[FEATURE] Desktop: no way to disable anthropic-skills:* skills in Code tab sessions

Status Open
Reported on v2.1.295
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 1 comment · opened Oct 10, 2026

Problem

In the Claude Desktop Code tab, every session (and every subagent) gets the anthropic-skills plugin with 17 Anthropic skills (docx, pdf, pptx, xlsx, morning, google-workspace, setup-claude, …). Their descriptions take ~9k characters (~2.5k tokens) of the skill listing in every session, and there is no way to turn any of them off.

What I tried — none of it removes the skills

  • "syncClaudeAiSkills": false in ~/.claude/settings.json — moves ~/.claude/skills/synced/ to .trash/ (works for the terminal CLI), but Desktop still injects the anthropic-skills plugin.
  • skillOverrides — documented as not applying to plugin skills.
  • permissions.deny: ["Skill(anthropic-skills:morning)"] — blocks invocation only; the skill stays in the listing.
  • Customize → Skills and Customize → Plugins in the Desktop app — the built-in skills are not listed there, so there is no toggle.
  • Turned off Settings → Capabilities → "Cloud code execution and file creation", renamed %APPDATA%\Claude\local-agent-mode-sessions\skills-plugin\ and restarted Desktop: it re-created the plugin with the same 18 skills, all "enabled": true in manifest.json.

Request

A supported way to disable individual anthropic-skills:* skills (or the whole plugin) for Code tab sessions — e.g. honour skillOverrides / enabledPlugins for this plugin, or list these skills with toggles in Customize → Skills.

Related

#26838 (locked; closed as a duplicate of #50631, whose fix covers skillOverrides for regular skills, not the Desktop plugin), #93318.

Environment

  • Claude Desktop 2.31226.1.0 (Microsoft Store), Windows 11 Pro
  • Claude Code 2.1.295

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