Claude Code /skills — See Your Available Skills at a Glance

After installing a plugin or adding a skill, you're left wondering "did this actually register?" /skills shows your currently available skills at a glance, letting you confirm registration and run one right away.

Definition (what it is)

/skills is a command that shows the list of currently available skills.

A skill is like a recipe card on which "tasks you ask for often" are written down in advance. For example, once you define a procedure like "write a blog draft" or "do research," from then on you can call it by name to run that procedure as-is. /skills gathers those registered recipe cards in one place and shows them.

How to use it (by level)

Basic — View the skill list

Type this in the input box.

/skills

Your installed skills are then listed out. If the skill you just added appears in the list, it registered fine.

Applied — Sort by weight (tokens)

With the list up, press the sort shortcut to view it by weight.

/skills then t

Here, weight means the amount of tokens (the smallest unit by which AI processes text) that skill takes up. The heavier a skill, the more context it uses, so knowing which skills are heavy helps with management.

Advanced — Run directly from the list

A skill you saw in the list can be run right away by putting a slash before its name.

/seo-blog-writer

Typing this runs that skill's procedure as-is. You can connect registration check and run test into one flow.

Common pitfalls

• If you added a new skill or edited one but it doesn't appear in the list, you can reload it immediately with /reload-skills. There's no need to quit and relaunch the program each time.

Real-world example

You use it like this: after installing a blog plugin, use /skills to confirm all three skills registered, then run one right there to test that it works normally. It's a great command to type first once installation is done.

Taking it further

Skills usually come bundled in plugins. So viewing it alongside /plugin, which manages plugins, gives you a sense of which plugin brought which skill. If you build the habit of checking registration state with /skills every time you make a new automation, you can reduce the "I definitely made it but it won't run" snags.

Wrap-up

/skills is a command that shows your currently available skills. You can confirm skills registered properly, sort by weight, and even run them right from the list, all at once. If a new skill doesn't appear, just reload it with /reload-skills.

Based on Claude Code v2.1.154 (2026.05)