npx skills add installs to ~/.agents/skills, not ~/.claude/skills

What to check when a third-party skill was just installed but isn’t recognized by the current session.

Symptom

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npx skills add Vincentwei1021/video-shotcraft

The command exits successfully and the files land on disk, but the skill never shows up in /help or the session’s available-skills list.

Cause

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npx skills add installs into ~/.agents/skills/<skill-name>/, not ~/.claude/skills/. That path is shared between Claude Code and Codex. On top of that, an already-running session doesn’t rescan the skills directory — a newly installed skill only shows up after starting a new session.

ls ~/.agents/skills/
# video-shotcraft shows up here (note: the repo name is "shotcraft", no "r")

Using it right away, without a new session

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No need to wait for a new session — just read the SKILL.md directly and follow it in place.

cat ~/.agents/skills/video-shotcraft/SKILL.md

Takeaway

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“Installed but not showing up” usually isn’t a failed install — it’s one of two things: wrong path assumption (checking the legacy ~/.claude/skills/), or a session that hasn’t rescanned. Neither needs a reinstall, just a check.