Consider merging Skills and Slash Commands
Status Fixed / completed
Maintainer reply ✓ Yes — dicksontsai
Activity 6 comments · opened Dec 5, 2025 · closed Jan 10, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (dicksontsai, collaborator)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
Skills and Slash Commands seem to function almost identically:
- Both can be invoked by the user with a slash prefix
- Both can be invoked by Claude itself
- Both load instructions into the conversation
The main difference appears to be intent (skills = Claude-invoked primarily, commands = user-invoked primarily), but in practice they work the same way.
Would it simplify things to merge these into a single feature? Perhaps with a flag to control whether it appears in autocomplete or is primarily model-invoked?
6 Comments
Found 3 possible duplicate issues:
This issue will be automatically closed as a duplicate in 3 days.
🤖 Generated with Claude Code
Yes. We think this difference is significant enough to keep the two concepts separate, especially since it would help with how Claude authors skills and slash commands.
We are definitely looking to eliminate this, but it's tricky since users may depend on the fact that they work the same way.
The way they load instructions may diverge over time.
@dhollman is very knowledgeable in and invested in this topic!
I'd like a way to call a skill in a prompt either via something like /skill:some-skill-name or @skill:some-skill-name etc
Thank you for taking this piece of feedback!
I saw a summary about this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1q92wwv/merged_commands_and_skills_in_213_update/
Credit to @bcherny for finding an elegant way to merge them 😄
This issue has been automatically locked since it was closed and has not had any activity for 7 days. If you're experiencing a similar issue, please file a new issue and reference this one if it's relevant.