Personal vs project skills

Skills can be located in one of three places: personal, project, or plugin.

Personal skills reside in ~/.claude/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md and are available across all your projects. Project-specific skills are stored in .claude/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md within the project directory. These project skills are intended to be checked into version control, making them accessible to your team. Plugin skills are located within a plugin's directory structure at <plugin>/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md.

When skills share the same name across these locations, precedence is determined as follows: enterprise skills override personal skills, and personal skills override project skills. Skills at any of these levels also take precedence over bundled skills with the same name. For instance, a custom code-review skill in your project's .claude/skills/ directory will replace the default bundled version.

Plugin skills use a plugin-name:skill-name namespace, which prevents naming conflicts with skills at other levels. Project skills are loaded from .claude/skills/ directories starting from your current working directory and moving up through parent directories to the repository root. This ensures that skills defined at the repository level are accessible even when working in subdirectories.

Skills can also be loaded on demand from nested .claude/skills/ directories. When Claude interacts with files in a subdirectory, any skills within that subdirectory's .claude/skills/ become available. This mechanism is particularly useful in monorepos, where individual packages can provide their own skills. If a nested skill has the same name as another skill, both remain available, and the nested skill is referenced using its path, for example, /apps/web:deploy.

A <skill-name> entry can also be a symbolic link to a directory located elsewhere on your filesystem. An exception to the typical file access rules occurs with the --add-dir flag and the /add-dir command: a .claude/skills/ directory within an added directory is automatically loaded, unlike directories added via the permissions.additionalDirectories setting.