Skills > Not all skills from known locations are loaded by the CLI

[demyte]

Describe the bug

Copilot cli doesnt load all my skills from the various known locations it should.

Affected version

0.0.381 Commit: cd1e4cc

Steps to reproduce the behavior

1. Open terminal to repo root.
2. Type in copilot
3. Type in /skills reload

Expected behavior

All skills in the directories as stated are used :

• ~.claude\skills
• ~.copilot\skills
• .claude\skills
• .github\skills

In my .claude\skills directory, I have 12 skulls and I have 1 skill in my ~.claude\skills directory:

In Copilot-cli when I run the /skills reload command:

In VSCode:

Additional context

Windows 11 / Windows Terminal / pwsh

This is what claude sees:

[ezonno]

@demyte can it be that not all skills have a license? I have noticed this behaviour as well when the license property is not in the frontmatter, see #894

I have also seen a report that CRLF line ending cause loading issues #694

[demyte]

@ezonno thanks for the suggestions.

I looked at both of those and it didn't seem to matter.

I converted all my SKILL.md files to have LF line endings and then /skills reload and it didnt pick any new ones up.

I added a license to all the front matter and that didnt help either.

[DamianEdwards]

I'm seeing this too. My repo skills are at https://github.com/DamianEdwards/DevBench/tree/main/.github/skills

Running /skills list only ever shows the first skill. If I rename the first skill to z-something and reload, then it only finds what was previously the second skill, etc.

[christso]

I have the same problem. I added the skills in awesome-copilot just to make sure it's not something I did.

It always loads the first 2 skills.

If I delete those 2 skills, it shows the next 2 skills.

All the skills load fine in Claude Code and VS Code. It seems like Copilot CLI skills is not production ready.

I think I will use OpenSkills as a workaround until this is resolved.

[ebencarek]

I also can't get copilot CLI to load my skills:

Skill directories:

Skills not found in CLI:

Reload does nothing:

[tdaroly]

I am also seeing this issue where only top/first 2 skills are being loaded. I am working around by deleting and re adding/re ordering them for now...

[alankpax]

I can't see any skills from within the Copilot CLI version v0.0.395. I tried with both .copilot and .github directories. They are seen in VS Code.

[darkings99]

+1

[DamianEdwards]

Working for me with latest update today!

[demyte]

I have tested this on v0.0.400 and it is still not working correctly.

It is picking up some of my user level skills and then only 1 of my project level skills (where there are 12)

What copilot shows when I /skills reload:

What Claude shows when I /skills:

What my user folder .claude\skills\ has

What my project has for skills

[demyte]

With the addition of using the common ./agents/skills path in the newer version v0.0.401, Copilot and I went looking deeper for this issue.

@ezonno you were close to on the money, the issue was:

Most SKILL.md files here start with a UTF‑8 BOM (they render as ---), which breaks the frontmatter parser so Copilot skips them; the three that load (complete-issue, releasenotes-generator, start-work) have a clean --- with no BOM. Re-save the non-loading SKILL.md files as UTF‑8 without BOM (frontmatter must be the first bytes in the file) and they should load.

Getting copilot to fix and re-save the files and then a /skills reload brought them all in.

Unsure where the UTF-8 with BOM came from as my vscode is set to save in UTF-8 🫤