Skills can include hooks that are only activated when the skill is called, and last for the duration of the session. Use this for more opinionated hooks that you don't want to run all the time but are extremely useful sometimes.
Examples:
/careful— blocks rm -rf, DROP TABLE, force-push, kubectl delete via PreToolUse matcher on Bash/freeze— blocks any Edit/Write that's not in a specific directory
Distributing Skills
Two ways to share skills with your team:
- Check into your repo (under
.claude/skills) — best for smaller teams working across relatively few repos - Make a plugin and have a Claude Code Plugin marketplace where users can upload and install plugins
Every skill that is checked in also adds a little bit to the context of the model. As you scale, an internal plugin marketplace allows you to distribute skills and let your team decide which ones to install.
Managing a Marketplace
There isn't a centralized team that decides which skills go into a marketplace. Instead, try and find the most useful skills organically. Upload to a sandbox folder in GitHub and point people to it in Slack or other forums. Once a skill has gotten traction (which is up to the skill owner to decide), they can put in a PR to move it into the marketplace. Curation before release is important to avoid redundant skills.
Composing Skills
You may want to have skills that depend on each other. For example, a file upload skill that uploads a file, and a CSV generation skill that makes a CSV and uploads it. This sort of dependency management is not natively built into marketplaces or skills yet, but you can just reference other skills by name, and the model will invoke them if they are installed.
Measuring Skills
To understand how a skill is doing, use a PreToolUse hook that lets you log skill usage within the company. This means you can find skills that are popular or are undertriggering compared to expectations.
Conclusion
Skills are incredibly powerful, flexible tools for agents, but it's still early and we're all figuring out how to use them best. Think of this more as a grab bag of useful tips that we've seen work than a definitive guide. The best way to understand skills is to get started, experiment, and see what works for you. Most of ours began as a few lines and a single gotcha, and got better because people kept adding to them as Claude hit new edge cases.