Claude Skills Not Showing Up? Fixes by Surface and Version

Agensi’s troubleshooting guide for Claude Code skills, dated 3 May 2026, still tells you to “end your current session and start a new one” when a new skill will not load, while Anthropic’s skills documentation, read on 10 October 2026, says Claude Code “picks up the change within the current session, without a restart.” Advice for Claude skills not showing up outlives the version it was true for: Anthropic’s changelog dates the no-restart behaviour to version 2.1.0, released on 7 January 2026, nearly four months before that guide’s date.

Every row on this page was checked on 10 October 2026 against the Anthropic page it cites, with a minimum version wherever the docs give one. The page sets Anthropic’s docs against older fixes that no longer match them, and I reproduced none of the failures. The skills page alone carried 24 distinct Claude Code version numbers, from v2.1.196 to v2.1.290, and the changelog’s newest entry was v2.1.296, dated 9 October.

I read every fix for a missing skill as written for one version of Claude Code. Check the version your session runs before you rule a fix in or out: claude --version in a terminal, or /status in the VS Code panel or the desktop Code tab, which each run their own copy of Claude Code. My standalone CLI reported v2.1.283 on 10 October 2026.

Why Are Claude Skills Not Showing Up?

A Claude skill fails to show up when it never loaded, a setting hides it, or it lives where the current surface does not read. Find which of five places is missing it: the Claude app’s Skills list, the / menu, /skills, the listing of names and descriptions Claude reads, or a cloud session.

Where it is missing	Documented causes	Fix	Minimum Claude Code version	Main Anthropic source
Skills list in the Claude app (Customize > Skills)	Code execution is off, so the section is hidden or greyed out; or the skill exists only as a folder on your machine	Turn on Code execution and file creation; upload a local skill as a ZIP	None: it is an app setting	Use skills in Claude
The / menu in Claude Code	The skill never loaded, or user-invocable: false or an "off" override hides it from you	Store it as <name>/SKILL.md; run /reload-skills if the skills folder is new; set an off state back to on in /skills; remove user-invocable: false	/reload-skills: v2.1.152. /add-dir for a nested folder: v2.1.257	Debug your configuration
The /skills dialog	The same loading causes; bundled skills are not listed there; account skills appear only after a sync	Look in /context for bundled skills; sign in with your claude.ai account for synced ones	Account sync: v2.1.273. /skills in the VS Code panel: v2.1.280	Skills synced from claude.ai
The listing Claude reads	disable-model-invocation: true, a user-only or name-only state, or a description dropped from an over-budget listing	Set a user-only or name-only state back to on in /skills; remove disable-model-invocation: true if Claude should pick the skill; raise skillListingBudgetFraction or trim descriptions	/context reports the listing after the budget from v2.1.196	Skill descriptions are cut short
A cloud session, Cowork or a routine	Those sessions do not read ~/.claude/skills/ on your machine	Enable the skill on your claude.ai account; for a cloud session or a routine, you can instead commit it to the repo’s .claude/skills/	None stated	Skills in Cowork and cloud sessions

Anthropic’s metadata dates the last change to the help article at 22 September 2026 and to the skills page at 9 October 2026.

If your search was “Claude skills not working”, split it the same way: a skill that never loaded belongs to rows two and three, and one that loaded but Claude never picks belongs to row four. Writing a description that triggers is covered in what a Claude skill is and how it loads.

The top and bottom rows come down to where a skill is stored. This matrix sets three skill stores (your account, your home folder and a repo) against the surfaces that read them:

Older Fixes That No Longer Match Anthropic’s Docs

Each row names its page and that page’s date, and wording in quotation marks is verbatim.

