What is a Claude skill?

A Claude skill is a small, shareable package that teaches an AI coding agent a role, a toolset, and a set of guardrails for a specific job — "Android engineer", "SEO auditor", "pitch deck designer". It's closer to a prompt template with muscle memory than a plugin: no new inference endpoints, just a crisp slice of context the agent pulls in when you ask for help. The format is SKILL.md — an open plain-text standard, one file, lives in the root of a GitHub repo. You can read the full spec at claudeskil.com/docs. Why they matter --------------- Skills make Claude's best behaviour repeatable. Instead of re-describing your style every conversation, you install a skill once and every thread it touches starts with the right tone, the right checklist, and the right tools. They also make AI behaviour auditable. Because a skill is a file in a Git repo, you can see every change, every version, and every issue report. You know exactly what you're running. How to pick a good one ----------------------- Look for three signals: an active changelog (the skill is maintained), a readable README (the author understands their users), and evals or examples (the skill has been tested). Star counts are a lagging indicator — install counts and recent commits are the real signal. How to try one -------------- Run `claude skills add <name>` in your terminal. The skill is available immediately in the same project. Try it on a representative task, compare the output to what you'd get without it, and keep it only if the delta is obvious. Browse 2,800+ skills at claudeskil.com/explore.