Unable to access plugin skills in Cursor

Support Bug Reports
1

I actually am having an Issue using Plugins, I installed the Vercel Plugin aswell as the Cursor Team Kit was excited to try them out and I cant seem to access the skills.

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Cursor 2.5: Plugins
No skill, rule, command, subagent access in Plugins - only MCP
4

hi @Tristan could you please provide more information? I have tried to reproduce it and have no issues with adding the Vercel Plugin and accessing Skills on Nightly.

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Here is the information we would need to investigate:

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Select an option

  • Cursor IDE
  • Cursor CLI
  • Background Agent (GitHub, Slack, Web, Linear)
  • BugBot
  • Somewhere else…

Describe the Bug

A clear and concise description of what the bug is.

Steps to Reproduce

How can you reproduce this bug?
We have a much better chance at fixing issues if we can reproduce them!

Expected Behavior

What is meant to happen here that isn’t working correctly?

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

.jpg, .png, .gif, .mp4, .mov

Operating System

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  • Windows 10/11
  • MacOS
  • Linux

Version Information

Provide IDE version OR CLI version depending on your selection above

For Cursor IDE: Menu → About Cursor → Copy
For Cursor CLI: Run “agent about” in your terminal

IDE:
Version: 2.xx.x
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: …

CLI:
CLI Version 2026.01.17-d239e66

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Model name: Sonnet 4, Tab…

For AI issues: add Request ID with privacy disabled

Request ID: f9a7046a-279b-47e5-ab48-6e8dc12daba1
Also for Background Agent issues post the ID: bc-…

Additional Information

Add any other context about the problem here

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Select an option

  • Yes - Cursor is unusable
  • Sometimes - I can sometimes use Cursor
  • No - Cursor works, but with this issue
5

I have the same issue. I tested on 2 computers and they all share same issues.

6

Hey Condor!
Thanks for getting back to me I was able to pin point that this is a Windows only Issue. I tried Cursor on MacOS and had no Issues (Just as you did).
The issue on Windows is that the skills and commands never show up in chat. Even asking the model about what skills it has It cannot find the skills from the plugins.
If you have a windows machine give it a go you should see the issue instantly. I tried on multiple windows machines and non of them have plugins working.

Appears In

Cursor IDE

Bug Description

No access to plugin skills/commands

Reproduction Steps

  • Enable any plugin (Vercel)
  • Open AI Chat
  • Attempt to use command (/vercel-deploy)
  • Command is not Recognized and doesn’t show in context menu

Expected Behavior

Command is recognized and able to be used

OS

Windows 11 (Full Details below)

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9

This seems to be indeed an issue on Windows, and the team is aware already and looking for a fix.

10

Hi, I’ve figured out the issue, is because of a check regarding path separators on Windows, the file separator is hardcoded to check / instead of \ on Windows. Please look at the details below:

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Local plugin loading (~/.cursor/plugins/local/)

Describe the Bug

When a local plugin defines agents, skills, commands, and mcpServers in its plugin.json, only the MCP server is discovered and loaded on Windows. Agents, skills, and commands are silently ignored, they don’t appear in the UI at all.

The root cause is a path separator mismatch in the plugin component discovery. When Cursor resolves the paths for subdirectories like agents/ or skills/, it validates that the resolved path doesn’t escape the plugin directory. That validation compares using forward slashes (/), but on Windows, path.resolve() produces backslash paths (C:\Users\...). The check fails for every subdirectory, and each component is silently rejected.

MCP servers work because their discovery goes through a different code path that doesn’t perform this path escape validation at all.

The error being thrown internally is "Path escapes plugin directory: <path>", but it’s swallowed, nothing shows in the UI or developer console to indicate why components weren’t loaded. The only visible symptom is that MCP servers appear and everything else doesn’t.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Create a local plugin at ~/.cursor/plugins/local/my-plugin/ with this plugin.json:
{
  "name": "my-plugin",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "Test plugin",
  "agents": "agents/",
  "skills": "skills/",
  "commands": "commands/",
  "mcpServers": ".mcp.json"
}
  1. Create the corresponding directories with valid agent/skill/command files and a valid .mcp.json
  2. Restart Cursor on Windows
  3. Check MCP server status — it loads
  4. Check agents panel — empty (agent not loaded)
  5. Check skills — not loaded
  6. Check commands — not loaded

Expected Behavior

All plugin components should load, not just MCP servers. The path escape validation should handle both forward and backward slashes, since path.resolve() on Windows returns backslash paths.

At minimum, if a component fails to load, it should surface a visible warning rather than failing silently.

Why MCP but not agents/skills/commands?

This confused me for a while. The MCP server configuration is discovered through a separate code path that reads the .mcp.json file directly and doesn’t run the path escape check. Every other component type (agents, skills, commands, hooks) goes through the path validation that breaks on Windows backslashes.

So the inconsistency is a strong diagnostic signal: if your MCP server works but agents/skills/commands don’t, and you’re on Windows, this is likely the cause.

Workaround

None that I’ve found from the plugin side. The plugin.json paths are correct, the directory structure is correct, and the files are valid. The issue is in Cursor’s internal path comparison logic. It would need a fix along the lines of normalizing path separators before the startsWith comparison, or checking both / and \\.

Before

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After

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Operating System

Windows 10 (10.0.26300)

Version Information

Version: 2.6.3 (user setup)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: a99a391b7c47a4c4b862ec96a22513dbb50780d0
Date: 2026-02-27T19:54:46.318Z
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Nightly
Electron: 39.6.0
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.22.0
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26300

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes, the plugin’s MCP server works, but agents, skills, and commands defined in plugin.json are completely non-functional on Windows. The only option is to scatter those files into global directories (~/.cursor/rules/, ~/.cursor/skills/, etc.) instead of keeping them packaged in the plugin, which defeats the purpose of the plugin system.

2 Likes
12

@condor If you could take a look at this and highlight it to whoever is looking at it, so that it could be fixed sooner, thank you so much!

1 Like