Skills added during a chat are unavailable until a new chat is created

Support Bug Reports
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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cloud Agent (GitHub, Slack, Web, Linear)

Describe the Bug

Summary

Cursor appears to resolve the available skill list when a chat is created. If a new skill is added afterward, that chat cannot discover or invoke it as a skill. Reopening the chat does not refresh the list.

The current workaround is to start a new chat, which is awkward when the skill was created as a result of work done in the existing conversation.

Why this matters

Creating skills during an active session is a pretty natural workflow. The current behavior means the chat that helped create a skill cannot test or use it.

A few common cases:

  • An agent discovers a useful project-specific workflow and writes a skill for it.
  • You refine instructions during a long debugging or implementation session and want to turn them into a skill without losing the current context.
  • You install or pull new project skills after a chat has already started.
  • Another branch or teammate adds a skill while you have an active chat open.

Starting over works, but you lose the conversation state that made the skill useful in the first place.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Start a chat with an agent.
  2. Work through a task and identify a repeatable process worth turning into a skill.
  3. Create .cursor/skills/my-skill/SKILL.md.
  4. Try to use /my-skill in the same chat.
  5. The skill is unavailable because it did not exist when the chat started.
  6. Start a new chat and the skill appears.

Expected Behavior

Ideally Cursor would refresh the skill catalog when skill files change.

A manual command would also solve most of the problem, for example:

/reload-skills

That could rescan the configured skill directories and update the available skill list without creating a new chat.

Automatic file watching would be nicer, but a manual refresh would already remove most of the friction.

Operating System

Windows 10/11
MacOS
Linux

Version Information

3.17.8 (Universal)

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

5

Hey, thanks for the detailed report, you read the behavior correctly. The list of skills the agent sees is fixed when the chat starts, so a skill added during the chat won’t show up in that list until you start a new chat. This is expected behavior by design, not something broken in your setup. The catalog also refreshes when a long chat goes through compaction or summarization.

A couple things that can help right now, without starting a new chat:

  • The / menu picks up new skills within a few seconds. Choosing a skill there attaches it to your message even in an already open chat.
  • If the skill doesn’t show up in the / menu, this can happen when it’s the very first skill in a newly created skills folder. Reload Window can help Cmd+Shift+P then type “Reload Window”.
  • As a fallback, you can ask the agent to read the new SKILL.md directly from its path.

Being able to refresh the skills list mid chat without starting a new chat is a reasonable request. If there’s an update, I’ll post it here.

One quick question: when you tried /my-skill in step 4, did it not appear in the / menu at all, or did it appear but the agent didn’t pick it up? That’ll help confirm if this is the separate case with a freshly created folder.