User skills¶

Select skill sources with the common skills list. Nothing is imported by default. Each path can be an individual skill directory containing SKILL.md or a collection whose immediate children are skill directories:

skills = ["~/.agents/skills", "../shared-skills", "../tools/example-skill"]

Paths expand ~ and resolve relative to the selected configuration file. Repeatable --skill PATH options replace the configured list for one launch and resolve relative to the caller. --no-skills ignores configured sources:

./run-exoshell-agent.sh --skill ~/shared-skills --skill ./example-skill
./run-exoshell-agent.sh --no-skills

The launcher snapshots complete skill directories, following symlinks and preserving executable scripts. Symlink aliases retain their directory names. Collection files and unrelated directories are ignored; discovery does not recurse into nested collections. Missing paths, unreadable content, broken links, cycles, and special files fail before provisioning.

Duplicate names among configured skills fail before provisioning. Any name already present in the image also fails before the agent starts; nothing overwrites image skills. Select individual skills when a home collection includes copies of skills already provided by the image.

The snapshot is temporarily mounted read-only at /tmp/exoshell-skills, then copied into /sandbox/.agents/skills. Source changes after the snapshot do not propagate, and sandbox edits do not update host skills. Host staging is removed after the launcher returns; --keep retains container copies. --no-share still imports explicitly configured skills and permits this snapshot mount, while suppressing project and kubeconfig mounts.

Rebuild the base and dependent images to enable imports. Claude's /sandbox/.claude/skills is a directory symlink to ../.agents/skills, so both image and imported skills are visible through the same directory. Custom policies must allow reading /tmp/exoshell-skills and reading/writing the real /sandbox/.agents/skills directory; the baseline already does. The snapshot uses the same local gateway filesystem requirement as existing project mounts. See ADR-0038.