Understanding Claude Skills Discovery in Large Monorepos

When working with Claude Code in a monorepo, understanding how skills are discovered and loaded into context is crucial for organizing your project-specific capabilities effectively.

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Important Difference from CLAUDE.md

Skills do NOT have the same loading behavior as CLAUDE.md files. While CLAUDE.md files walk UP the directory tree (ancestor loading), skills use a different discovery mechanism focused on nested directories within your project.

How Skills Are Discovered

1. Standard Skill Locations

Skills are loaded from these fixed locations based on scope:

Location	Path	Applies to
Enterprise	Managed settings	All users in organization