Agent/Skills/Support in Multiple Tools

• Agent Skills: Support Across Multiple Tools

  • Overview

    • The Agent/Skills open standard defines what a skill file contains but does not mandate where skill directories live. Each vendor ships a native directory (.claude/skills/, .gemini/skills/, etc.), and .agents/skills/ is the recommended cross-client interoperability path. The gap between these two conventions is the central challenge of multi-tool skill management.

  • The core tension

    • The spec recommends that clients scan .agents/skills/ alongside their native path, but not all vendors have implemented this. A user who installs skills to ~/.agents/skills/ following the ecosystem convention will find those skills invisible in Claude/Code, which only scans ~/.claude/skills/.
    • This gap is documented in a live bug report: Vercel skills issue #693 — skills installed to ~/.agents/skills are silently ignored by Claude/Code.

  • How vendors currently handle .agents/skills

    • GitHub Copilot officially documents both .agents/skills and ~/.agents/skills as valid skill locations alongside its native paths — strong evidence that .agents/skills is becoming a real interoperability target, not just a spec aspiration.
    • OpenAI Codex and Gemini CLI also scan .agents/skills/ natively.
    • Claude/Code (as of mid-2026) does not natively scan .agents/skills/; a community issue (anthropics/claude-code#31005) requests this support.
    • See Agent/Skills/Dir/Compatibility for a full tool-by-tool matrix.

  • Dominant workarounds

    • Symlinks

      • Put skills in ~/.agents/skills/, then symlink into ~/.claude/skills/. Multiple practitioners recommend this, including an SSW engineering rule (ssw.com.au/rules/symlink-agents-to-claude) and a dedicated blog post (wow.pjh.is).

    • Sync tooling

      • skillshare ("One source, every agent") syncs skills from a single source to 60+ agent tools.
      • rulesync takes a broader scope: rules, commands, subagents, and MCP config in addition to skills, targeting the same set of tools.

  • Why convergence is slow

    • The spec defines what goes inside a skill file, not where the directory lives. Vendors have pre-existing conventions they cannot rename without breaking existing users. Adopting .agents/skills/ is an additive second lookup, not a rename — which makes adoption optional and therefore incremental.

  • Current state (mid-2026)

    • The dominant pattern in the practitioner community:
      • 1. Author skills once, in .agents/skills/ (or ~/.agents/skills/ for user-level)
      • 2. Symlink into vendor-specific directories for tools that don't yet scan .agents/skills/ natively
      • 3. Use a sync tool (skillshare or rulesync) for multi-agent teams or repos with many targets
      • 4. Watch for vendor convergence as GitHub Copilot's official support normalizes the interoperability path