You know what gets sand kicked in my face on the nerd beach? When I can’t explain the difference between a Claude Skill and a Claude Project.
Here’s my analogy:
Claude is the kitchen.
Skills are utensils.
Projects are cookbooks.
For more detail, keep reading:
Skills are utensils and techniques
A skill is a knife. Or one of those cool combs folks use to get crumbs off of table linens. I love those. It’s also “how to crack an egg” — a technique you’ve practiced enough that you don’t think about it anymore. Unless you’re me, in which case you still spray egg everywhere.
The knife works the pretty much the same way no matter what you’re cooking. Yes, I know there’s dicing and chopping and mincing. There’s still a sharp edge that you apply to the thing you want to cut. And you take it with you. French kitchen, Thai kitchen, your Sunday-dinner kitchen at home, doesn’t matter. The knife does what knives do.
Skills work like that. I have a skill for generating schema markup. It knows the universally-applicable rules and best practices: nest correctly, validate against schema.org, don’t spam. I can use it anywhere, and I don’t have to rewrite these requirements every time I use Claude.
Skills tell Claude how to do a specific thing.
Projects are cookbooks
A project is a cookbook. Or that ratty notebook handed down across generations with recipes and notes scribbled in the margins of every page.
The cookbook contains the recipes that matter for this kitchen or this event. Dinner party vs. lunch. Thai food vs. American diner fare. It has the notes in the margins — “well-done only,” “never use margarine,” “the regulars are gluten-free.” It has the dishes you make over and over for particular situations and people.
Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking is not a generic cookbook. It assumes French ingredients, French techniques, French sensibilities. You wouldn’t grab it to make pad thai. Wrong cookbook.
Projects work the same way. My e-commerce SEO project has specific guidelines for e-commerce sites. And client A’s project might include the cannibalization clusters we found last quarter, what we’re focused on this month, the rules we’ve agreed on.
Projects tell Claude when to do things, what the goal is, and what’s special about this situation.
Projects call skills
- Skills get called from inside projects, not vice-versa
- Projects shouldn’t reinvent skills. They orchestrate the use of skills
Take my schema work. The skill knows how to build valid schema — that’s the technique, applies to any site I touch. The project tells Claude what site or type of site we’re on, what type of pages it has, and the exceptions that apply here. “These are all e-commerce sites, so every product page gets Product schema with Offer nested inside.”
The cookbook says what to cook. The utensils do the work.
You need both.
How do I know whether it’s a skill or a project?
One question:
Would this be valuable on every engagement/category, or just this one?
- Every engagement, from client A to client Z? From huge project to two-hour gig? It’s a skill.
- Specific engagements and categories? B2B vs B2C? E-commerce vs SAAS? Big project vs small job? It’s a project.
How to write valid schema = skill
Which schema patterns suit an e-commerce TTRPG sites = project
How to run a content audit = skill
Content audits for law firms = project
Skill = utensil
Project = cookbook
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Psst: Don’t use Claude? Wondering what a “skill” is in Gemini? I put together an AI model cheat sheet that helps you get the vocabulary right from one AI tool to another.