Using Skills in Claude.ai¶
Skills reach you through claude.ai, not a terminal. If you're a practitioner, there's nothing to install: open claude.ai, describe what you need, and your team's skills are already available.
Where skills live in Claude.ai¶
Skills show up in three tiers, from Customize → Skills → Browse skills in claude.ai:
- Personal Skills — skills you've added for yourself.
- Shared Skills — skills a teammate or team has shared with you.
- Organization Skills — org-wide skills, managed by admins and available to everyone.
Most practitioners only ever touch Organization Skills — they're already there when you open a chat or start a Cowork session.
How skills get published (for maintainers/admins)¶
The agents-infra GitHub repo is synced to Claude.ai as a plugin marketplace (see AGENTS.md §0.12 "Claude.ai Marketplace Sync Compatibility"). A skill reaches Claude.ai by landing on master with an entry in its plugin's skills[] array in .claude-plugin/marketplace.json — Claude.ai's marketplace sync then picks it up automatically. There's no manual per-skill zip upload in this path.
- Add or update the skill, then register it in the owning plugin's
skills[]array in.claude-plugin/marketplace.json. - Merge to
master. - Claude.ai's marketplace sync picks up the change — no separate upload step.
./scripts/package-skills.sh --target web still exists as a secondary, manual fallback for one-off or standalone Claude.ai skill uploads (it strips binaries, sanitizes frontmatter, and enforces a 30MB-per-skill limit, producing a zip per skill under dist/skills/<name>.zip for an admin to upload at claude.ai/admin-settings/capabilities). It is not the primary distribution mechanism.
Sharing & piloting a skill¶
Shared Skills are the pilot/prototyping lane; Organization Skills are the production lane. Enabled-by-default Organization Skills go through piloting and review first, because skills interact — a broad skill can fire when a specific one should, or create conflicting instructions.
- Share a Personal Skill: Customize → Skills → select the skill → Share → pick access (Only people invited for early pilots, or Everyone at Seer for broad-but-optional) → add emails or copy the link.
- Install a Shared Skill: Customize → Skills → + → Browse skills → Shared tab → Install. Installing keeps you on the owner's copy — you auto-receive their updates and can toggle it off anytime.
- Avoid download-and-reupload drift: don't have everyone download and reupload their own copy of a skill — that creates divergent versions. Keep one owner as the source of truth; share the original so recipients get updates automatically.
- Two Claude orgs caveat: Seer has two Claude organization accounts. A skill shared in one org may not be available in the other. For cross-org access, name a cross-org sharing owner who pushes the maintained version to both orgs.
- A Shared Skill graduates to Organization Skills once the pilot group has tested it with real work, the owning team agrees, trigger issues are addressed, there are no conflicts, and there's a clear owner and reason for broad access.
Builders vs practitioners¶
Practitioners consume skills through claude.ai — no setup required. Builders author and test skills in Claude Code, then land them on master registered in marketplace.json for the org, or share a personal copy for piloting. If you're building or extending a skill rather than just using one, see the Quickstart.