User-level skills (~/.claude/skills) not available in Desktop app's Home/Cowork sessions

Status Open
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 0 comments · opened Jul 23, 2026

Project-scoped Claude Code sessions (CLI or desktop app opened against a project folder) read skills from ~/.claude/skills/, so a custom skill installed there shows up correctly.

The desktop app's Home/Cowork sessions use a separate, Anthropic-managed skill bundle at ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/local-agent-mode-sessions/skills-plugin/.../skills/, gated by its own manifest.json that only lists Anthropic-authored skills (pptx, docx, xlsx, pdf, morning, schedule, etc.). User-level skills from ~/.claude/skills/ are not merged into this list.

Result: a custom skill (e.g. a personal pptx-harvard skill) has to be manually copied between locations to work in both contexts, and there's no supported way to add it to the Home/Cowork skill set at all.

Request: let Home/Cowork sessions within a project also read user-level skills from ~/.claude/skills/, so a skill installed once is available everywhere, project CLI sessions and Home/Cowork sessions alike, instead of requiring manual duplication.

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