[BUG] Skills gone from desktop navrail and context rail after 1.30096.5 — both skills-dashboard GrowthBook flags cached false

Description

After updating the macOS desktop app to 1.30096.5, the Skills entry disappeared from the navigation rail, and the Skills row disappeared from the context rail. Skills themselves still load and invoke correctly — only the UI surfaces are gone.

On this machine both skills-dashboard GrowthBook flags are cached false, which appears to be the gate.

Environment

• Desktop app: 1.30096.5 (com.anthropic.claudefordesktop), installed 2026-08-14 22:05
• Claude Code CLI: 2.1.220
• OS: macOS (Darwin 25.5.0)
• Skills present: 142 under ~/.claude/skills/, plus 14 claude.ai account skills, plus plugin and built-in skills

Symptoms

1. Navrail: the Skills entry is no longer present. It was there before the 2026-08-14 update and disappeared immediately after. (User-observed; I could not screenshot the app to confirm independently — see note below.)
2. Context rail: no Skills row appears. Per #85439 a Skills row is normally part of the context breakdown, so its absence looks like a second symptom rather than intended behavior.

Evidence

~/.claude.json → cachedGrowthBookFeatures:

"claude_code_skills_dashboard_enabled_cli": false,
"tengu_skills_dashboard_enabled": false

The file was last written 2026-08-17 16:07, i.e. these are freshly refetched values, not a stale cache. Restarting the app re-fetches the same false, so there is no local workaround.

These are the same two flag names identified in #77740 as gating skills-dashboard functionality.

What still works

This appears to be confined to the UI surfaces. Verified on this machine:

• All 142 filesystem skills load and are listed to the model
• /skill-name invocation works
• All 14 claude.ai account skills report enabled: true
• No skill-disabling keys in settings.json or settings.local.json

Notably, 0 of the 142 skills use disable-model-invocation: true — which is what spares this setup from the more severe failure mode in #77740, where skills carrying that frontmatter become invisible to explicit slash-command invocation while the flag is off (reported there as 17 of 48 skills lost). Any user in this flag state who does use that frontmatter would silently lose those skills.

Ask

1. Confirm whether the navrail Skills entry and the context-rail Skills row are intentionally gated behind claude_code_skills_dashboard_enabled_cli / tengu_skills_dashboard_enabled.
2. If the gating is unintended for users who already have skills installed, restore the surfaces for them.
3. If it is intentional, consider surfacing something — the current behavior gives no indication that a feature flag removed the UI, which sends users to check their skills directory, settings, and plugin config for a problem that isn't there.

Note on verification

I am Claude Code, filing this at the user's request. The flag values, version numbers, file timestamps, skill counts, and disable-model-invocation audit above are all machine-verified on this host. The two UI symptoms are user-reported: I attempted to screenshot the app to confirm them directly, but computer-use access to Claude's own window is permanently refused by design, so I have no way to observe the navrail myself.

Related

• #77740 — same two flags gating skills-dashboard behavior
• #85439 — references the context-rail Skills row
• #77503, #64466 — desktop Skills panel not showing local ~/.claude/skills/
• #79054, #71536, #49942 — prior instances of nav entries disappearing after desktop updates