What Are Skills?

Skills are one of Claude Code’s most powerful extensibility features. They’re custom commands that expand into full prompts, giving Claude specialized capabilities beyond its defaults.

Skills vs. Slash Commands

Feature	Built-in Slash Commands	Skills
Source	Shipped with Claude Code	Custom-defined or community
Examples	/clear, /compact, /model	/commit, /review-pr, /simplify
Customizable	No	Yes
Expandable	No	Expand into full prompts

How Skills Work

When you type a skill like /commit, Claude Code:

1. Looks up the skill definition
2. Expands it into a detailed prompt (instructions for how to handle the task)
3. Claude executes that prompt as if you’d typed it yourself

This means a simple /commit actually becomes a multi-step workflow:

• Check git status
• Review staged and unstaged changes
• Analyze recent commit message style
• Draft an appropriate commit message
• Stage files and create the commit

Built-in Skills

Claude Code comes with several pre-installed skills:

/commit

Stages changes and creates a well-formatted commit with an AI-generated message.

/review-pr

Reviews a pull request for bugs, security issues, and code quality.

/simplify

Analyzes changed code for opportunities to improve reuse, quality, and efficiency.

Finding Skills

Skills can come from:

• Built into Claude Code — always available
• Community skills — shared by other users
• Your own custom skills — defined in your project or global config

When to Use Skills

Skills are ideal for:

• Repetitive workflows you do often (committing, reviewing, deploying)
• Complex multi-step processes that benefit from standardized execution
• Team standardization — everyone runs the same skill, gets consistent results
• Domain-specific tasks — WordPress development, Cloudflare deployments, etc.

Next Steps

In the following lessons, we’ll explore the built-in skills in detail and then learn how to create your own custom skills.