Installing skills installs them as Rule, instead of Skills.
Steps to Reproduce
Install a skill via terminal (eg. npx skills add vercel-labs/agent-skills@vercel-react-best-practices) → project/global → symlink/copy.
Result: skills are installed as a rule
Expected Behavior
Skill is installed under skills (for both symlink and manual copy)
Hey, thanks for the report. This is a known issue. Skills installed via npx skills add sometimes show up under Rules instead of showing correctly under Skills.
A couple things to check:
Can you share a screenshot of how the installed skill appears in Cursor Settings > Rules? That’ll help confirm what’s happening. Whether it shows up as a Rules entry or it’s just ending up in the wrong directory.
Which install method did you choose, Symlink or Copy? If you used Symlink, try reinstalling and choose Copy:
I see the screenshot. Yep, even after using the Copy method, the skill still shows up under Rules, not under Skills. So it’s not a symlink issue.
Can you check a couple things?
Go to your file system and see where the skill was installed. There should be a folder at %USERPROFILE%\.cursor\skills\ Are there files there, or did they end up in the rules directory?
Share the contents of the installed file, specifically the frontmatter at the top of the .md file. It might be missing the right metadata to be classified as a skill.
Okay, when installing the skill globally it ends up in \%USERPROFILE\.agents\skills\vercel-react-best-practices\. The SKILL.md file contains:
-–
name: vercel-react-best-practices
description: React and Next.js performance optimization guidelines from Vercel Engineering. This skill should be used when writing, reviewing, or refactoring React/Next.js code to ensure optimal performance patterns. Triggers on tasks involving React components, Next.js pages, data fetching, bundle optimization, or performance improvements.
license: MIT
metadata:
author: vercel
version: “1.0.0”
-–
The %USERPROFILE%\.cursor\skills\ directory doesn’t exist (.cursor does though), if that helps.
Installing the skill in a project, puts it in \project-folder\.agents\skills\vercel-react-best-practices.
In both global and project install 2 rules are created, based on AGENTS.md and SKILL.md
I have the same issue. What worked as a temporary fix for me was moving the created skills from \project-folder\.agents\skills to \project-folder\.cursor\skillsthen they are recognized and work as expected.