Older fix or report	Source and date	Anthropic’s docs on 10 October 2026	Changed in
”end your current session and start a new one” after installing a skill	Agensi’s troubleshooting guide, 3 May 2026, last modified on 26 Aug 2026 per its metadata	Changes under an existing skills folder load without a restart; a skills folder created mid-session needs /reload-skills	Hot-reload: v2.1.0, 7 Jan 2026, before the guide’s date. /reload-skills: v2.1.152, 27 May 2026. Slash-menu fix: v2.1.216, 20 Jul 2026
With malformed frontmatter, Claude Code “might ignore the skill entirely”	The same Agensi guide	”the skill still loads with no fields set”, so /name works and Claude has no description to match	v2.1.186, 22 Jun 2026
The listing “defaults to 15,000 characters” and “there’s no warning when you go over”	Jesse Vincent, 17 Dec 2025, on Claude Code 2.0.70	The budget “scales at 1% of the model’s context window”, every skill name stays listed, and an overflow is written to the debug log	Budget tied to the context window: v2.1.32, 5 Feb 2026
Organization skills “do not appear in Claude Code CLI”	GitHub issue #40320, 28 Mar 2026, on 2.1.86	Per the help article’s Use skills in Claude Code section, account skills, including those “an owner provisioned for your organization”, load in a terminal session signed in with the same account	v2.1.273 in the docs; listed under v2.1.275, 17 Sep 2026, in the changelog
Upload the ZIP from a Features page in Settings; the folder name “must match the name field in the frontmatter exactly”	mcp.directory, labelled “Updated May 2026”	Code execution sits in Settings > Capabilities and uploads in Customize > Skills. The name match is an upload rule; Claude Code takes the command from the folder name or from name	Lookup fix for a name that differs from its folder: v2.1.290, 5 Oct 2026

What the table leaves out:

• A restart is still the documented step after /login mid-session, after editing .claude/commands/ or .claude/agents/ inside a folder added with --add-dir, and after renaming a skill that used a reserved name.
• The restart advice kept some basis after v2.1.0. The changelog entry for v2.1.216, dated 20 July 2026, reads “Fixed skills and commands changed during a session not appearing in the slash menu until restart.”
• Two Anthropic pages give different budget figures. The v2.1.32 changelog entry says “2% of context”, while the skills page and the skillListingBudgetFraction setting say 1%, and no changelog entry names that setting. Run /doctor for the cost of your own listing.
• Nicolas Dao’s skill field guide, bylined 18 June 2026 and by its own text verified against Claude Code v2.1.207 on 13 July 2026, had already flagged the 15,000 figure as out of date.
• One older fix is neither confirmed nor replaced. On 2 November 2025, Scott Spence traced skills missing from Claude’s list to a code formatter that had wrapped description onto several lines, and fixed it by keeping the description on a single line. The skills page says nothing about multi-line descriptions. It does give a parse check, claude plugin validate .claude/skills, which needs v2.1.233 (14 August 2026), so run that before you reformat anything.

Claude Code Skills Not Showing Up in the / Menu or /skills

Run /skills and look for the skill. Anthropic’s Debug your configuration page says the dialog shows “Available skills from project, user, and plugin sources.” If yours is absent, work down the loading causes:

Symptom	Documented cause	Fix	Minimum version
A new skill never appears	The file is .claude/skills/name.md, not a folder	Move it to .claude/skills/name/SKILL.md	None stated
Skills in a folder you just created do not load	A top-level skills folder that did not exist at session start is not watched yet	Run /reload-skills, and again after each later change there	v2.1.152
A skill under a subfolder’s .claude/skills/ is missing	Nested skills load once Claude reads or edits a file in that subfolder	Run /add-dir with the subfolder’s path	v2.1.257
Skills from a second folder never load	The permissions.additionalDirectories setting “grants file access only”	Launch with --add-dir, or run /add-dir	--add-dir: v2.1.32
A worktree session has no project skills	Parent folders are searched up to the worktree root and no further	Update: the main checkout’s skills then load when the worktree has no .claude/skills at its root	v2.1.277
A skill that came with a plugin is missing	Plugin skills load wherever the plugin is enabled, under /plugin-name:skill-name	Check that the plugin is enabled (/plugin in a terminal, Manage plugins in VS Code and the desktop app), run /reload-plugins if it changed since the session started, and type the namespaced name	/reload-plugins: v2.1.98, or v2.1.260 in the desktop app and -p runs
/name runs a different skill, or edits to a project skill seem to do nothing	Two skills share a name: enterprise wins over personal, and personal over project	Rename one copy, or edit the one that runs	None stated
A skill installed with the npx skills CLI is missing	Run from inside an agent session, the CLI may install only to .agents/skills/, a folder Anthropic’s location table does not list	Reinstall with the agent flag covered in the Claude marketing skills guide	None stated
One folder is skipped	It is named synced or anthropic-skills, names reserved for account skills	Rename the folder	anthropic-skills refused from v2.1.282
A SKILL.md saved with a UTF-8 BOM is ignored	A bug the changelog lists as fixed	Update, or save the file without a BOM	v2.1.239
Every custom skill is missing	The session started with --safe-mode, --bare or --disable-slash-commands, per the CLI flags table	Start a normal session	None stated
A bundled skill is not in /skills	The dialog leaves bundled skills out	Read the skills section of /context	None stated
Personal skills load in one setup and not in another	On Windows ~/.claude resolves to %USERPROFILE%\.claude, and CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR moves every ~/.claude path, per the .claude directory reference	Save the skill under the home folder that session reads	None stated

