[Feature Request] Support standard `.github/skills/` directory for agent skills

Or .agents/skills

There is a discussion in the agent skills standard git repo on what the standard directory for skills should be and the consensus is .agents/skills/

https://github.com/agentskills/agentskills/issues/15

the consensus is .agents/skills/

Yes, please. I have symlink fatigue

Yes please.

For sure no „standard“ with „github“ in the pathname!

Please, finally .agent/skills

Looking at https://github.com/agentskills/agentskills/issues/15 Claude Code now seems to be the only major coding agent without support for the .agents/skills folder.

please no .github by default, simply using .agent/skills would be awesome! Hopefully we get it for claude code soon as well

@egils it should be .agents (plural), that's the standard.

It’s a bit awkward to define the official spec for the entire ecosystem, only to have your own product be the one that doesn't follow it. I guess reading the documentation is optional when you’re the one who wrote it?

Please at least support .agents/skills.

Any progress on supporting the .agents/skills directory? This is an incredibly frustrating state to be in for a team that uses multiple CLI tools.

I can't believe this isn't a thing, I'm in shock. I thought I screwed something up but CC really doesn't have automatic support for .agents?

I'm surprised this is an issue. I just want to track my skills using github in my code directory like all the rest of my code, not .claude or .agents. I followed 2 closed feature requests which linked to related requests to get here. This ticket under represents how many people have requested this feature.

It almost seems like they don't want to make it easy to move from one agent system to another...

I've also created an issue because Claude is unusable since my cognitive map resides in ~/.agents/, and I'd rather stop using AI than duplicate content simply because a company is vendor-only instead of being more customizable or supporting universal paths. .github wouldn't be acceptable either because it would be another vendor and not a universal path.

@Aesthermortis indeed.

Also, how many tokens are we wasting on CLAUDE.md and .claude/skills symlinks?

Please, Anthropic - support AGENTS.md and .agents/skills 🙏

+1 — concrete team use case for a configurable skills path.

Our team distributes a shared set of Claude Code skills (MCP-server operational guides, internal workflow helpers) from a single git repo that every engineer clones. The goal is simple: a git pull on that repo should update everyone's active skills, with the repo as the single source of truth — no per-machine copying or drift.

Today the only mechanism that achieves "git pull = live" for an always-on personal skill is a per-skill symlink from ~/.claude/skills/<name> into the repo's working tree, e.g.:

ln -s ~/git/<team-repo>/.claude/skills/<skill> ~/.claude/skills/<skill>

That works, but it's brittle as a distribution mechanism:

• It's per-skill and manual — every engineer re-creates a symlink for each skill, and new skills don't appear until someone adds another link.
• A symlink tracks the repo's checked-out branch working tree, so a stray git checkout silently changes everyone's skills.
• Same-named skills shadow rather than merge, so layering a thin personal skill over a team one isn't possible.
• The marketplace/plugin path copies skills into ~/.claude/plugins/cache instead of tracking the working tree, so it isn't git-pull-live either.

A first-class configurable skills source would remove all of this. Either of these would solve our case:

1. A settings key (e.g. additionalSkillsPaths: ["~/git/team-repo/.claude/skills"]) and/or a CLAUDE_-prefixed env var pointing at one or more extra skills directories, or
2. The standard .github/skills/ discovery this issue proposes, as long as it's loaded from a directory the team controls in-repo.

For reference, this has been requested several times and the dedicated variants were closed without shipping: #18621 (closed not_planned), #22902 and #12541 (closed as duplicates/locked). This issue (#16345) is the live one, so consolidating support here.

To use Claude I had to duplicate my skills by breaking SSOT, DRY, etc. This makes me upset because everything is in ~.agents/ which makes it difficult to use Claude with other AIs at the same time. This might be a bit selfish on Anthopics' part.

I do not agree with the comment above because .github would be another vendor not trackable by other AIs, which would create the same friction. AIs should use a universal route, and if they want they can have their own but I am not going to use them as a vendor only.

@Aesthermortis agree

This might be a bit selfish on Anthopics' part.

Yep, quite selfish. We're also paying for this overhead out of our own pocket- by having to maintain .claude/ duplicates/symlinks, Claude has to think about why `.agents' exists on every turn.

This is one of the reasons why I switched to Codex for my daily driver.

~/.agents/skills/ pls