Where Skills Live: Personal, Project, and Plugin Skills

A skill only fires in sessions that can see it, and visibility is decided by where the skill folder lives. There are three homes, and the choice is a scoping decision, not a formality.

The three locations

• Personal: your user-level skills directory (in Claude Code: ~/.claude/skills/). Available in every project you open on that machine. Right for skills about how YOU work: your commit style, your writing voice, your review checklist.
• Project: a skills directory inside the repository (in Claude Code: .claude/skills/ at the project root). Checked into version control, so every teammate and every session in that repo gets it. Right for skills about how THIS PROJECT works: its deploy steps, its conventions, its gotchas.
• Plugin: skills that arrive bundled inside an installed plugin. You do not manage their files directly; installing, updating, or removing the plugin manages them for you. Right for adopting a maintained set someone else publishes.

How to decide

Ask one question: who should get this behavior? If the answer is "me, everywhere," it is personal. If it is "anyone working in this repo," it is project: committing the skill is how it reaches your team. If it is "whatever the maintainer ships," install the plugin and let it carry the skills.

# personal: follows you across projects
~/.claude/skills/release-line/SKILL.md

# project: follows the repo, reaches the whole team
<repo>/.claude/skills/deploy-checklist/SKILL.md

One more practical difference: project skills are reviewable in pull requests like any other file. If a skill encodes team policy, the project directory also gives you the team process for changing it.