AI Essentials #3 - A home for Skills

Skills in Claude are one of those things that sound great and yet have vexed me until very recently. I couldn't get the workflow right even though when they worked, they were amazing.

The first approach

I started out by creating Skills in Cowork itself. That worked well for a while until I realized that Claude Code, which is where I do the coding in an IDE called VS Code, couldn't edit those Skills.

The second approach

Wanting Claude Code to be able to edit the Skills, I pivoted 180 degrees and put the Skills in ~/.claude/skills, where Claude Code could reach them. Pretty quickly I realized I'd made a mistake because now Cowork couldn't find the Skills and definitely couldn't edit them. That's because .claude folders are generally protected by Claude and so I wasn't able to mount ~/.claude/skills to a Cowork task.

The third approach

I created a new folder called claude-kit on my laptop at ~/code/claude-kit. This new folder has Skills, along with other notes and explainers that are helpful to me as I build my products. Since claude-kit is a folder, it can be mounted to a Cowork session and so Cowork can edit it. It's not a perfect setup because Claude Code can't read directly from claude-kit; it reads from ~/.claude/skills.

To match ~/code/claude-kit and ~/.claude/skills, I created symlinks for each individual Skill. Since ~/code/claude-kit is my "single source of truth", the file that's in ~/.claude/skills is kind of like a shortcut or hyperlink that directly links to the respective Skill in ~/code/claude-kit and displays that information. Therefore, on my Mac it looks like I have the same Skill in two places, but it's really just one. Edits made in Cowork automatically hit ~/.claude/skills, and edits made in Claude Code pass through the shortcut and hit ~/code/claude-kit too.

I also needed to back up these Skills somewhere safe so they can't get wiped on my Mac and lost forever. To do that, I first commit to .git; my Mac looks at what changed since the last snapshot and records just that difference into .git. Then I push that difference up to GitHub's servers, and because GitHub already had the prior version, it now has the full project again. If anything happens to my Mac, I can recreate my work from GitHub.

The fourth approach

The third approach worked well except that if I created any new Skills, I was going to get drift between ~/code/claude-kit and ~/.claude/skills. That's because the symlink was at the individual Skill level and I would have to remember to set the symlink up at the same time I created the new Skill. That was a 50/50 bet at best.

The fix was a single symlink at the top: instead of one shortcut per Skill, ~/.claude/skills is now one shortcut to the Skills folder in ~/code/claude-kit. Now, any new Skill I drop into that folder automatically hits ~/.claude/skills through that one shortcut.

Finally, I have both things I wanted: Skills can be edited in both Cowork and Claude Code and they are looking at the same thing, at the same time.