, so if you just dropped in a skill folder from someone else's settings it may not work.
Skills not part of a plugin should work as long as they follow this pattern in this testing step Claude have in their docs
# Personal Skills
ls ~/.claude/skills/*/SKILL.md
# Project Skills
ls .claude/skills/*/SKILL.md