This is going to be a very quick blog!
What’s the Problem?
Different agentic tools — like Gemini CLI and Google Antigravity — look in different locations for agent skills. This can be confusing. What should we do?
Quick Agent Skills Recap
Why Skills?
Skills provide your agent’s model (like Gemini or Claude) just-in-time knowledge for how to do a thing.
It’s like this: when an AI agent needs to do something specific, you can package the domain knowledge for how to do that thing into a skill. The skill can contain instructions, best practices, and sometimes even helper scripts tailored to a particular task.
So what’s the big deal? Well, you don’t have to tell your agents to use a skill. The agent automatically discovers the skills it has available, and then loads the skill it needs, at the time it needs it.
Because it only loads the required skill into context at the point it’s actually required, your model’s context isn’t bloated with irrelevant information. This is good for you, because it makes your agent more efficient, faster, and ultimately cheaper, because it’s consuming fewer tokens.
What Do They Look Like?
An agent skill is always packaged in a folder that contains a SKILL.md file. Many skills are nothing more than this: just a single markdown file in a folder, that gives your agent knowledge to do a thing. I won’t get into more detail here. But if you want to know more, check out:
Where Do You Get a Skill?
You can write your own, or just download the skill you need from one of the growing Skills repos, like:
Where To Put Your Skills
Ultimately, you need to get your skill (i.e. the skill folder) into a location where your agent will discover it. But here’s the confusing bit… Different tools look in different locations. Here’s what I’ve discovered:
- Gemini CLI looks for global skills in:
~/.gemini/skills/ - Google Antigravity looks for global skills in
~/.gemini/antigravity/skills/ - Cursor looks for global skills in
~/.cursor/skills/ - A sort-of tool-agnostic standard location for global skills:
~/.agents/skills/— Gemini CLI will look here, but Antigravity does not - Another sort-of tool-agnostic standard location for global skills:
~/.agent/skills/. (Note, this one is.agentnot.agents.) Antigravity will look here, but Gemini CLI does not.
So, you see the problem! I don’t want to have the same skills replicated in multiple locations.
My Solution
I don’t know if this is the ideal solution, but it works for me… I just decide on what location is my authoritative source of skills, and then create symlinks to other locations. For me (because I started here) my single source of truth is the location ~/.gemini/skills. So, to get Antigravity to see these skills, I just run this one command to create my symlink:
ln -s ~/.gemini/skills ~/.gemini/antigravity/skills
And that’s it!
Wrapping Up
So, there we have it. A bit of a whirlwind tour through the slightly messy, wild west world of agent skill directories. The reality is that we’re still in the early days of these agentic standards. It’s evolving fast, and until everyone agrees on a single, unified home for our agent’s brains, we’re going to have these little friction points.
It’s a classic case of standards proliferation — everyone wants to build the “one true standard” — so we end up with five of them. But as we’ve seen, a simple symlink can save you from the nightmare of keeping duplicate folders in sync. It’s robust, it’s fast, and it works.
Pro Tip: If you’re just starting out, I’d suggest picking ~/.agents/skills as your primary home. It feels the most future-proof and tool-agnostic of the bunch.
Before You Go
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Useful Links and References
- Agent Skills
- The Open Agent Skills Hub
- Awesome Agent Skills
- Google Antigravity
- Gemini CLI
- My Portfolio / Blogs / Applications
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