A technical breakdown of how the Claude Code Desktop runtime discovers, loads, and executes Skills. We'll cover the SKILL.md spec beyond the basics, frontmatter parsing, description-based triggering, file system scoping, and how skills compose with MCP and hooks in a single session.
Then the practical side: what makes a skill trigger reliably, how to scope it without bloating context, and the common failure modes when moving from CLI to Desktop.
This talk has been presented at React Summit 2026, check out the latest edition of this React Conference.