On Windows, a WSL session in the desktop Code tab runs inside the Linux distribution with what Anthropic’s Claude Code Desktop in WSL page calls “native Linux paths”. A WSL install keeps ~/.claude, and the personal skills folder under it, inside the distribution and separate from the Windows one; my comparison of native Windows, Git Bash and WSL 2 lists where each side keeps its files.

Custom command files have their own table of causes in my Claude Code commands cheat sheet.

Claude Skills Not Found: What a Missing Name Looks Like

Typing the name of a skill that did not load gets a different reply depending on where you type it, per Anthropic’s errors reference:

Where you typed /name	What happens
An interactive terminal session	Unknown command: /name, with the closest command name suggested when one is close
The VS Code panel, the desktop Code tab, -p runs, cloud sessions and routines	The text goes to Claude “as a normal message”, with a note that the command did not run

Outside cloud sessions and routines, the second row needs v2.1.274 or later; cloud sessions and routines have behaved that way since v2.1.273. I run Claude Code in the VS Code panel, so a mistyped or unloaded skill name in my setup falls in that row. The panel also offers a subset of commands and skills, one of the differences between the extension and the CLI.

Account Skills Missing From Claude Code

Skills you enable on your claude.ai account are listed in /skills under claude.ai sync. When that group is missing, the sync section of the skills page gives these causes:

• The version is below v2.1.273.
• The session is not signed in through /login: it uses an API key, ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN, CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN or an apiKeyHelper script.
• The session does not fetch feature flags, as on Amazon Bedrock or with CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC set.
• It runs in bare mode, or was started with --safe-mode.
• Managed settings lock skills to plugin sources, or --setting-sources leaves out user.
• syncClaudeAiSkills is set to false.
• You signed in with /login during the session and have not restarted.
• The skill is switched off on claude.ai.

The changelog adds one more: v2.1.296, released on 9 October 2026, fixes synced skills “never finishing their install” when several sessions share a config directory.

A change made on claude.ai takes time to arrive: the docs put the checks at about every 10 minutes while you or Claude work in the session and about every 40 minutes while it is idle. The 40-minute idle interval arrived in v2.1.293, released on 7 October 2026; the changelog says it replaced a check every 10 minutes.

A synced skill that shares its name with another command is listed, and runs, under /anthropic-skills:<name>. From v2.1.269 through v2.1.280, the / menu and /skills listed every synced skill under that full name; v2.1.281 restored the short name.

Personal Skills That Disappeared

If folders you created in ~/.claude/skills/ are gone, the skills page sends you to ~/.claude/skills/.trash/:

• “Before v2.1.280, a file named manifest.json in ~/.claude/skills/ caused Claude Code to move the skill folders that file listed” into a timestamped folder there, “and those skills stopped loading.” The changelog entry for v2.1.280, dated 22 September 2026, lists the fix.
• Synced skills go to the same trash when you set syncClaudeAiSkills to false or your organization turns Skills off on claude.ai.
• To restore a skill, move its folder back into ~/.claude/skills/ before the retention sweep deletes it, “by default 30 days after they were moved to the trash.”

Claude Skill Not Triggering: Name-Only and User-Only States

When a skill sits in the / menu and Claude never picks it, check the listing Claude reads before you rewrite the description. What that listing holds depends on a state set from /skills and on two frontmatter fields in the skill’s own SKILL.md, per the visibility section of the skills page:

State or field	Where it is set	In your / menu	Listed to Claude
on (the default)	skillOverrides	Yes	Name and description
name-only	skillOverrides	Yes	Name only
user-only (user-invocable-only)	skillOverrides	Yes	Hidden
off	skillOverrides	Hidden	Hidden
disable-model-invocation: true	SKILL.md frontmatter	Yes	Hidden
user-invocable: false	SKILL.md frontmatter	Hidden, and typing /name does not run it	Name and description

To read or change a state:

• In a terminal, run /skills, highlight the skill, press Space to cycle the states and Esc to save. The choice is written to skillOverrides in .claude/settings.local.json. The changelog lists skillOverrides as working from v2.1.129, released on 6 May 2026.
• In the VS Code panel, typing /skills opens the Slash commands dialog, where each row shows its visibility, such as On or Name only, and a click changes it. Anthropic’s VS Code page puts that at v2.1.280 or later.
• Plugin skills cannot be cycled, and neither can a skill whose frontmatter sets disable-model-invocation: true or one pinned in managed settings.
• On the Debug your configuration page, a “user-only” label “means Claude won’t trigger it on its own.”

