How Skills differ from Projects

Skills and Projects are different tools that complement each other. A simple way to remember the difference: Projects store knowledge, Skills execute tasks. Projects are knowledge repositories. They contain the reference materials Claude needs to understand your work: project specifications, meeting notes, research documents. When you upload files to a project, Claude draws on this information across all conversations inside the project. Projects answer the question "what" — what information is needed. Skills are process machines. They encode how Claude should perform a task: specific steps, the order of operations, and the methodology you want applied every time. Skills answer the question "how" — how the task should be performed. These two tools work great together. A skill can use knowledge stored in a project. For example, a "prepare for a client call" skill can draw information from client profiles uploaded to a project's knowledge base. The project provides the "what" — the information; the skill provides the "how" — the process.