It took me a while to get my head round the idea that Claude and Claude Code live in separate environments. They’re both called “Claude”, right? But I didn’t really understand the practical implications until it started getting in my way.
I was out. Had my phone in my hand. And wanted to run a competitive analysis to see how Knapsack was addressing the market issue raised in an article I’d just read. Everything I needed was in my cpo-skills suite. Context, background data sources, routing tables to know which command to pull for which task.
All sitting in my vault. Perfectly organized. Inaccessible to me.
Because Claude Code lives in my CLI. My CLI lives on my laptop. My laptop was at home.
Claude.ai was right there. And it had far less that could help me.
It made me take a closer look at what claude.ai skills could do. My assumption - skills are prompts. A few hundred words providing context, available to trigger. Useful for tasks. But a long way from the depth I’d built in Claude Code.
I’ve built for depth. My cpo-skills suite has ten discrete command files, a delivery pipeline context document, and utilizes my specialized data-gathering agents wired to Linear, Slack, Github, etc. My thought-leadership suite carries its own context file - posting cadences, metrics, content pillars, conferences I’m tracking.
When Claude Code triggers these, that’s more than a prompt. It’s loading a working system.
But I realized that a claude.ai skill can be a gateway to that same system. On trigger, instead of containing all the intelligence itself, it instructs Claude to fetch it. It reads the README from my vault, loads the context file, consults the routing table, and pulls the specific command for the task at hand.
The files live in GitHub. Claude fetches them directly during the session. The skill in claude.ai is the key. The vault on GitHub is the room it opens.
My cpo-skills and thought-leadership skills in my Claude.ai project work in exactly this way. Each one is a few dozen lines. When I trigger the skill, it expands into the full suite I built in Claude Code. That’s context, routing logic, specialized commands, and in some cases an agent. All also available in that GitHub vault.
If you’re working in claude.ai you see a simple skill with a clear description. What runs is everything in the vault, accessed remotely.
This matters beyond just my own workflow. Claude Code solves for depth. That’s complex, stateful, multi-step work with persistent context. Claude.ai solves for accessibility. No terminal, no config files, far lower technical barrier.
The bridging pattern doesn’t collapse the distinction. The complexity stays in the vault, versioned and maintainable. The interface stays simple.
The person who builds the vault and the person who opens the door don’t have to be the same.
Further reading:
Salcan, Y. E. Claude vs Claude Code vs Cowork — Which One Do You Actually Need? Medium article, Feb 2026