Skills pane shows empty state during cloud-sync, indistinguishable from "no skills configured"

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
• [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

What happened

After a desktop app update (Windows), I opened Customise → Skills and saw an empty "Personal skills" list. I have ~10 personal skills synced to my account and they show fine on my other machine. A few minutes later they reappeared in the pane — apparently the client just hadn't finished pulling them from my account yet.

Why it's a problem

The empty pane is visually identical to "you have no personal skills." There's no spinner, no skeleton row, no "loading" text — so the user's only signal that sync is in progress is "wait and see if they show up." I went down a rabbit hole investigating local install paths, OneDrive backups, and a junctioned skills folder before realising the app simply hadn't synced yet.

Steps to reproduce

Sign in on a fresh machine, or trigger an app update that re-initialises local state.
Immediately open Customise → Skills before the cloud sync completes.
Pane shows empty "Personal skills" with no indication that a sync is in progress.
Environment

Proposed Solution

Show a loading state in the Skills list while the initial fetch is in flight — even a skeleton row plus "Loading your skills…" would distinguish "syncing" from "empty." If the fetch fails, surface that explicitly rather than falling through to an empty list.

Alternative Solutions

_No response_

Priority

Low - Nice to have

Feature Category

Interactive mode (TUI)

Use Case Example

Avoids confusion after updates.

Additional Context

OS: Windows 11 Pro
Claude Code desktop: Claude 1.5354.0 (9a9e3d) 2026-04-29T01:14:34.000Z
Repro consistency: seen once, on first launch after an update