Claude Code Skills

A skill is a folder of instructions an AI coding agent loads before it starts work: a SKILL.md describing when to apply it, plus whatever reference files, scripts and examples the agent needs to follow it. Claude Code reads them, and so do Cursor, Windsurf, and the other agents that adopted the same convention — which is why a well-written skill is portable across tools in a way a prompt pasted into a chat window never is.

The articles below cover the whole lifecycle: what separates a skill that changes how an agent writes code from one that restates the official docs, how to publish and share one, and what to check before you install someone else's. Every skill in the SkillSafe registry is scanned before it ships, and the roundups here quote directly from the files rather than ranking by install count.