Local plugin not loading commands

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Local (custom) plugin installed.
I can see the plugin installed in cursor settings and I can see the list of skills and commands loaded.

However, inside the chat, after slash / no command appears.
If i type the exact name of the command, the command is executed without any shorcut.

What I want is the slash shortcut to work properly for local plugins

Steps to Reproduce

create a local plugin, install.
Type /mycommand in the chat → the shorcut does not work

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

Version: 3.4.20
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 0cf8b06883f54e26bb4f0fb8647c9500ccb43310
Date: 2026-05-15T02:26:10.351Z
Layout: editor
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 39.8.1
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.22.1
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 25.4.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Sometimes - I can sometimes use Cursor

Hey, this is a known bug. Plugin commands load, but the slash menu keeps a stale cache until you reload the window. We’re tracking the issue, but I can’t share an ETA for a fix yet.

Workaround: reload the window via Cmd+Shift+P → Developer: Reload Window or Cmd+Shift+R. After that, / should pick up the plugin commands.

Similar reports for context: Skills visible in Settings but not appearing as slash commands in Agent chat and Slash command suggestions disappear after conversation starts

If the commands still don’t show up after a reload, let me know and we can dig deeper.

Hi Dean, thanks for the answer.

The commands are not showing after the reload window

Thanks for the screenshot and video. To narrow this down, can you try typing /analyst or /architect in the chat? Those are names from the 70 subagents listed on this plugin’s Settings page. Two possible outcomes:

  • They show up in autocomplete → only this plugin’s commands are missing
  • They also don’t show up → the whole plugin is missing from the slash menu, not just commands

Either way it’s a real bug worth escalating on our side, but your result tells us the scope.

Also, please try fully quitting Cursor with Cmd+Q and reopening it - not the same as Reload Window. Some slash menu state is cached to disk and survives a reload, while a full restart reloads it from scratch. If the command shows up after Cmd+Q, the cache was the cause.

agents works…

To narrow down:
a) agents: ok
b) commands: nok, installed but does not appear on chat “slash”
c) skills: not showing in the installed plugin. Weird. Should have.. we have 100+ of skills

OK, I’ve got a hypothesis on the second part, skills.

Your structure is <plugin-root>/skills/context/llm-wiki-ingest/SKILL.md. So between skills/ and the skill folder, there’s an extra context/ level. By the standard plugin convention, a skill is expected directly under skills/, like skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md, without intermediate categories. Subagents and commands in the same plugin are detected because they have a fixed depth of one level, but for skills/ the plugin loader most likely doesn’t scan recursively.

As a test, can you take one skill and place it flat like <plugin-root>/skills/llm-wiki-ingest/SKILL.md remove context/, then fully restart Cursor using Cmd+Q. If it shows up in Settings, the issue is the nesting. Then you’ve got two options:

  • Flatten all 100+ skills directly under skills/
  • Wait until we add support for nested plugin skills, if we confirm it’s not supported right now

And for commands, try Cmd+Q specifically, not Reload Window. Some state is cached to disk and survives a reload, and a full quit clears it. If after restart / starts showing commands, we’ll confirm it’s that known bug. If not, we’ll dig deeper.

Also, can you share the SKILL.md frontmatter the first lines between --- just in case, so we can rule out an issue with name or description.

skills/ the plugin loader most likely doesn’t scan recursively."

Correct. I tested it, and it worked without sub-levels (flat structure). This should be documented, because it works when the skills are inside the repository, but it does not work when the skills are inside a plugin.

About the commands, same error. I am testing with the example command from cursor documentation just to make sure there is no format error.

btw1, I do see the built in commands from cursor.

btw2: is there a bug number I can follow to track the status of the correction?

Hey, thanks for testing it through.

Skills nesting: good find. You’re right it’s not documented right now. I’ll flag it to the docs team so the plugin layout is clear flat skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md, no intermediate folders. If you want to keep your category structure on disk, you will need to flatten only the skills/ folder for now until we add recursive scanning for plugin skills.

Commands: since the example command from our docs also does not show up in /, that rules out a format issue and matches the cache bug I mentioned earlier. One thing to double check is a full quit and reopen using Cmd+Q, not just Reload Window. Some state is cached to disk and can survive a reload, but it gets cleared on a full restart. Can you confirm you tried that? If commands still do not show after Cmd+Q, then we are looking at something a bit different than the known cache race.

About a tracking number: we do not share internal issue IDs externally, but this thread is linked to the internal report, so any update will land here. Subscribe to the thread and you will get notified when there is news.

thanks, i will subscribe to this thread

ps: full quit Crd+Q also do not work

this last cursor version downgraded even more.

Now, I cannot see the plugin at all in cursor settings. It was working before…

I can see it in the agent cli, but not in the IDE

At last:
I can still see the Claude plugins in the agent CLI, even though I have disabled the setting below.

image

Version: 3.6.31
VS Code Extension API: 1.105.1
Commit: 81fcf2931d7687b4ff3f3017858d0c6dee7e2a60
Date: 2026-05-31T17:46:29.630Z
Layout: editor
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 39.8.1
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.22.1
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
xterm.js: 6.1.0-beta.220
OS: Darwin arm64 25.4.0

Thanks for the update and the screenshots. This looks like a different symptom than the original slash menu issue. Now the plugin isn’t showing up in Settings > Plugins at all, even though it shows up in the agent CLI. Let’s dig in.

One important detail I noticed: in your screenshot, the toggle Include third-party Plugins, Skills, and other configs is turned off. My guess is that this is what hid the local plugin from the Settings UI. Can you check these?

  1. Turn the toggle back ON, then run Cmd+Shift+P → Developer: Reload Window. Does the plugin show up again in Settings > Plugins?
  2. Confirm the plugin path is ~/.cursor/plugins/local/<plugin-name>/ and that it contains .cursor-plugin/plugin.json.

If the plugin comes back after turning the toggle on, then that’s the cause and it’s a bug. That toggle shouldn’t hide your local Cursor plugins. If it still doesn’t come back, we’ll go deeper. We might need to temporarily roll back to an older version to unblock you.

About the CLI: the agent CLI currently loads configs from ~/.claude / ~/.codex regardless of this IDE toggle, so turning the toggle off in the IDE won’t affect the CLI. This is a known limitation and there’s already an open feature request here: Toggle (or allowlist) for Agent Skills roots — stop loading ~/.claude/skills and ~/.codex/skills when I only want .cursor / .agents

Send back what you see for steps 1 and 2 and we’ll know if this is the same bug or a new one.

same error after reload. This was working on the previous version

Thanks, the screenshots helped. Since the Include third-party Plugins, Skills, and other configs toggle is already on, and the plugin still didn’t show up after Reload Window, it’s not that. Let’s rule that out.

It looks like the 3.6.31 update broke local plugin discovery in the Settings UI, even though the agent CLI still loads it. Since it worked on the previous version, this is a regression and we’ll dig in.

Quick unblock: you can temporarily roll back to a version where the plugin showed up, like 3.4.x, since it worked there.

To go deeper, please share two things:

  1. The exact plugin path. Please confirm it’s ~/.cursor/plugins/local/<plugin-name>/ and that it contains .cursor-plugin/plugin.json. Also paste the plugin.json contents, at least the first fields like name and displayName.
  2. Plugin load logs. Open Cmd+Shift+P → Developer: Toggle Developer Tools → Console tab, then check if there are any errors that include the word plugin during startup or after reload. A screenshot or the error text would help a lot.

Since this is a different symptom from the original thread issue (the slash menu), I suggest starting a new thread for this so it’s easier to track the Settings plugin missing issue.