Skills in your CLI

Every skill you pin appears in Claude Code, Codex, Grok and AGY as an ordinary skill, and stays current by itself. On paid plans, any other readable skill loads on demand.

Where they go

The client puts your skills into one skills folder per CLI, chosen so that no CLI sees a skill twice: ~/.claude/skills (Claude Code), ~/.agents/skills (Codex), ~/.grok/skills (Grok) and ~/.gemini/config/skills (AGY's desktop app, CLI and IDE). Each skill appears under its own name, so you can also call it yourself, for example /commit-lint in Claude Code.

What is in the folder

A small lazy skill: the skill's name, its signed description, and a line that loads the skill itself with skilvault read when your CLI uses it. The skill's instructions and files are not copied there. So what your CLI follows is always the latest, signature-checked version, with your notes, and nothing on disk can drift out of date or be edited without the client noticing.

Keeping them current

Every session start refreshes the folders in the background, at most every 30 minutes, and skilvault sync does it on demand. A skill you add on My skills appears at the next refresh, and one you remove disappears. Your own skills and links are never touched, even when one has the same name as a SkilVault skill.

Older copies

Before September 2026 the client could copy whole skills into your CLI folders (the Also install skills locally option). Those copies are replaced by lazy skills the first time the new client syncs. In case you edited one, each is moved to ~/.local/share/skilvault/retired/ instead of being deleted; skilvault doctor tells you how many are there.