Run Claude Code Skills on Your Phone

You can run Claude Code skills on your phone today, iPhone or Android, the same way you run Claude Code itself: from a cloud Linux container reached by a native terminal app. Skills are folders with a SKILL.md file in your home directory, so the question is not whether Claude Code can find them on a phone, it is whether your phone has a real home directory that persists. With Cosyra for iOS or Cosyra for Android the answer is yes, and the skill you wrote on the couch is loaded on the train. 1 hour free on signup, no credit card.

This guide was written by the Cosyra team. We use Claude Code skills daily inside our own Cosyra containers from both iPhone and Android, and every claim about the skills feature is checked against the official Claude Code skills documentation and the Anthropic Agent Skills launch post as of 2026-05-27.

What are Claude Code skills?

Skills are folders Claude Code loads on demand to extend what it can do. Each skill is a directory with a SKILL.md file, plus optional scripts, templates, or reference docs the skill points at. The SKILL.md has YAML frontmatter (at minimum, a description) and markdown instructions Claude follows when the skill loads. The official docs put it this way: "Create a SKILL.md file with instructions, and Claude adds it to its toolkit. Claude uses skills when relevant, or you can invoke one directly with /skill-name."

Anthropic launched Agent Skills on 2025-10-16 and published the spec as an open standard at agentskills.io on 2025-12-18. Custom slash commands you might have written in .claude/commands/ still work, but skills have replaced them as the recommended pattern. The difference: a skill is a directory, so it can carry supporting files; a command is a single markdown file.

Where Claude Code looks for skills

Three locations, with a clear priority order. The same skill name at two levels collapses to the higher level: enterprise overrides personal, personal overrides project.

Project skills also load from .claude/skills/ in every parent directory up to the repo root, and from nested .claude/skills/ directories you cd into during the session.

Why skills change the math on a phone

Coding from a phone has a real cost we have learned to respect: every keystroke is slower, autocomplete fights you more, and copy-pasting a long prompt from a notes app is the kind of break-the-flow micro-task that kills a 20-minute coding window on the train. The opinion we hold, which the desktop-skills crowd would push back on: on a phone, personal skills earn their keep faster than they do on a laptop. A laptop user can keep a long CLAUDE.md and paste snippets without thinking. A phone user retyping the same five-line instruction loses the whole point of agent-driven coding. A /commit-msg shortcut you typed once on the couch is one slash command on the train tomorrow.

Personal skills live in your home directory. In a Cosyra container the home directory is on a 30 GB persistent volume, so the skill you write today is at ~/.claude/skills/commit-msg/SKILL.md tomorrow, after the container has hibernated and resumed, and the same skill loads when you open the same container from a different device. That cross-device part is what we mean by "the skill on the couch loads on the train." It is the same container, so it is the same ~/.claude/skills/.

Setup: write your first skill in a Cosyra container

Five minutes, four commands. The example here is a skill that turns git diff HEAD into a short, structured commit-message draft, because that is the friction we feel most often when coding from a phone.

Step 1: Open a Cosyra container

Download from the App Store or Google Play. Sign in with Apple, Google, or email. On first launch we provision a fresh Ubuntu 24.04 container with Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode, and Gemini CLI already installed, plus Node.js, Python, Git, and tmux.

Step 2: Create the personal skills directory

Personal skills live under ~/.claude/skills/. Make a directory named after the slash command you want. We use commit-msg here.

Step 3: Write SKILL.md

Open ~/.claude/skills/commit-msg/SKILL.md in nano or vim. The YAML description is the field Claude uses to decide whether to load the skill automatically when you describe a task, so write it as a sentence that names the trigger.

The !`git diff HEAD` line uses Claude Code's dynamic context injection: before Claude reads the skill, the runtime executes the command and inlines the output. That is the trick that lets a skill feel less like a template and more like a live tool, and it is the same trick the bundled /code-review and /debug skills use.

Step 4: Invoke the skill

Run claude in your repo and type /commit-msg. The directory name becomes the command. You can also describe what you want and let Claude load the skill from its description.

Step 5: Open the same container on another device

Open Cosyra on your iPad or in the web client, point it at the same container, and the skill is there because ~/.claude/skills/ is on persistent storage. No sync step. The skill you wrote on iPhone is the skill loaded on Android.

Five skills that earn their keep on a phone

These are the ones we actually use from a phone, in the Cosyra container we keep open for personal work. None are clever. All save typing.

1. /commit-msg — turns git diff HEAD into a Conventional Commit. The example above.
2. /pr-summary — pipes git log main..HEAD into a 4-line PR description. We invoke this before opening a pull request from a phone, because writing a good PR body on a phone keyboard is the part we used to skip.
3. /morning-status — runs git status and git stash list across our top three repos and prints what we should look at first. Useful as the first command after the container resumes.
4. /run-tests — knows the test command for each of our repos (Vitest here, pytest there) and runs the right one without us having to remember.
5. /oncall-checklist — a static checklist for what to verify when a deploy alarm fires. No dynamic input, just a skill we can invoke instead of fishing the checklist out of Notion on a phone.

The pattern: each skill replaces a piece of typing or a piece of memory. None replaces thinking.

Personal vs project skills on a phone

The default we recommend on a phone is personal. The /commit-msg and /pr-summary kind belong at ~/.claude/skills/ because they apply to every repo you touch. Reserve project skills for the per-repo rules a teammate should also pick up when they clone the repo on a laptop: the project's test command, its deploy steps, its code-review checklist. Those go in .claude/skills/ and get committed.

A trade-off worth naming: a personal skill on a phone is not visible to anyone else. If you want the skill to outlive your container or your Cosyra account, copy the directory into a repo you control and commit it. We keep a small dotfiles repo with .claude/skills/ in it for exactly this; cloning it into a new container gives us our skills back in one command.

Honest trade-offs

Where this approach is worse than a laptop, and we will say so:

• Editing markdown on a phone keyboard is slow. We write the description on a laptop when we can and add the body on a phone, or use a Bluetooth keyboard. A 60-line skill on a phone keyboard is painful; a 15-line skill is fine.
• No offline mode. The container lives in the cloud, so no internet means no skill. Termux on Android can run a local ~/.claude/skills/ without that constraint, with all the Termux trade-offs we cover in Cosyra vs Termux.
• You pay Anthropic for the tokens. Skills do not change that — they reduce typing, not API spend. Bring your own key.

Next steps

The single takeaway: skills are five-minute files that pay off most when the keyboard is slowest. Start with /commit-msg, add /pr-summary when you write your next PR from a phone, and stop there until you feel the next friction point. If you have not yet got Claude Code running on the phone in the first place, our Claude Code on your phone guide is the prerequisite, and the AI coding agents on mobile pillar covers the same problem space for Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, and OpenCode.

Frequently asked questions