Agent skill discovery paths
Agent skill discovery paths
One-line summary: Grok App Builder, Cursor, Cursor Cloud Agents, and Grok Bot do not share one skill-discovery path — .grok/skills, .cursor/skills, machine-local ~/.cursor/rules, and account User Rules are different loaders.
Vintage: 2026-08-23. First-party session log. One environment.
The insight
Telling an agent to read a skill pack is not the same as injecting the pack. grok-app-builder auto-lists .grok/skills/. cursor, Cursor Cloud Agents, and grok-bot coding agents auto-list .cursor/skills/, .agents/skills/, and user skill dirs — not .grok/skills/. Repo AGENTS.md can instruct a consult; it does not put the skill bodies on the available-skills list. Cloud rule-walk starts at /workspace and never reaches /home/ubuntu, so machine-local ~/.cursor/rules do not follow Cloud Agents. Account User Rules in Cursor Settings are the documented cloud-synced channel.
Evidence
- From 2026-08-23-session-cursor-paper-grok-app-builder-workflow: "Grok App Builder and Cursor do not share a skill-discovery path."
- From 2026-08-23-session-cursor-paper-grok-app-builder-workflow: "Cursor, Cursor Cloud Agents, and Grok Bot coding agents auto-list
.cursor/skills/,.agents/skills/, and user skill dirs — not.grok/skills/." - From 2026-08-23-session-cursor-paper-grok-app-builder-workflow: "
AGENTS.mdin the repo tells agents to consult Grok skills; it does not inject the skill bodies." - From 2026-08-23-session-cursor-paper-grok-app-builder-workflow: "Without a Read, the agent restyles from memory or Paper skills alone."
- From 2026-08-23-session-cursor-paper-grok-app-builder-workflow: "Home rules (
~/.cursor/rules) are not walked — rule discovery starts at/workspaceand never reaches/home/ubuntu." - From 2026-08-23-session-cursor-paper-grok-app-builder-workflow: "Account User Rules in Cursor Settings are documented as applying across cloud sessions."
- From 2026-08-23-session-cursor-paper-grok-app-builder-workflow: "The installer skill itself is not on the Cloud VM unless copied there or committed. Cloud agents consume the result in git, not the Mac installer."
The chain
Grok App Builder auto-lists .grok/skills; Cursor / Cloud / Grok Bot do not. AGENTS.md instructs a consult but does not inject skill bodies. A committed .cursor/skills symlink is what follows the clone.
Canonical: grok-skills-isolation-to-cursor-symlink.
Design implications
- If Cloud / Grok Bot must load Grok UI doctrine, commit a repo
.cursor/skillssymlink (or per-skill links) plus an alwaysApply rule. Canonical: grok-skills-isolation-to-cursor-symlink. - Do not assume
~/.cursor/ruleson a laptop follows a Cloud Agent. AGENTS.md/ claude-md-team-knowledge-base is instruction, not injection.
Contradictions / tensions
- One session’s
available_skillslist. Cursor docs and a forum note are named in the log’s provenance for the Cloud/workspacewalk; those pages were not fetched into this vault as separate sources. - Account User Rules “are documented as applying” — that is the log’s reading of Cursor docs, not a reproduced cloud test in this source.
Open questions
- Whether Cursor will later auto-list
.grok/skillsthe way Grok Build does. - How much of the Cloud miss is skills vs rules vs both.