Cursor doesn't know new skills aren's saved

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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Had a strange loop today where i was having cursor make new skills for itself, but when i tried to use them later, they weren’t there. This is what i found out:

Agent writes to ~/.cursor/skills-cursor/ appear to succeed but are silently discarded; no error; no indication that this is the managed (read-only-for-user-skills) folder. User-scope skills require ~/.cursor/skills/ which doesn’t exist by default and isn’t discoverable from the presence of skills-cursor/.
Cursor itself doesn’t know that it cant write into skills-cursor.

Current behaviour: phantom persistence, silent pruning, and a confusingly-named sibling folder (skills-cursor vs skills) that looks like it should be the user-scope location.
Compounding factor: agent-shell file writes from inside the Cursor sandbox sometimes return success for paths that don’t persist to disk — writing a probe file and reading it back via cmd /c (outside sandbox) is the only reliable way to detect it.

Steps to Reproduce

Tell Cursor to create a new skill. See if and where it saves it.

Expected Behavior

You’d expect either: (a) writes to skills-cursor\ to fail loudly, or (b) the manager to leave unknown entries alone, or (c) Cursor to auto-create ~/.cursor/skills/ on first launch so the correct path is obvious.

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Version Information

Cursor 3.1.14

For AI issues: which model did you use?

opus 4.7

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

5

Thanks for the report @jphion!

Cursor’s built-in /create-skill skill has explicit guidance to not write to ~/.cursor/skills-cursor/ – that directory is reserved for Cursor’s managed built-in skills. The correct location for user-created skills is ~/.cursor/skills/. From the skill:

IMPORTANT: Never create skills in ~/.cursor/skills-cursor/. This directory is reserved for Cursor’s internal built-in skills and is managed automatically by the system.

Could you share the prompt you used that led to the skill being created there? That would help us understand whether /create-skill wasn’t triggered at all, or if the agent saw the guidance and ignored it. A request ID or conversation ID would also be helpful if you have one.

In the meantime, you can invoke it directly by typing /create-skill in chat – it will walk you through creating the skill in the right place (~/.cursor/skills/ for personal skills, .cursor/skills/ for project-scoped ones).

7

Hi! I was converting existing skill files from a colleague’s linux machine to work on my windows one. Conversation id: 8b4b8980-297f-430d-9455-17e6e7c8255d