Practice — Skills, Slash Commands & Plugins (12 questions)

A team wrote this skill to streamline their deploy process:

---
name: deploy
description: Deploy the application to production.
---

Deploy the application:
1. Run the test suite
2. Build the application
3. Push to the deployment target

A few days later, an engineer reports that Claude ran the deploy workflow in the middle of an unrelated conversation about fixing a bug, without anyone typing /deploy.

1. Explain the mechanism that caused this — why was Claude able to run the skill without explicit invocation?
2. Propose the specific frontmatter fix, and explain what it changes about both invocation and how the skill loads into context.
3. A teammate suggests the real fix is to make the description field vaguer so Claude is "less likely to think it's relevant." Evaluate this suggestion.

Instead of grepping for a symbol and then reading every file that might define it, you want Claude Code to jump straight to a definition the way an IDE would.

What should you install to make that possible?

Every engineer keeps re-explaining the same multi-step "how we add a new API endpoint" procedure to Claude Code at the start of relevant sessions.

What's the best place for that procedure, and why?

A SKILL.md file contains the line !`git diff HEAD` inside its instructions.

What happens when the skill is invoked?

A repo's committed .claude/settings.json declares extraKnownMarketplaces pointing at your team's plugin catalog. A teammate clones the repo and trusts the folder for the first time.

What happens automatically at that point?