Skills in subdirectory .claude/skills/ not discovered in monorepo

Bug: Skills in subdirectory .claude/skills/ not discovered in monorepo

Environment

• Claude Code: 2.1.39 (desktop app)
• macOS (Darwin 25.4.0)

Monorepo layout

tribe-docs/                  # <-- git root
  .claude/
    launch.json
  tribe-designer/
    .claude/
      skills/
        impeccable/SKILL.md  # user-invocable: true
        ux-designer/SKILL.md
        ux-ds-translator/SKILL.md
      settings.local.json
      launch.json
  tribe-be/
    .claude/
      ...
  tribe-exec/
  tribe-pm/

Steps to reproduce

1. cd tribe-docs/tribe-designer
2. claude (starts a new session)
3. Type / to see available skills

Expected

Skills from tribe-designer/.claude/skills/ appear in the / menu, per the docs:

When you work with files in subdirectories, Claude Code automatically discovers skills from nested .claude/skills/ directories. This supports monorepo setups where packages have their own skills.

Actual

No project skills appear. Only global/personal and Anthropic-provided skills are listed.

Why this matters

In a monorepo with multiple independent projects, each project has its own .claude/skills/. The alternatives all have significant downsides:

• Symlinks at git root: every project sees every other project's skills
• Submodules: adds daily workflow friction (recursive clones, pointer bumps)
• Separate git repos: loses unified history across projects
• Editing a file first: not a viable UX for skill discovery on session start

The documented nested discovery would solve this cleanly, but it doesn't seem to work when launching from a subdirectory.