Cline skills. Where they live and how to install them.

What skills are in Cline

Cline's documentation describes skills as modular instruction sets that extend Cline for specific tasks. Each one packages guidance, processes and optional resources that Cline loads only when relevant. Unlike rules, which are always active, skills stay dormant until your request matches, so they use no context for unrelated work.

Loading is staged. Cline always sees each skill's name and description, which the docs estimate at roughly 100 tokens per skill. When your message matches a description, Cline activates the skill through its skills tool and loads the SKILL.md body, which the docs suggest keeping under 5,000 tokens. Bundled files are read only when needed. Required frontmatter is name, which must exactly match the folder name, and description, up to 1,024 characters.

Where Cline looks for skills

Cline's published source for its VS Code extension also scans .agents/skills in the project and ~/.agents/skills globally, alongside the folders above, although the documentation page does not list them. When a global skill and a project skill have the same name, the global skill takes precedence. Commit .cline/skills/ if you want your team to share project skills.

Install a skill

Cline's documentation covers creating skills in its Skills menu or by hand, not importing them from a repository, so the routes below use other tools or a copy. The examples use frontend-design from anthropics/skills, located at skills/frontend-design.

Option 1: the skills CLI

npx skills add anthropics/skills --skill frontend-design -a cline

This installs into .agents/skills/ in the current project. Add -g for ~/.agents/skills/.

Option 2: GitHub CLI

gh skill install anthropics/skills frontend-design --agent cline
gh skill install anthropics/skills frontend-design --agent cline --scope user

Needs GitHub CLI 2.90.0 or later, where gh skill is a public preview.

Option 3: copy the folder

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/anthropics/skills.git skills-src
mkdir -p .cline/skills
cp -r skills-src/skills/frontend-design .cline/skills/frontend-design
rm -rf skills-src

Use ~/.cline/skills/ for a global skill. Cline detects skill directories automatically.

Option 4: create one in the Skills menu

Click the scale icon at the bottom of the Cline panel, to the left of the model selector, and switch to the Skills tab. Click New skill..., enter a name such as aws-deploy, and Cline creates the directory with a template SKILL.md for you to edit. This is for writing your own, not for importing an existing skill.

Check that it loaded

Open the Skills tab from the scale icon. Discovered skills are listed there, each with a toggle, and skills are enabled by default when discovered. To trigger one explicitly, type / in chat, choose the skill command such as /frontend-design, and Cline loads its SKILL.md. Otherwise just describe a task that matches the description.

Update and remove

• Disable without deleting: use the toggle in the Skills tab. This is useful for skills that only matter on some projects.
• Remove: delete the skill folder, or run npx skills remove frontend-design.
• Update: copy a newer version of the folder over the old one, or use npx skills update or gh skill update for skills those tools installed.

Troubleshooting

• The skill does not appear: confirm the folder holds SKILL.md, the frontmatter has name and description, and name is identical to the folder name.
• It never triggers: a vague description means it will not match. Start with what the skill does, add the phrases users might say, and mention file types or tools.
• It installed to a folder you did not expect: the skills CLI writes to .agents/skills/. Cline's own source scans that folder, but if you see nothing, copy the skill into .cline/skills/.
• Global and project copies conflict: the global one wins, so rename one of them.
• A long skill behaves poorly: keep SKILL.md short and move detail into docs/ files that Cline reads when needed.

Safety

Skills can include scripts that Cline will run on your behalf, in the same environment where it edits files and runs commands. Read SKILL.md and anything bundled before installing a skill you did not write, and keep project skills under version control so changes to them are visible in review. Treat a global skill as something that applies to every project.