Skills: what they are and where they come from

The Skills screen lists every Claude Code skill found on this machine. It reports what is installed; it is not a set of switches.

Last checked against the app on · View as Markdown

Steps

  1. Open Settings, then Agents & tools, then Skills.
  2. Search by name to answer the usual question, which is whether a particular skill is installed.
  3. To add one, install it where Claude Code keeps skills on this machine. NeuralVault discovers what is on disk rather than managing an installer of its own. *Corrected 2026-10-14: NeuralVault only reads a skills library you have switched on. Open Settings, then Agents & tools, then Bring your work across, switch the library on and press Save, or name a folder with NV_SKILLS_DIR or the skills_dirs field of ~/.neuralvault-skills.json. With none switched on, the Skills screen says "No skills found".
  4. Assign a discovered skill to a custom agent from this same screen, tick by tick, then press that agent’s own Save. Nothing commits per checkbox. *Corrected 2026-10-14: the Skills screen in the current build has no assignment control. It has a "Search skills" box and a table with the columns Skill, Where it came from and Enabled. Which agent may use which skill is set per agent, not on this screen.

How to tell it worked

A newly installed skill appears in the list, and the total count goes up.

If it does not work

You are looking for a per-skill on/off switch.
There is not one, anywhere in the product. The Enabled column is a status, not a control. Opting in happens once per directory, and narrowing what a particular agent may use is done per agent.
You cannot assign a skill to a builtin agent, only to ones you imported yourself.
That is correct in this build: only custom agents can be assigned skills. A builtin agent has no editable manifest to write the assignment into, so the picker leaves it out rather than showing a checkbox that would silently do nothing. *Corrected 2026-10-14: this answer describes an assignment picker that the Skills screen no longer has, so disregard it.