Scoping a Skill: Personal, Project, or Team
Where a skill lives changes who benefits from it: a personal toolbox, a project-specific one, or a shared one everyone on a team gets.
Your toolbox, or the site's toolbox
A carpenter usually has two sets of tools: a personal toolbox they carry from job to job, and a shared set of tools that stays at one particular site because that's the only place they're needed. Neither is wrong. They solve different problems: one travels with the person, the other stays with the place.
Skills work the same way, and where one lives determines which of those two problems it solves.
Why this choice actually matters
Putting a genuinely project-specific skill in your personal collection means it quietly misfires or sits uselessly the moment you're working somewhere else. Putting a genuinely personal preference into a shared project skill means it starts showing up for teammates who never asked for it and don't want it. The scope isn't just a filing detail. It's a decision about who this skill is actually for.
Ask: if I handed this exact skill file to a teammate working on a completely different project, would it still make sense, or would it reference things specific to one particular codebase? A confident "still makes sense" points toward personal. A confident "no, this is specific to here" points toward project.
Specific beats general, one level at a time
When a skill exists at more than one scope, the more specific one usually wins for a good reason: a project's own conventions should be able to override general habits, on purpose, for the place where those conventions actually apply. This mirrors something worth remembering from the tool-design instinct in general: the version closest to the actual situation at hand is usually the one that should take priority.
Think of two things you find yourself explaining to Claude repeatedly. Is either one truly personal, something you'd want everywhere? Is either one truly tied to one specific project, something that would look out of place anywhere else? Notice which category each one actually falls into, it's often not the one you'd assume at first.