Before you can bless a taxonomy decision, you need the words. This lesson is just vocabulary — five things, five diagrams. No history, no decisions yet. Just "what are we even talking about."
Not deploy them. Not run them. Build them. The skill lives in the workshop while it's being designed, tested, and iterated. Once it works, you ship it out — to your global Claude home, to a project, or wherever. The workshop is the workbench, not the showroom.
You have one workshop right now: skills-lab/. It sits at ~/lab/projects/_agentic-lab/skills-lab/. Future siblings (already planned) include hooks-lab/, cli-lab/, mcp-lab/ — each its own workshop for a different kind of Claude Code thing.
When SL-5.3 or any taxonomy chat says "workshop", they mean this folder. Not Claude. Not the chat. Not the editor. The literal directory at skills-lab/ where skills get built.
That's the whole shape. A folder + a SKILL.md = a skill. Claude finds it, reads the description, and lets you invoke it with /skill-name. Add a CHANGELOG.md, some scripts, a _system/ umbrella, and you've got a substantial skill — but the SKILL.md is the only required file.
You already have ~80 of these. Some live globally at ~/.claude/skills/. Some live in workshops while they're being iterated. The same folder shape works in both places.
Half the taxonomy questions you're going to bless are about WHERE this folder lives — at the workshop root? Inside _meta-skills/? Inside a family workshop like mission-control/? Same folder shape, different home, different meaning. That's the next concept.
This is the part SL-5.3 just blessed (verdict D9, lesson 2). The three homes are not interchangeable — where a skill lives signals what it IS.
"Operates on other skills" → _meta-skills/
"Operates on chats/workers" → mission-control/
"Operates on the rest of your world" → flat <skill>/
Skills, workshops, family folders, your master projects — anything that's a "project" gets a _system/ folder with the same 5 sub-folders inside. Always the same 5. Memorize them once.
The _ sorts it to the top of ls output and signals "meta / housekeeping, not the main attraction." Same trick used by _meta-skills/, _personal/, _business/, etc.
This is the new piece SL-5.3 blessed (verdict D8). When you've got 2+ skills that share a domain — say, several skills that all touch dispatch-relay infrastructure — you can group them under a family folder. mission-control/ is the first instance.
The clever bit: each level (workshop, family, per-skill) keeps its OWN _system/. Three umbrellas, three scopes.
Workshop _system/ = stuff that touches multiple families (new skill ideas, cross-skill research).
Family _system/ = stuff that touches multiple skills in this family (shared schemas, family-wide handoffs).
Per-skill _system/ = stuff specific to this one skill (its iteration history, its test runs).
skills-lab/)./skill-name._meta-skills/ (operates on skills), mission-control/ (operates on chats), or flat at the workshop root (regular skills)._system/ umbrella with five sub-folders: handoffs / ideas / research / resources / runs.mission-control/) groups sibling skills sharing a domain. It nests _system/ three levels deep: workshop, family, per-skill.