Extend Claude with skills
Create, manage, and share skills to extend Claude's capabilities in Claude Code. Includes custom commands and bundled skills.
Skills extend what Claude can do. Create a SKILL.md file with instructions, and Claude adds it to its toolkit. Claude uses skills when relevant, or you can invoke one directly with /skill-name.
Create a skill when you keep pasting the same instructions, checklist, or multi-step procedure into chat, or when a section of CLAUDE.md has grown into a procedure rather than a fact. Unlike CLAUDE.md content, a skill's body loads only when it's used, so long reference material costs almost nothing until you need it.
For built-in commands like /help and /compact, and bundled skills like /debug and /code-review, see the commands reference.
Custom commands have been merged into skills. A file at .claude/commands/deploy.md and a skill at .claude/skills/deploy/SKILL.md both create /deploy and work the same way. Your existing .claude/commands/ files keep working. Skills add optional features: a directory for supporting files, frontmatter to control whether you or Claude invokes them, and the ability for Claude to load them automatically when relevant.
Claude Code skills follow the Agent Skills open standard, which works across multiple AI tools. Claude Code extends the standard with additional features like invocation control, subagent execution, and dynamic context injection. See Using skill frontmatter outside Claude Code for which frontmatter fields are part of the standard and which are Claude Code extensions.