[FEATURE] .claude/skills/ and project config should be discovered without requiring a git repository

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
• [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

Project-level skills in .claude/skills/ are not discovered when the working directory is not a git repository. Claude Code requires a .git/ directory to treat .claude/ as project configuration.

I distribute a n MCP project as a zip file that includes .claude/skills/ with custom skills and a CLAUDE.md. When users extract the zip and run claude, the skills are not discovered because there's no .git/ directory.

The current workaround is telling users to run git init first, but this is friction that shouldn't be necessary — the presence of .claude/ should be sufficient to discover project configuration.

Proposed Solution

Claude Code should discover .claude/skills/, .claude/commands/, and project CLAUDE.md based on the presence of the .claude/ directory itself, without requiring the directory to be a git repository.

Alternative Solutions

_No response_

Priority

Medium - Would be very helpful

Feature Category

Configuration and settings

Use Case Example

A team maintains an internal CLI toolkit distributed as a zip to new engineers during
onboarding. The zip includes:

my-toolkit/
├── .claude/
│ ├── skills/
│ │ └── deploy.md # guided deployment workflow
│ │ └── oncall-triage.md # runbook for investigating alerts
│ └── commands/
│ └── setup.md # interactive environment setup
├── CLAUDE.md # project conventions and tool usage
├── scripts/
└── configs/

The skills encode institutional knowledge — how to deploy safely, how to triage pages, how to set up a
dev environment. Today, none of this is discovered when a new engineer extracts the zip and runs claude.
They have to know to run git init first, which defeats the purpose of packaging everything up to "just
work."

This pattern applies broadly to any project distributed outside of git: vendor SDKs with Claude
integration, workshop/training materials, exported project archives, or air-gapped environments where git
isn't available.

Additional Context

_No response_