Claude Code: skills-only plugins lose slash command autocomplete

[rhuss]

Context

I maintain cc-spex, a plugin built on top of spec-kit. Following spec-kit's migration to skills-only (PR #2051, #2077, #2081), I migrated cc-spex from commands/*.md to skills/<name>/SKILL.md. I had to revert the migration due to two Claude Code issues that make skills-only plugins significantly worse for users.

Problem 1: Plugin skills invisible in autocomplete

Skills loaded from the skills/<name>/SKILL.md directory structure do not appear in the / slash command autocomplete dropdown. The legacy commands/*.md files do.

The skills load correctly: the model sees them, they execute when fully typed, they appear in the system prompt. But users can't discover them by typing / or /pluginname:. The dropdown is empty.

This is a known Claude Code bug (open since Jan 2026):

• anthropics/claude-code#18949 (root issue, 15+ comments, still open)
• anthropics/claude-code#17271, #17509, #20935, #28555, #35641, #42038 (duplicates and regressions)
• anthropics/claude-code#43803 (my report with source code analysis)

No fix or timeline from Anthropic so far.

Problem 2: Name shadowing in autocomplete

When multiple plugins have skills with the same base name (e.g., both prose:init and spex:init), the autocomplete fuzzy matcher picks the first match regardless of what the user typed. So if you have a collission in the command names, then you typed command that is not part of the autocompletion can never be executed.

Since the skills are not included, you end up with running an unrelated command of the same name (but different namespace).

Questions

1. Are you aware of these Claude Code limitations? The user-invocable: true fix in PR fix: add user-invocable: true to skill frontmatter #2077 addressed one symptom (skills being treated as managed), but the autocomplete visibility is a separate, unresolved bug.

2. Should spec-kit's Claude integration offer a fallback mode that generates commands/ stubs alongside skills/ until the autocomplete bug is fixed? Something like thin command files that delegate to the corresponding skill.

3. For the shadowing problem: does spec-kit have a strategy for skill names that are likely to collide across plugins? The speckit- prefix on generated skills helps, but third-party plugins building on spec-kit may choose shorter names.

Environment‘

• Claude Code: v2.1.91
• spec-kit: latest main (post PR Remove template version info from CLI, fix Claude user-invocable, cleanup dead code #2081)
• OS: macOS Darwin 25.4.0

[rhuss]

Sorry, for the noise, I think this is not an issue for speckit (but only for my plugin which gets installed via marketplace. There are no autocomplete issues when installed within a project). I'm just finding my way out the latest renaming from speckit.command to speckit-command which brokes quite a bit my workflow.

[mnriem]

@rhuss Let us know if you see anything else. We have tried to keep these changes as least disruptive as possible, but sometimes things happen.