Skills

One at a time. Tell it whether you knew, and the ones you did not stay in your pile.

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Only a skill's description stays in context; its body loads when used.

Many skills cost little, and the description is what decides whether Claude reaches for one.

The whole topic8

Only a skill's description stays in context; its body loads when used.
Many skills cost little, and the description is what decides whether Claude reaches for one.
A skill's description and when_to_use are cut at 1,536 characters in the listing.
Put the key use case first, or the part that makes Claude pick the skill may be truncated away.
Skill frontmatter only parses if --- is the very first line.
Unknown fields are ignored silently, so a typo gives you no error at all.
A failing inline shell command in a skill aborts the whole invocation.
Append || true when the command is allowed to fail.
context: fork runs a skill as a subagent that sees only the skill content.
It runs in the background by default; set background: false to wait for it.
You can chain up to six skills in one message.
Each runs in order, which turns a routine into a single line.
/skills lists every skill with its token cost.
/skill-doctor adds cost and usage, which shows what you can switch off.
Edits to an existing skill are picked up live, but a new skill directory needs /reload-skills.
If a new skill does not show up, this is the first thing to try.