If the state is on and Claude still skips the skill, the Skill not triggering checks and the listing budget come next:

1. Ask Claude What skills are available? and confirm the skill is in the answer.
2. Compare the description with the words in your request, then rephrase.
3. Check the listing budget. The listing “always contains every skill name”, but over budget it drops descriptions “starting with the skills you invoke least.” /doctor estimates the listing’s context cost, the Skills row in /context shows its size after the budget is applied, and claude --debug logs a warning when it overflows.
4. Free some budget: raise skillListingBudgetFraction (the docs’ example is 0.02 for 2%), set rarely used skills to name-only, or trim description and when_to_use, which are cut at 1,536 characters per skill whatever the budget. /skill-doctor, on v2.1.252 or later, reports what each skill costs in context and how often it is used.
5. After a /compact the listing is gone, because compaction does not re-inject it. Type the skill’s /name yourself. The compact vs clear breakdown covers that case, including this repo’s count of 18 project skills in the listing out of 20.
6. If Claude invokes no skill at all, look for Skill among the deny rules in /permissions.

Claude Skills Not Showing Up in the Claude App

The Claude app has no terminal to check. Anthropic’s Use skills in Claude help article has a Troubleshooting section with eight headings:

Heading in the article	Cause it gives	What to do
Skills section not visible	Code execution is off	Settings > Capabilities on Free, Pro and Max; Organization settings > Plugins & skills, Policy tab, on Team and Enterprise
Claude isn’t using a skill	The toggle is off, or the description and instructions are unclear	Turn it on in Customize > Skills; name the skill in your request
Can’t create or upload a skill	An owner turned off User-created skills, or a custom role lacks the Create skills capability	Ask the organization owner
Skills greyed out	Code execution is disabled for the organization or for you	The owner, or Settings > Capabilities
Upload errors	The ZIP exceeds size limits, the folder name differs from the skill name, the skill file is missing, or the name or description holds invalid characters	Correct the folder and upload again
Group doesn’t appear when I try to share a skill	The group lacks the “Share resources with this group” setting	Ask the organization owner
Share button not visible	The sharing toggles are off, or a custom role lacks the Share skills with groups capability	The owner turns on at least one sharing toggle in Organization settings > Skills; the article’s Share a skill section puts those toggles under Plugins & skills, Policy tab
”Publish to org” button not visible	Publishing is off, or the skill is not one you created	Ask the organization owner

The same article and the Claude Code docs add other reasons a skill is not available in the app:

• A skill a colleague shared sits in the recipient’s list “grayed out until they enable it.” Turn it on under Shared with you.
• Organization skills are installed from the directory instead of being enabled from the list.
• On Enterprise plans with skill scanning on, a third-party skill you upload or edit is checked before it can run, and the article says most scans finish “in about one to two minutes.”
• An upload fails with a hard error when SKILL.md carries frontmatter fields outside the six that claude.ai accepts. The message starts “Unexpected key(s) in SKILL.md frontmatter”.
• A custom style from before the 2026 migration is now a skill that arrives switched off, and the Claude styles migration guide covers turning it on.

Local Skills Missing From the Desktop Customize Panel

The GitHub reports on this share a pattern: skill folders in ~/.claude/skills/ work in the desktop app’s Code tab, and all or most of them are absent from Customize > Skills. Anthropic’s docs describe Customize as configuration that syncs through your claude.ai account, and none of the three pages quoted below says the panel lists folders from ~/.claude/skills/.

Anthropic’s Documentation on the Panel

• The desktop docs say Customize manages connectors, skills and plugins, and that the Cowork tab sources them “from this Customize configuration, which syncs through your claude.ai account, not from the CLI’s ~/.claude directory.”
• The same page says “Local sessions load your personal skills from ~/.claude/skills/”, and that you browse them by typing / or by clicking + and choosing Slash commands.
• The skills page says a personal skill reaches the account when “you upload it to claude.ai”, and that the upload accepts six frontmatter fields.
• The word personal has two meanings across these pages. On Team and Enterprise plans, the help article’s Personal skills section of Customize > Skills holds “Skills you’ve created or uploaded yourself”, while the Claude Code docs use personal for folders under ~/.claude/skills/.

