Where files land

A skill folder is always copied (or symlinked, with --symlink) into one of two locations, derived deterministically from the (scope, agent) pair.

Project scope (default - no -g)

With $PROJECT = current working directory:

Agent	Install path
claude-code	$PROJECT/.claude/skills/<skill-name>/
codex, cursor, opencode, universal	$PROJECT/.agents/skills/<skill-name>/ (shared canonical dir)

Global scope (-g)

With $HOME = user home (env vars take precedence if set):

Agent	Install path
claude-code	$CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR/skills/<skill-name>/ or $HOME/.claude/skills/<skill-name>/
codex	$CODEX_HOME/skills/<skill-name>/ or $HOME/.codex/skills/<skill-name>/
cursor	$HOME/.cursor/skills/<skill-name>/
opencode	$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/opencode/skills/<skill-name>/ or $HOME/.config/opencode/skills/<skill-name>/
universal	$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/agents/skills/<skill-name>/ or $HOME/.config/agents/skills/<skill-name>/

<skill-name> sanitization

The <skill-name> segment is the kebab-case form of the SKILL.md name field: lowercased, runs of non-[a-z0-9._] collapsed to -, leading/trailing dots and hyphens stripped, capped at 255 chars.

Three ways to see paths for skills already on disk

1. agentskills-cli add … prints them in the result table's Path column and in the Installed under … summary
2. agentskills-cli list --paths re-renders the same Path column for everything installed
3. agentskills-cli list --by path --paths groups skills by install directory - handy for a "what's actually in ~/.claude/skills/?" view

The "canonical only" install result

You may see canonical only in the result column when adding for a non-universal agent (typically claude-code) without that agent's config directory existing in the project. In that case AgentSkills CLI installs only to the canonical .agents/skills/ location and skips creating the per-agent mirror. This avoids polluting your project with config directories for agents you may not actually use.

The skill is still available - any future agentskills-cli add (or symlink) will materialize the agent-specific copy if the config directory appears later.