Agent/Skills/Dir

• Skill Discovery Recommendations for Agentic Tool Implementors - .agents/skills

  • The Agent Skills Specification Recommendation of Where to Scan for Skills

    • Most locally-running agents scan at least two scopes:
      Project-level (relative to the working directory): Skills specific to a project or repository.**
      User-level (relative to the home directory): Skills available across all projects for a given user.
      

    • Within each scope, consider scanning both a client-specific directory and the .agents/skills/ convention

      Scope	Path	Purpose
      Project	<project>/.<your-client>/skills/	Your client’s native location
      Project	<project>/.agents/skills/	Cross-client interoperability
      User	~/.<your-client>/skills/	Your client’s native location
      User	~/.agents/skills/	Cross-client interoperability

    • The .agents/skills/ paths have emerged as a widely-adopted convention for cross-client skill sharing. While the Agent Skills specification does not mandate where skill directories live (it only defines what goes inside them), scanning .agents/skills/ means skills installed by other compliant clients are automatically visible to yours, and vice versa.
      

    • Some implementations also scan .claude/skills/ (both project-level and user-level) for pragmatic compatibility, since many existing skills are installed there. Other additional locations include ancestor directories up to the git root (useful for monorepos), XDG config directories, and user-configured paths.
      

  • My Notes

    • see Agent/Skills/Dir/Compatibility for notes on compatibility