So the documented place to confirm a local skill in a desktop Code session is the / menu, and the documented way to get it into Customize is an upload.

User Reports on GitHub

Issue	Opened	Report	Status on 10 October 2026
#31597	6 Mar 2026	Skills in ~/.claude/skills/ “appear in the / slash menu and trigger correctly” while the panel “doesn’t list them”	Closed as not planned by the inactivity bot on 21 May 2026, locked on 11 Jul 2026
#64466	1 Jun 2026	The panel’s Personal skills list shows a small subset of the folder, and the subset changes between opens	Closed as not planned by the inactivity bot on 1 Sep 2026
#77503	14 Jul 2026	Repeats the report and asks for a re-triage	Closed as a duplicate of #64466 on 25 Aug 2026

A commenter on #31597 who analysed the v2.1.96 binary wrote on 8 April 2026 that the panel appears to query plugin skills and built-in plugin skills and to skip the skills folders. That is a community finding, and none of the Anthropic pages cited here confirms it. None of these threads held a fix or an explanation of the panel from Anthropic when I read them for the table above, and the eight comments on #31597 come from four users and GitHub’s automation account.

Claude Skills Not Loading in Cloud Sessions, Cowork and Routines

The skills page says Cowork sessions and cloud sessions, routines included, “don’t read ~/.claude/skills/ on your machine.” The matrix near the top shows what they read instead: account skills, which Cowork syncs at session start, plus project skills committed to the repository in a cloud session. The details come from the skills page, the desktop docs and the cloud environments table:

• A routine that invokes a skill stored only on your machine gets a report that the skill was not found.
• The fix for Cowork is to enable the skill for your claude.ai account. For a cloud session or a routine, you can do that or commit the skill to the repository’s .claude/skills/.
• Plugins declared in the repository’s .claude/settings.json, and plugins enabled only in your user settings, do not load in cloud sessions, so their skills do not either.
• The changelog entry for v2.1.287, dated 1 October 2026, fixes “repositories added mid-session in cloud and SDK sessions not loading their skills and plugins”.
• Desktop scheduled tasks run on your machine, “so they do load ~/.claude/skills/.”
• An SSH session in the desktop app reads ~/.claude/skills/ from the remote host’s home directory.

Which of these skills reach a thread in Claude’s redesigned projects is covered in Claude projects vs skills.

Minimum Claude Code Version for Each Fix

Release dates are from the Claude Code changelog, and a row that starts with Fix is a changelog entry for a bug. A row applies to the copy of Claude Code your session runs: the VS Code extension and the desktop Code tab each carry their own, with its own version number.

Claude Code version	Released	What changes for a missing skill
v2.1.0	7 Jan 2026	Skills created or edited in an existing skills folder load without a restart
v2.1.32	5 Feb 2026	The listing budget scales with the model’s context window; skills in an --add-dir folder load
v2.1.98	9 Apr 2026	/reload-plugins picks up plugin skills without a restart
v2.1.129	6 May 2026	The skillOverrides setting works: the off, user-only and name-only states take effect
v2.1.152	27 May 2026	/reload-skills re-scans skill folders
v2.1.186	22 Jun 2026	Malformed frontmatter loads the skill body with empty metadata
v2.1.196	29 Jun 2026	The Skills row in /context reports the listing after the budget is applied
v2.1.216	20 Jul 2026	Fix: skills changed during a session reach the / menu without a restart
v2.1.233	14 Aug 2026	claude plugin validate checks a bare skills folder
v2.1.239	21 Aug 2026	Fix: a SKILL.md that starts with a UTF-8 BOM is no longer ignored
v2.1.252	31 Aug 2026	The minimum the docs give for /skill-doctor; the changelog lists the command under v2.1.261, 4 Sep 2026
v2.1.257	1 Sep 2026	/add-dir loads a nested .claude/skills/
v2.1.260	3 Sep 2026	/reload-plugins runs in the desktop app, the Agent SDK and -p runs
v2.1.273	15 Sep 2026	The minimum the docs give for account skill sync in a terminal session; the changelog lists the sync under v2.1.275, 17 Sep 2026
v2.1.274	17 Sep 2026	Outside an interactive terminal, an unmatched /name goes to Claude as a normal message; cloud sessions and routines did so from v2.1.273
v2.1.277	18 Sep 2026	A worktree with no .claude/skills at its root loads the main checkout’s project skills
v2.1.280	22 Sep 2026	Fix: manifest.json stops sending personal skills to .trash. /skills and /status open in the VS Code panel
v2.1.281	23 Sep 2026	Synced skills are listed by their short name when no other command uses it
v2.1.282	24 Sep 2026	A skill folder or command file named anthropic-skills no longer loads
v2.1.287	1 Oct 2026	Fix: repositories added mid-session in cloud sessions load their skills
v2.1.290	5 Oct 2026	Fix: a skill is found by its name when its folder has a different name
v2.1.293	7 Oct 2026	Sync checks drop from about every 10 minutes to about every 40 while no session is in use
v2.1.296	9 Oct 2026	Fix: synced skills finish installing when several sessions share a config directory

