Up And Running With Skills In Claude Desktop

Adding a skill to the Claude Desktop app is a different mechanism from Claude Code. In Claude Code a skill is discovered by a symlink at ~/.claude/skills/<name> (see Up and Running with Agent Skills). Claude Desktop has no symlink path — every skill is uploaded as a ZIP, one at a time, private to your account. The same skill therefore has to be added in both places independently.

The to-do

  • Enable code execution first. Settings → Capabilities → turn on "Code execution and file creation". Skills will not run without it, and the Skills section will not even be visible until it is on.
  • Open the Skills manager. Customize → Skills.
  • Start an upload. Click "+" → Create skill → Upload a skill.
  • Pick the ZIP. Select the ZIP of the skill folder. After upload, Claude reads the SKILL.md frontmatter and shows the skill's name and description.
  • Repeat per skill. There is no "link the whole directory" shortcut like the Claude Code symlink approach — each skill is its own upload.

The format gotcha

The ZIP must contain the skill folder at its root, not a bare SKILL.md:
text 
decile-hub-connector.zip
└── decile-hub-connector/
    ├── SKILL.md
    └── references/
        └── endpoint-inventory.md
Zipping the loose SKILL.md (no enclosing folder) will fail to register. One skill per ZIP.

What ports cleanly — and what does not

Claude Desktop runs skills in a sandbox with no access to your local machine. That changes which of our skills are worth uploading:
✅Ports cleanly — pure-guidance skills
Skills that are just instructions and reference docs work as-is:
decile-hub-connector
(the API contract),
git-conventions
,
changelog-conventions
,
context-vigilance
,
pseudomonorepos
.
⚠️Does not port — local-tool skills
Any skill whose steps read a local file, run a local script, or reach a local service will break in the sandbox:
search-lossless-corpus
(local Chroma),
crawl-fetch-ingest
(API keys in
~/.secrets
),
generate-consistent-og-images
(Ideogram + local paths), and anything referencing
context-v/
paths or
sync-skills-symlinks.sh
.

Constraints worth knowing

  • Available on Free, Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans (code execution required).
  • Uploaded skills are private to your individual account — not shared org-wide and not centrally pushed by an admin (Team/Enterprise provisioning aside).

Sources