Claude Skills and SKILL.md for Developers: VS Code, JetBrains, Cursor

Most teams misuse Claude Skills in one of two ways. They either turn SKILL.md into a dumping ground, or they never graduate from giant copy-pasted prompts. Both approaches are sloppy. If you want Skills to work in a real dev workflow, you need to treat them like code and operations logic, not like prompt poetry. Claude Skills are directories anchored by SKILL.md , with optional scripts, references, and assets. They work because of progressive disclosure. The agent starts by loading only compact