WTF is up with Skills

My existential skill crisis.

If you’re reading this, you already know about skills and why people love them.

But I had a moment yesterday where it felt pretty out of control. Here’s the TL;DR of what I think I understand after an hours-long deep dive.

• Where do Claude Code skills live? Everywhere.

• Were they the same ones that Claude Desktop has? Nope.

• How do we share versioned skills across team members? lol.

• What about Codex, can it use the skills I like? Kind of.

• What about updating them? Sure. But try to have a specific spot for it.

• What about the necessary tools they need? Define them and/or package them with the skill

HOW MANY? AND WHERE?!

sudo find / -type f -name “SKILL.md” 2>/dev/null

A list of 3,000 “SKILL.md” files found.

Shit.

Ok. What’s going on here?

• 1,000+ of them are from my SuperDuper! backup. That’s fine.

• Most duplication is my work at Offline, duplicating skills across repos.

• Many are just runtime copies inside CC/Codex/etc sessions

Ok, I can chill out, I only have around 50-60. Next step, understanding the actual walls skills don’t cross.

Claude Code vs. Claude Desktop

It took me too much time to understand the separation here.

• Claude Code skills live in .claude folders

• Claude Desktop skills are uploaded to Anthropic (so Claude.ai can use them, too)

• When having Claude change a skill in Claude Desktop, you get the modal below, which should have tipped me off.

Sometimes, you have to remind Claude to prompt you.

Sharing is Caring

I’m not doing a great job of this, but I have a way of thinking about it.

My skills

I have two types of personal skills. Here are some examples.

1. Claude Desktop via Cowork

   1. Loop Two bookkeeper, marketing director

   2. Podcast prep interviewer

   3. Multi-inbox triage assistant

   4. AI Conference Finder

2. Claude Code

   1. These are actually mostly Anthropic skills at this point (frontend-design, playground, etc)

   2. n8n-workflow-development skill (We use n8n across projects at Offline and Claude just builds them at this point. Honestly, it should be in the Company-wide repo. I’ll do that this week.)

Team Skills: GitHub Repo Based

These are all Claude Code project based and committed in the /repo/.claude/skills folder - this is the way.

I don’t think I need to explain much here. Committing a skill to a shared repo only works if people REMEMBER it's there. I don’t have a solution to this right now.

Some /command examples in Offline repos:

1. /wrapup - Typically created from a base skill and adjusted to the stack/pipeline. Runs CI → packages up everything → git commit → git release → tag → Slack message to team 🥳

2. /create-issues - Batch-create GitHub issues from screenshots and descriptions during QA sessions

3. /review-issues - Review, triage, and optionally fix open GitHub issues by validating them against the codebase.

4. /customerio-email-templates - View, edit, and manage Customer.io email campaign templates via MCP

5. /offline-ui-designer - Enforces the @offlinemediainc/offline-ui component library and design system when writing partner-facing frontend code.

What about Codex?

Here’s where it gets shaky. Codex does ask you to “import” skills at some point. And then checks this little box in settings:

Let’s press it!

“Great, now I have the skills in Codex!” Unfortunately, they are a one-time copy. When I add new skills to my .claude user directory, they’ll auto-copy, right? Surely, if they don’t auto-copy, the UI will def tell me on the Codex Skills page I have potential new skills.

No. They will not. You will have to go back to that Import button and tap it again.

I guess you could symlink them, but I mean. What are we even doing here at this point.

What about updating + tools?

This post is too long and I need to stop typing the word “skill”.

• Claude Desktop → Make Claude update + prompt you to save

• Claude Code in repo → Just update it in the repo and commit. EASY

• Codex → Um, just build them in Codex and do what they tell you or symlink if you’re nasty. Or make a skill to copy the skill to the right skill file. 🤮

Tools?

Introduce them at the beginning of the skill so the LLM can tell you what to set up. I’m also playing with plugins that allow you to bundle lil MCPB files (local MCP server + manifest) that you can just drop into Claude Desktop. Pretty neato.

I hope you like broccoli.

I think it’s still developing and this will definitely be out of date in 7 hours.

I hope it helped.

Bye!¹

1. Written by me, always. Proofreading by AI and me.