Bug Report: Skills in Symlinked Directories Not Detected After Cursor Restart

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Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Agent Skills stored in ~/.cursor/skills/ via symbolic links are not detected by Cursor after an IDE restart, even though the symlinks are valid and the target files are accessible. Re-creating the symlinks (without changing anything else) makes Cursor recognize the skills again.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Create a skills directory with SKILL.md files outside of ~/.cursor/:

    mkdir -p /some/path/my-skills/brainstorming
# Create valid SKILL.md file

  2. Create symbolic links in ~/.cursor/skills/:

    mkdir -p ~/.cursor/skills
ln -s /some/path/my-skills/brainstorming ~/.cursor/skills/brainstorming

  3. Verify symlinks work correctly:

    cat ~/.cursor/skills/brainstorming/SKILL.md  # Works fine

  4. Open Cursor - skills may or may not be detected initially

  5. Close and restart Cursor completely

  6. Skills are no longer visible in Cursor’s skill list

  7. Re-create the symbolic links (same target, same location):

    rm ~/.cursor/skills/brainstorming
ln -s /some/path/my-skills/brainstorming ~/.cursor/skills/brainstorming

  8. Skills are now visible again (sometimes requires Reload Window)

Expected Behavior

  • Cursor should detect skills in symlinked directories after restart
  • Symlinked skills should behave the same as non-symlinked skills
  • No need to re-create symlinks after each restart

Operating System

Linux

Version Information

  • OS: Linux (WSL2) - 5.15.167.4-microsoft-standard-WSL2
    Version: 2.4.21 (user setup)
    VSCode Version: 1.105.1
    Commit: dc8361355d709f306d5159635a677a571b277bc0
    Date: 2026-01-22T16:57:59.675Z
    Build Type: Stable
    Release Track: Default
    Electron: 39.2.7
    Chromium: 142.0.7444.235
    Node.js: 22.21.1
    V8: 14.2.231.21-electron.0
    OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26100
  • Shell: bash

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

2 Likes
3

Hey, thanks for the report. This is a known issue. Cursor doesn’t follow symlinks yet when indexing skills (and rules too). The team is aware.

Related reports:

Other users say symlinks in the project-level .cursor/skills (in the project root) seem to work in v2.4.21, but symlinks in the home directory ~/.cursor/skills don’t. WSL might behave differently, but it’s worth trying.

Workaround for now: copy the files directly instead of using symlinks until it’s fixed.

4

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