Capability Skills

Skills

A skill is a skills/<name>/ directory with a SKILL.md (plus any assets) — a model-invocable capability the agent loads on demand. agentgear writes each as a loose, tag-owned <name>/SKILL.md in the target tool's skill root through one shared renderer.

13 backends serve skills. claude and copilot-cli carry them natively (the whole tree copies verbatim). The other 11 — crush, cursor, devin, droid, goose, kilo, kimi, kiro, openclaw, qwen-code, zed — render the SkillDir IR through the shared skillsdir renderer as a tag-owned <name>/SKILL.md.

Where each skill lands

harness	where written	notes
claude	skills/<name>/ (native)	SKILL.md is the one thing CC hot-reloads
copilot-cli	native, verbatim	live-proven (copilot skill list sees a plugin skill)
crush	~/.config/crush/skills/<name>/SKILL.md (user) · <project>/.crush/skills/<name>/SKILL.md (project)	tag-owned
cursor	~/.cursor/skills/<name>/SKILL.md (both scopes)	tag-owned
devin	shared ~/.agents/skills/<name>/SKILL.md	tag-owned; one of devin's native scan roots
droid	<base>/skills/<name>/SKILL.md (user + project)	tag-owned
goose	~/.agents/plugins/<plugin>/skills/<name>/SKILL.md	tag-owned, inside the plugin dir goose owns
kilo	<base>/skills/<name>/SKILL.md in every discovered config dir	tag-owned
kimi	{$KIMI_CODE_HOME|~/.kimi-code}/skills/<name>/SKILL.md	tag-owned
kiro	~/.kiro/skills/<name>/SKILL.md	tag-owned, auto-inherited by every agent
openclaw	~/.openclaw/skills/<name>/SKILL.md	tag-owned
qwen-code	{$QWEN_HOME|~/.qwen}/skills/<name>/SKILL.md (both scopes)	tag-owned
zed	~/.agents/skills/ (global) · <worktree>/.agents/skills/ (project, trust-gated)	tag-owned, 50 KB catalog budget

The shared .agents/skills/ convention

A cross-harness convention (pi's docs name it agentskills.io): amp, cline, crush, cursor, devin, goose, kimi, qwen-code, vscode-copilot, and zed each independently read ~/.agents/skills/ as a discovery root. devin and zed are the two agentgear writes into; the rest read it without agentgear writing there.

Gotchas

• Real but untranslated. amp, antigravity, augment, cline, codex, gemini, omp, opencode, pi, and vscode-copilot each have a skill surface agentgear does not write yet (the tool reads a SKILL.md root, just not one agentgear targets). These are open upgrades, not harness limits.
• A loose skills/foo.md is ignored. The directory level is required — a skill needs its own skills/<name>/ dir with a SKILL.md inside. See Plugin tree.
• Tag-owned means safe to remove. Each written SKILL.md carries an ownership tag, so remove and the retired-path sweep delete only agentgear's files; a user's same-named skill survives.

See also

• Capabilities — the index.
• Agent backends — the skillsdir renderer and adding a backend.
• Commands · Agents — the sibling surfaces.