SKILL.md frontmatter validator missing 'allowed-tools' and other valid attributes

Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Mar 12, 2026 by mpiroc Closed Mar 16, 2026

Summary

The SKILL.md frontmatter validator reports a false-positive warning for allowed-tools and likely several other attributes that are valid and functional.

Diagnostic message:

Attribute 'allowed-tools' is not supported in skill files. Supported: argument-hint, compatibility, description, disable-model-invocation, license, metadata, name, user-invocable.

Details

The Claude Code native binary correctly parses and uses allowed-tools from SKILL.md frontmatter (visible in the bundled code as BR(q["allowed-tools"])allowedTools), but the validation allowlist that generates IDE diagnostics does not include it.

The same code also parses these attributes which may also be missing from the allowlist:

  • context
  • agent
  • arguments
  • when_to_use
  • version
  • model
  • paths

Reproduction

  1. Create a SKILL.md with allowed-tools in the frontmatter:

```yaml
---
name: my-skill
description: Example skill
allowed-tools:

  • Bash
  • Read

---
```

  1. Open the file in VS Code with the Claude Code extension
  2. Observe the warning diagnostic on the allowed-tools lines

Expected behavior

No warning should be emitted for allowed-tools or other attributes that are parsed and used by Claude Code.

Environment

  • Claude Code extension version: 2.1.74
  • VS Code (Remote - Codespaces)

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