[BUG] Skill creator skill is confusing for the agent (skill placement)

Open 💬 6 comments Opened Mar 17, 2026 by IgorWarzocha

💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What issue are you seeing?

When asking Codex to create a repo-level skill, it defaults to putting it in /skills/*/SKILL.md directory.

When asked to correct itself, it put it in /.codex/skills/*/SKILL.md , which is also incorrect - Codex (at least desktop) does not surface these skills. The only correct repo-level skill path is /.agents/skills/*/SKILL.md - and the agent isn't aware of this.

The easiest fix would probably to hardcode the bundled creator to canonical paths, or update the detection mechanism to include other dirs.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Ask Codex (in my case desktop) to use the skill creator skill to create a repo level skill (that is a mouthful)

What is the expected behavior?

_No response_

Additional information

_No response_

View original on GitHub ↗

6 Comments

etraut-openai contributor · 5 months ago

This is model behavior, so it's not something the codex harness can fix.

The recommended way to create new skills is to use the $skill-creator skill, which should place them in the correct location.

github-actions[bot] contributor · 5 months ago

Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.

#14785

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IgorWarzocha · 5 months ago

This is model behavior, so it's not something the codex harness can fix. The recommended way to create new skills is to use the $skill-creator skill, which should place them in the correct location.

Ok, but I am using the built in skill creator skill.

etraut-openai contributor · 5 months ago

OK, if you're using the built-in skill creator skill, then this should work. Reopening.

IgorWarzocha · 5 months ago

OK, if you're using the built-in skill creator skill, then this should work. Reopening.

Thank you, happy to record a short vid if the team isn't able to reproduce

omarpinarecords · 5 days ago

Current reproduction on macOS:

ChatGPT desktop: 26.818.41509, build 6962
Codex CLI: 0.149.0

The currently bundled $skill-creator still directs user-scoped skills to $CODEX_HOME/skills, or ~/.codex/skills when CODEX_HOME is unset.

Current Build Skills documentation lists $HOME/.agents/skills as the USER location. OpenAI maintainer guidance in #14337 also identifies ~/.codex/skills as the legacy location.

Following the bundled Skill Creator guidance reproduced the legacy placement for a new personal skill. Moving that skill to ~/.agents/skills resolved the configuration discrepancy.

Could the bundled Skill Creator be updated to use ~/.agents/skills for user-scoped skills and .agents/skills for repository-scoped skills?

Attachments: NONE.