An emergency-management office is packaging its incident-action-plan drafting procedure as a Claude Code skill so the whole team gets the same workflow. For the harness to discover the skill, where must the SKILL.md file be placed?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
A skill is a folder, not a loose file. Give it its own named directory under a skills directory with SKILL.md inside, which is also what lets it carry scripts and reference files alongside the procedure.
Full Explanation
Discovery in Claude Code is convention-based rather than registry-based, so location is part of the contract rather than an incidental detail. The harness looks in the skills directories, treats each subdirectory it finds there as one skill, and reads the SKILL.md inside that subdirectory.
Placing the file at .claude/skills//SKILL.md makes the incident-action-plan procedure a project skill that ships to the whole emergency-management team in version control, while the equivalent path under the user's home directory keeps it personal to one operator. The directory-per-skill layout matters architecturally too, because it gives the skill a home for the supporting assets, such as reference documents and helper scripts, that it can pull in on demand.
A SKILL.md at an arbitrary repository path is not discovered, because the filename alone is not the contract; skills are not embedded as text inside settings.json, which carries configuration such as permissions and hooks rather than skill bodies; and placing the file in the repository root beside CLAUDE.md conflates two different mechanisms, since CLAUDE.md is always-loaded project context while a skill loads only once it has been selected.
Exam caveat: correct placement makes a skill discoverable, not invocable, and a well-located skill with a vague description still never fires. Operational check: put the SKILL.md in its named subdirectory, start a fresh session, confirm the skill appears in the available list, then confirm it is actually selected during a real incident-planning conversation rather than only when named.