Install Skills in Claude Code — The Complete Setup Guide

Claude Code was the first AI tool to support skills natively. The installation is simpler than most people expect, and once you understand the pattern, you can install any skill in seconds.

Claude Code is Anthropic terminal-native AI coding agent and the first tool to ship native SKILL.md support. The skills system in Claude Code is also the cleanest implementation in the ecosystem — once you understand it, you understand how skills work everywhere.

The Two Skill Directories

Claude Code reads skills from two locations:

# Personal skills (available across all projects)
~/.claude/skills/

# Project-specific skills (only in this project)
.claude/skills/

The distinction matters more than it looks. Skills in your home directory load in every Claude Code session anywhere on your machine. Skills in the project directory load only when you work in that specific project. This separation lets you have personal patterns (your code review preferences, your documentation style) plus project-specific patterns (this codebase architecture rules, this team git conventions) without them interfering.

The Three Installation Methods

You can install any GitHub skill in three ways. The fastest is the Vercel skills CLI:

npx skills add vercel-labs/agent-skills

This single command browses the repo, lets you select which skills to install (if there are multiple), and copies them to the right directories. The CLI auto-detects Claude Code and routes appropriately.

The second method is Claude Code own plugin marketplace command:

claude /plugin marketplace add owner/repo

The third method is manual — useful when you want to inspect a skill carefully before installing or modify it locally:

git clone https://github.com/owner/repo.git
cp -r repo/skill-name ~/.claude/skills/

Verifying Your Installation

After installation, run claude /skills in any Claude Code session. The command lists every skill currently loaded, with the description for each. If your installed skill appears, the metadata loaded correctly and the skill is ready to trigger when relevant.

If a skill does not appear in the list, the most common cause is a folder-name mismatch — the directory name must match the name field in SKILL.md exactly. The second most common cause is YAML frontmatter that does not start at line 1 of the file.

Skills That Ship with Claude Code

Claude Code includes several Anthropic-built skills out of the box: pdf, docx, xlsx, pptx for document creation, webfetch for web content retrieval, and skill-creator for building your own skills. These are excellent reference implementations — open them up and read them when you want to see what production-quality skill writing looks like.