Skills Overview
What a skill is
A skill is a markdown knowledge file registered with Claude Code. Skills auto-load into the model's context based on task relevance — you don't prompt for them explicitly. Each skill tells Claude:
- When to activate (trigger conditions)
- What tool call sequences to follow
- Dialect-specific gotchas and patterns
Skills are Claude Code-specific. They don't run in Cursor, Codex, or other MCP clients.
How skills auto-load
Claude Code scans your message and active context for skill triggers. When a match is found, the skill's markdown is prepended to the model's context window. Multiple skills can be active simultaneously (e.g. dbt-workflow + duckdb-sql for a DuckDB-backed dbt project).
You can inspect which skills are currently active:
check active skills
/skills
The 9 plugin skills
| Skill | One-line description |
|---|---|
dbt-workflow | Full 5-step dbt lifecycle: output shape inference, incremental handling, what to trust in YML |
dbt-write | Writing SQL models: column naming, type preservation, JOIN defaults, materialization rules |
dbt-debugging | Debugging dbt run/dbt parse failures: YML duplicate patches, ref errors, zero-row diagnosis |
dbt-date-spines | Fixing current_date/now() hazards in date-spine models |
sql-workflow | Pre-query schema exploration, CTE-based query building, structured verification loop |
duckdb-sql | DuckDB-specific patterns: integer division, INTERVAL syntax, DATE_TRUNC gotchas |
snowflake-sql | Snowflake-specific patterns: QUALIFY, LATERAL FLATTEN, VARIANT, ILIKE |
bigquery-sql | BigQuery-specific patterns: UNNEST, STRUCT, backtick table refs, EXCEPT/REPLACE |
sqlite-sql | SQLite-specific patterns: substr/instr, string concatenation with pipe-pipe, no ILIKE, strftime() |
See Skills reference for per-skill detail.