The last four rows are newer than the v2.1.283 my standalone CLI reported, and I tested none of the rows for this page. claude update updates the standalone CLI. The VS Code panel runs the extension’s bundled copy, so its version is the extension’s own, which the Extensions view shows. The desktop app updates the Code tab’s copy, and its docs say “updating one doesn’t update the other.”

File Checks to Run on a Claude Skills Folder

The file-level causes can be checked with a few shell commands. I ran these against the 20 third-party skill folders committed in this site’s repo, part of the Claude Code setup behind this site, on 10 October 2026:

# 1. every skill is <name>/SKILL.md, with no loose name.md files
ls .claude/skills/*/SKILL.md | wc -l
ls .claude/skills/*.md 2>/dev/null | wc -l

# 2. frontmatter opens on line 1 (tr strips Windows line endings)
for f in .claude/skills/*/SKILL.md; do
  head -n 1 "$f" | tr -d '\r' | grep -qx -- '---' || echo "not on line 1: $f"
done

# 3. hidden from Claude, or hidden from the / menu
grep -liE "^disable-model-invocation: *(true|yes|on|1)" .claude/skills/*/SKILL.md
grep -liE "^user-invocable: *(false|no|off|0)" .claude/skills/*/SKILL.md

# 4. committed, so a clone or a cloud session gets it
git ls-files .claude/skills | wc -l

# 5. no UTF-8 BOM at the start of a SKILL.md
for f in .claude/skills/*/SKILL.md; do
  [ "$(head -c 3 "$f" | xxd -p)" = "efbbbf" ] && echo "BOM: $f"
done

# 6. no folder with a reserved name
ls .claude/skills | grep -iE "^(synced$|anthropic-skills)"

Check	Documented cause it rules out	Result
A SKILL.md inside each skill folder	A skill saved as name.md	20 of 20, and no loose .md files
--- on line 1	Frontmatter is read only when it opens the file	20 of 20
disable-model-invocation: true	Hidden from Claude’s listing	2 of 20
user-invocable: false	Hidden from the / menu	0 of 20
Files tracked by git	A clone or cloud session gets only committed skills	24 files across the 20 folders
File starts with a UTF-8 BOM	Ignored before v2.1.239	0 of 20
Folder named synced or anthropic-skills	Reserved names	0 of 20
Frontmatter parses with a YAML library	Malformed YAML loads with no fields set	20 of 20
Description longer than the 1,536-character listing cap	Cut short in the listing	0 of 20; the longest runs 661 characters

Rows one to seven come from the commands above. The YAML and length rows come from a short Node script built on the js-yaml library, a stand-in for Claude Code’s own parser and no substitute for the validator.

The two flagged skills set disable-model-invocation in their own frontmatter, which matches the count of 18 in the listing. Every other file check passes, so for a missing skill in this repo I would look next at what a file check cannot see: the listing budget, a skillOverrides state and the session type.

Anthropic’s validator reference says claude plugin validate “doesn’t follow symlinks inside the directory you name” and skips a linked entry with a warning. Where each entry in .claude/skills/ is a link into another folder, as it is in my working copy, run the validator on the folder the links point to.

Claude Skills Not Showing Up: Match the Fix to Your Version

The fixes on this page will age the way the older ones did: the changelog entries dated 1, 5 and 9 October 2026 fix three more ways a skill can go missing. So treat any fix, these included, as tied to a place and a version.

Find the row for the place your skill is missing from, read the version your session runs (claude --version in a terminal, /status in the VS Code panel or the desktop Code tab) and compare it with the version table. Run claude update when the CLI is below the row you need.

In Claude Code, start with /skills and check whether the skill is listed before you read its label.