Personal ~/.agents/skills skills not loaded inside repository, loaded elsewhere

[lewislbr]

Describe the bug

Personal skills located in ~/.agents/skills/skill-name/SKILL.md are not loaded when running copilot inside a repository. However, on any other non-repository folder, they load correctly.

I know ~/.agents is not listed in the automatically discovered folders, and is not mentioned in the CLI Reference, but in effect it is, and it is a valid folder according to the Skills standard.

Additionally, they load on Visual Studio Code Copilot Chat as they are explicitly supported: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/customization/agent-skills#_create-a-skill.

Affected version

GitHub Copilot CLI 1.0.9.

Steps to reproduce the behavior

1. Have some valid skill file in ~/.agents/skills/skill-name/SKILL.md
2. Navigate into a repository cd repository-folder
3. Start Copilot CLI and run /skills list
4. Result:

No skills found.

  Skills are automatically discovered from:
    • ~/.copilot/skills/ (personal GitHub skills)
    • ~/.claude/skills/ (personal Claude skills)
    • [repo-root]/.github/skills/ (project skills)
    • [repo-root]/.claude/skills/ (project Claude skills)

  To add a custom skill directory, use:
    /skills add <directory-path>

Expected behavior

Skills are listed.

Additional context

• Operating system: macOS
• CPU architecture: ARM
• Terminal emulator: Terminal
• Shell: zsh

[lewislbr]

This has been already raised in #1329, #1744, #1846... This issue just provides more context, but feel free to close as duplicate if so