Hey, this is a known parity gap between the CLI and desktop. The CLI uses a narrower way to discover skills than the IDE:
- Nested skills (a
.cursor/skillsfolder inside subfolders) aren’t picked up by the CLI - Skills shipped via plugins aren’t registered in the CLI yet, see Cursor-agent CLI does not register skills from plugins (IDE does — parity gap)
- There’s no file watcher in the CLI, so skills added during a session won’t show up until you restart
Some cases are already fixed in newer CLI versions (loading ~/.cursor/skills, auto-trigger via natural language). You’re on 2026.04.17, so those fixes should apply.
To figure out which case you’re hitting, can you share:
- Where the skills that show up in desktop but not in CLI are located project
.cursor/skills, user~/.cursor/skills, plugin, nested - The output of
/skillsin your CLI session
Related thread: Cursor CLI don't see user skills just project ones