Installing skills in Cursor, Codex and other agents

Agent Skills started in Claude Code, but the format is an open standard and most other coding agents adopted it — along with a shared directory to read it from. That means the answer to “how do I install this skill in Cursor?” is usually “the same way you install it for nine other tools at once.”

The universal directory

Rather than each agent inventing its own location, the ecosystem converged on ~/.agents/skills/. A skill folder placed there is visible to every tool that follows the convention — which, at this point, is most of them.

~/.agents/skills/
└── frontend-design/
    └── SKILL.md

The layout is identical to Claude Code’s: one folder per skill, SKILL.md at its root. Only the parent directory changes.

Which agent reads what

Agent	Skills directory	Notes
Cursor	`~/.agents/skills`	Universal convention
Codex CLI	`~/.agents/skills`	Universal convention
Gemini CLI	`~/.agents/skills`	Universal convention
OpenCode	`~/.agents/skills`	Universal convention
Amp	`~/.agents/skills`	Universal convention
Goose	`~/.agents/skills`	Universal convention
GitHub Copilot	`~/.agents/skills`	Universal convention
Claude Code	`~/.claude/skills`	Its own directory — see the Claude Code guide
Cline	`~/.cline/skills`	Its own directory

This is a convention, not a specification with a version number, and support arrived at different times in different tools. If a skill does not appear, check your agent’s current docs before assuming the folder is wrong — and make sure you are on a recent release.

Installing one

By hand

mkdir -p ~/.agents/skills
git clone https://github.com/anthropics/skills.git /tmp/skills
cp -r /tmp/skills/document-skills/pdf ~/.agents/skills/

That single copy is now visible to every universal-directory agent on the machine. Restart behaviour varies: some pick skills up immediately, others notice on the next session.

With the CLI

npx skills add https://github.com/anthropics/skills/tree/main/document-skills/pdf

Without an -a flag the CLI asks which agents you want, and knows the right directory for each. Useful when you want a skill in some tools but not others.

In one click

Skill Installer shows the targets as checkboxes — Claude Code, Universal, Cline, or any custom directory you add — and writes to all of them at once from whatever page you found the skill on. It is the same folder copy underneath; the difference is that you see the skill’s contents and security flags before it lands, and you do not need a terminal.

Project skills

The same split as Claude Code applies: a skill in ~/.agents/skills follows you across every project, while one in .agents/skills/ inside a repository belongs to that repository. Commit it and every collaborator gets it with a git pull — no install step, no instructions in the README about where to copy things.

For anything encoding house conventions — commit format, testing procedure, deployment checklist — the project directory is almost always the right home. Personal scope is for skills that are about how you work.

Does one skill really work everywhere?

Mostly. The core of the format — the frontmatter, the instructions, the supporting files — is genuinely portable, and a well-written skill behaves the same in Cursor as it does in Codex. Where portability frays is at the edges:

Tool-permission fields. An allowed-tools list naming Claude Code’s tools means nothing to an agent with different tool names. It is ignored rather than fatal.
Bundled scripts. A skill that shells out to Python needs Python present, and needs an agent willing to run it.
Instructions that name a specific agent. Skills written against one tool’s exact affordances travel worst. The portable ones describe the task, not the toolbar.

For Claude Code specifically, including plugin marketplaces and the troubleshooting list, see how to install skills in Claude Code. For what actually goes inside the file, see the SKILL.md format explained.