Where Are Claude Skills Stored? File Paths and Locations Explained

One of the most common questions from developers new to AI agent skills is: where do the skills actually go? Each agent stores them in a slightly different location, and understanding the directory structure helps with installing, debugging, and organizing your skills.

Claude Code skill locations

Claude Code stores skills in two places:

Personal skills live at ~/.claude/skills/. Every skill you put here is available across all your projects. This is where most individually installed skills go.

Project skills live at .claude/skills/ inside a specific repository. These are shared with anyone who clones the repo. Teams use this to standardize workflows — commit a code review skill to the project, and every developer on the team gets it automatically.

Claude Code scans both directories at session startup and loads the frontmatter from every SKILL.md it finds.

OpenClaw skill locations

OpenClaw uses a similar structure:

Personal skills: ~/.openclaw/skills/ Project skills: .openclaw/skills/ in the project directory

OpenClaw calls these "AgentSkills" but the format is identical — the same SKILL.md file works in both Claude Code and OpenClaw without modification.

Codex CLI skill locations

OpenAI's Codex CLI stores skills at:

Personal skills: ~/.codex/skills/ Project skills: .codex/skills/

Cursor skill locations

Cursor reads skills from .cursor/skills/ in the project directory. Cursor focuses on project-level skills since it's tightly integrated with your workspace.

Directory structure

Inside each skills directory, every skill gets its own folder:

~/.claude/skills/
├── code-reviewer/
│   └── SKILL.md
├── git-commit-writer/
│   ├── SKILL.md
│   └── scripts/
│       └── parse-diff.sh
├── env-doctor/
│   ├── SKILL.md
│   └── references/
│       └── common-issues.md

The only required file is SKILL.md. Everything else — scripts, references, assets — is optional.

Common mistakes

The most frequent installation error is nesting the skill one level too deep. The path must be ~/.claude/skills/skill-name/SKILL.md, not ~/.claude/skills/skill-name/another-folder/SKILL.md.

Another common issue is having a skill folder without a SKILL.md file inside it. The folder will be ignored.

If you download a zip file from a marketplace like Agensi, make sure unzipping doesn't create a double-nested folder. Check with ls ~/.claude/skills/skill-name/ — you should see SKILL.md directly.

Listing your installed skills

To see all skills you have installed:

# Claude Code
ls ~/.claude/skills/

# OpenClaw
ls ~/.openclaw/skills/

# Codex CLI
ls ~/.codex/skills/

To see the details of a specific skill:

head -20 ~/.claude/skills/code-reviewer/SKILL.md

This shows the frontmatter with the skill's name, description, and configuration.

---

Find and install security-scanned skills for Claude Code, OpenClaw, and more on Agensi.