Sharing AI skills between engineers

With all the AI skills developers use and create today, and the workflows they build around them, there is a lot of knowledge worth sharing. But taking the step from a personal setup to something colleagues can use can feel like another task on the backlog.

A skill might depend on local files, assume certain tools are configured or need instructions its author has never had to write down. Its author may also be unsure where to share it or what a contribution should look like. A shared home and a simple example to follow can remove some of that uncertainty, leaving the engineer to focus on making the skill useful to others.

One way to provide that shared home is through a repository of Claude Code plugins. Plugins give skills a common packaging format, while a marketplace makes the available plugins discoverable. Together, they give engineers a concrete place and format for their contributions.

Skills, plugins and a shared catalog

There are three pieces to the setup:

A plugin can group related skills. For example, a review plugin could contain skills for explaining a change and working through feedback. Another plugin could focus on investigations. Engineers can install the packages relevant to their work.

The first goal can simply be visibility. Engineers can keep their own skills while colleagues follow commits, try an approach or offer feedback. There is no need to consolidate everything into one common set before sharing it.

The Claude Code plugin guide covers how those pieces are packaged.

Put the catalog and plugins in a repository

One arrangement is to keep the marketplace and its plugins together:

engineering-skills/
├── .claude-plugin/
│   └── marketplace.json
└── plugins/
    └── review-tools/
        ├── .claude-plugin/
        │   └── plugin.json
        └── skills/
            └── explain-change/
                └── SKILL.md

Here, SKILL.md contains the instructions, and plugin.json describes the plugin. The marketplace file points to the plugin directory. For an existing plugin named review-tools, the catalog could look like this:

{
  "name": "engineering-skills",
  "owner": { "name": "Engineering" },
  "plugins": [
    {
      "name": "review-tools",
      "source": "./plugins/review-tools",
      "description": "Skills for preparing and reviewing code changes"
    }
  ]
}

Another plugin gets another entry. A catalog can also reference plugins hosted in separate repositories. These options are described in the marketplace documentation.

Listing plugins together in marketplace.json makes them discoverable without consolidating them into one plugin. Developers can opt in to the ones they find useful. Adding the marketplace registers the catalog; each plugin is installed separately.

That choice matters because a skill can be tightly coupled to how its author develops software: how they plan tasks, structure commits or handle reviews. Another engineer may use the same tools but prefer a different workflow. Sharing still lets them learn from the approach and reuse parts that fit, without adopting the whole plugin.

Keeping contributions in Git lets engineers follow changes to each other's skills, discuss a commit or suggest an improvement through a pull request. Add a short README to each plugin explaining what its skills do, what they require and how to use them.

Install and use the shared skills

Once the repository is hosted on GitHub, colleagues can add it as a marketplace and install a plugin. In these Claude Code commands, replace example-org/engineering-skills with the actual repository:

/plugin marketplace add example-org/engineering-skills
/plugin install review-tools@engineering-skills

Follow the installation prompts, including any instruction to reload plugins. A skill named explain-change inside review-tools is then invoked as:

/review-tools:explain-change

The installation guide covers access, installation scopes and updates.

Happy coding!