Cline

Cline Skills: SKILL.md Location, Format and Slash Command Use

How do I add a custom skill to Cline?

Create a folder with a SKILL.md file in .cline/skills/ for a project or ~/.cline/skills/ for every project. The frontmatter needs a name that matches the folder and a description. Cline loads the skill when your request matches the description, or you can run it with a slash command.

Where skills go

  • Project: .cline/skills/ (recommended), .clinerules/skills/ or .claude/skills/
  • Global: ~/.cline/skills/ on macOS and Linux, C:\Users\USERNAME\.cline\skills\ on Windows
  • If a global and a project skill share a name, the global one wins.

SKILL.md format

.cline/skills/my-skill/SKILL.md

---
name: my-skill
description: Brief description of what this skill does and when to use it.
---

# My Skill

Instructions for Cline.
  • name: required. Must match the folder name exactly. Use lowercase kebab-case.
  • description: required. Up to 1024 characters.
  • Optional subfolders: docs/, templates/ and scripts/.

Turn skills on or off

Open the menu with the scale icon at the bottom of the Cline panel, left of the model selector, and go to the Skills tab. Each skill has a toggle. New skills are on by default.

Run a skill

Cline matches your request against skill descriptions and loads the full SKILL.md when it fits. To run one yourself, type / in chat and pick the skill, for example /aws-deploy.

Keep skills small

Keep SKILL.md under 5k tokens and move extra detail into files under docs/. Each skill's metadata costs about 100 tokens at startup. Bundled files load only when needed.

Get Cline settings changes by email

When a setting, flag or permission rule in this guide changes, it goes in the weekly AgentAtlas update, checked against the vendor docs. One email a week.

Sources

Cline Docs: SkillsCline Docs: Config

More on Cline

Cline standards support

More Cline guides

Other guides

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Reviewed Oct 13, 2026. Settings change often; the linked vendor docs are the source of truth.