How to share Claude skills with your whole team

A Claude skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file that teaches Claude one way of doing a task — your quote format, your weekly report, your review checklist. A short one can take minutes to write. Getting it to everyone who should use it is the harder part. There are three ways to do it today: commit it to a repository, share or publish it through Claude Team or Enterprise, or keep it in a workspace on your company’s own server, next to your company’s files. Which one fits depends on two things: whether the people who need the skill write code, and where the files the skill works on live.

What a skill is, briefly

Anthropic’s Claude Code documentation describes it this way: you create a SKILL.md file with instructions, and Claude adds it to its toolkit. Claude uses a skill when it is relevant, or you call it directly with /skill-name. The file starts with YAML frontmatter — every field is optional, but description is the one Anthropic recommends, because Claude uses it to decide when to apply the skill — followed by the instructions. A skill folder can also carry reference files and scripts. [1]

Why a skill ends up on one laptop

Claude Code loads skills from several places. The one people start with is the personal folder, ~/.claude/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md, which applies to all your projects on that machine. For Cowork sessions and cloud sessions, Anthropic’s documentation says to enable the skill for your claude.ai account. [1]

So the first good skill on a team usually lives in one person’s home directory. Everyone else keeps asking Claude from scratch and corrects the answer by hand. Sharing the skill is what turns one person’s fix into the team’s default.

Way 1 — commit it to the repository

Claude Code also loads skills from a project’s .claude/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md. Anthropic’s guidance is direct: commit it to a repository to share it with everyone who works there. [1] For a whole organization, the same skill can go out through a plugin (where it is namespaced as /plugin-name:skill-name) or through managed settings, which reach all users on machines where the organization deploys them. When two skills share a name, enterprise wins over personal, and personal wins over project. [1]

Fits when the people who need the skill already work in that repository with Claude Code. Changes to the skill can go through the same review as the rest of the repository.

Falls short when the people who need the skill don’t use a terminal. A sales lead who wants the quote skill is not going to clone a repository.

Way 2 — Claude Team or Enterprise

In the Claude apps, skills are available on Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans, and a skill is uploaded as a ZIP of its folder. Skills require code execution to be enabled. [2]

On Team and Enterprise, owners can provision skills for all users. Once an owner turns sharing on, people can share skills they made with specific colleagues — and with groups on Enterprise — or submit them to the organization’s library. If the organization requires it, an owner or someone with permission to review checks a skill before it is published, and chooses who gets it. [2]

Skills you enable in your Claude settings also load in Claude Code in your terminal. That sync is one-way, and it does not happen when Claude Code is signed in with an API key or runs on a cloud provider such as Amazon Bedrock. [2]

Fits when everyone who needs the skill is on your organization’s Claude Team or Enterprise plan and signs in with a Claude account.

Worth checking when some people use Claude Code with an API key or through a cloud provider — skills enabled in Claude settings don’t sync there. [2]

Way 3 — a workspace on your company’s server, next to company files

The third way moves the skill to where the work is: a workspace on your company’s own server — one you run, or one run for you — where the skill is a file in a company folder and the AI that follows it reads company files under each person’s permissions.

This is what we built Trina AX to do, so here is how it works there.

• Agent Skills folders work, with stricter rules. Team skills live in the workspace’s skills/ folder, either as a folder with a SKILL.md entry point or as a single Markdown file with a name header. A SKILL.md needs both name (lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens, matching its folder) and description, and every other field must be plain text. A Claude Code skill that sets something like disable-model-invocation: true, or lists allowed-tools as a YAML list, is skipped until those lines are changed. Skill text past 16,000 characters is cut off. [3]
• Anyone suggests, a folder manager registers. Under a useful answer, an employee selects Suggest as skill. A person allowed to manage team skills in the destination folder opens Team skills → To review, edits it if needed, and selects Register or Turn down. Changes under skills/ are logged, and once a registered skill has been edited, earlier versions can be restored from its version history (kept 7 days by default; an admin can change it). [4][6]
• Permissions don’t move. A member can use a registered skill if they can read the folder it is in. A skill does not grant extra folder permissions — if the quote skill reads the price sheet, the person using it still needs access to the price sheet. Every file tool checks the permissions of the person who asked. [5][6]
• Not just for developers. Claude Code runs on the company’s server; people use the Trina AX app on the web, desktop or phone and pick a skill by typing / in a chat. When a request clearly matches a skill, the AI is instructed to read it, follow it and name the skill it used. [6][7][3]
• Usage you can see. Admins see usage by person, model and skill, and can export it as CSV. Claude access comes from each person’s own Claude plan or from one company API key with a monthly limit per person. [6]

What it doesn’t do. The runtime does not execute scripts bundled inside a skill, and a skill’s allowed-tools metadata does not grant tools or change permissions. [3] If your skills depend on running bundled scripts, or on frontmatter fields Trina AX doesn’t accept, Way 1 or Way 2 is the better home for them. Trina AX is also new: its own security page describes it as a pre-release with no security certification yet. [8]

The software is open source under AGPL-3.0 and free to install yourself; Trina also hosts it on a monthly plan by team size. Either way, Claude usage is billed by Anthropic, not by Trina. [6][9]

Side by side

	Repository	Claude Team / Enterprise	Your company’s server (Trina AX)
Who uses the skill	People working in that repo with Claude Code	People on the organization’s Claude plan	Members who can read the skill’s folder, in the web, desktop or phone app
How it is shared	Commit · plugin · managed settings	Owner provisioning · share with people (groups on Enterprise) · org library	Saved in a company skills/ folder
Who approves it	Your repository’s review process	Owner provisions; library submissions can require review by an owner or permitted reviewer	A person who manages that folder registers it
Company files	Files the developer’s Claude Code session can reach	Not covered in the skills documentation	Read on the company server, under each person’s folder permissions
Bundled scripts	Supported	Requires code execution	Not executed
Skill format	Claude Code SKILL.md	Claude SKILL.md, uploaded as a ZIP	SKILL.md with plain-text fields only, or a Markdown file with a name header

How to choose

1. Everyone who needs the skill writes code in the same repository → commit it to .claude/skills/. It adds no cost beyond the Claude Code access they already have, and it is already where they work.
2. Everyone who needs the skill is on Claude Team or Enterprise and signs in with a Claude account → provision it, share it, or publish it to the organization’s library.
3. The skill is only useful with company files, and the people who need it aren’t developers → put the skill next to the files, behind folder permissions, with a folder manager who registers it.

Many teams will use more than one. Engineers keep their repository skills; the quote skill and the weekly report skill go where sales and operations can reach them.

Try it

• Write the skill first, wherever you are: Anthropic’s guide covers the file format. [1]
• For a team-wide skill in Trina AX: Use a team skill in chat and Review and register a team skill.
• Install guide and source: github.com/trina-app/trina-ax. Hosting plans: ax.trina.app/#pricing.

Claude is a trademark of Anthropic. Trina AX is made by Trina Inc. and is not affiliated with Anthropic.