Projects or skills? How to tell them apart

The difference

A worked example

Say you have one project that helps you create social media posts. Inside it, you have four skills:

1. Research: finds the trending topics in your niche.
2. LinkedIn: writes a post the way LinkedIn needs it.
3. Facebook: the same, for Facebook.
4. X: the same, for X.

When you work inside the project, Claude uses all four: it does the research on the topic, then writes the right post for each platform.

But go to an entirely different chat and ask for a LinkedIn post about something completely different, like a job you've just finished for a client. Claude uses that same LinkedIn skill and writes the post the way you want it.

For the research skill to find this week's news, web search needs to be switched on.

Which one do you need?

1. Make a project when Claude needs background to do good work: your business, your clients, your files, how a whole area of work runs. Day 3 shows how to build one.
2. Make a skill when there's a job you want done the same way every time, wherever you ask for it. Day 20 shows how.
3. Use both when a project has jobs inside it that repeat. The project holds the knowledge, and the skills do the jobs.

In Claude Code

Same idea, with one extra choice. A skill saved in a project's .claude/skills/ folder only works in that project. A skill saved in your personal ~/.claude/skills/ folder works in every project on your computer.

Where this goes

Day 22 puts a project and a skill to work together on something that makes money: a proposal that's with the client before they've had time to change their mind.