Newly added Agent Skills do not appear in existing chats (no in-chat skill reload)

Support Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

When I add a new Agent Skill while a chat is already open (e.g. under ~/.agents/skills/<name>/SKILL.md or project .agents/skills/), the existing Agent conversation does not pick it up.

The new skill often:

  • does not appear in the agent <available_skills> catalog for that conversation
  • may be missing from / autocomplete in the old chat
  • only becomes usable after opening a new chat, and sometimes only after Developer: Reload Window or fully quitting Cursor (Cmd+Q)

There is no documented way to reload / refresh skills inside an active chat.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Open an Agent chat in Cursor.
  2. Add a new personal skill (valid SKILL.md with frontmatter) under a discovered skills path.
  3. Stay in the same chat and try to use the new skill (via auto-selection, /skill-name, or checking available skills).
  4. Observe that the old chat still uses the previous skill catalog.
  5. Open a new Agent chat (and/or Reload Window) — the skill then appears.

(one workaround is to input skill in new chat and copy it back to old chat)

Expected Behavior

One of:

  • Hot-reload skill directories and refresh the in-chat skill catalog when skills are added/updated, or
  • Provide an explicit command (e.g. /reload-skills) that re-discovers skills and re-injects available-skills into the current conversation, or
  • Clearly document that skills are snapshotted at chat start and require a new chat.

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

Cursor: 3.10.20
Commit: 23b9fb205fe595ea2be29da7214e19762d037fc0
OS: macOS 26.5.1 (darwin 25.5.0)

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

5

Hey, thanks for the detailed report. This is mostly expected behavior, but there’s one nuance.

The skills catalog in <available_skills> is fixed when the chat starts and it does not get re-injected into an ongoing conversation. This is done to keep the prompt stable. So an existing chat will keep seeing the old set of skills, while a new chat will get the updated set.

What to do:

  • Open a new chat. This is the fastest option. The new skill will be available right away for auto-selection, /skill-name, and in <available_skills>. You don’t need any workaround like copying things back into the old chat. A new chat is enough.
  • Reload Window is only needed if the skill doesn’t show up in the / menu even in a new chat. In the classic IDE, the / menu sometimes doesn’t pick up a fresh skill due to a race when the directory or file is being created.

About the / menu specifically. If the new skill is not immediately visible in slash autocomplete until you reopen the menu or use Reload Window, that’s an actual bug and we’ve already tracked it. I can’t share an ETA for the fix yet.

I also noted the idea of hot reload or an explicit command like /reload-skills for the current chat. It’s tracked as an enhancement, but there’s no timeline.

Let me know if a new chat still doesn’t pick up the skill, and we’ll dig deeper.