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Understanding Skrills Data

Skrills stores minimal data on disk. This chapter explains what gets saved, where to find it, and how to reset things when needed.

What Skrills Saves

Your Skills

Skrills discovers skills from these directories:

LocationPurpose
~/.codex/skills/Codex CLI skills
~/.claude/skills/Claude Code skills
~/.agent/skills/Universal agent skills

When you run skrills sync or skrills mirror, skrills copies skills between these directories so both tools can access them.

Note: Codex skills require an experimental feature flag in ~/.codex/config.toml:

[features]
skills = true

Discovery Cache

To avoid scanning directories repeatedly, skrills caches skill metadata:

Location: ~/.codex/skills-cache.json

The cache refreshes automatically when:

  • The time-to-live (TTL) expires (default: 60 seconds)
  • You use the --watch flag with skrills serve

Manifest

The manifest controls which directories skrills searches and in what order:

Location: ~/.codex/skills-manifest.json

{
  "priority": ["codex", "mirror", "claude", "agent"],
  "expose_agents": true,
  "cache_ttl_ms": 60000
}
FieldPurpose
prioritySearch order for skill directories
expose_agentsInclude agent definitions in discovery
cache_ttl_msHow long to cache results (milliseconds)

Analytics Cache

Usage analytics are stored when you run analytics-building commands with persistence enabled:

Location: ~/.skrills/analytics_cache.json

Enable automatic persistence with:

  • --auto-persist flag on recommend-skills-smart
  • SKRILLS_AUTO_PERSIST=1 environment variable

Manual persistence:

skrills export-analytics --output analytics.json
skrills import-analytics analytics.json

Subagent Configuration

Settings for launching subagents:

Location: ~/.claude/subagents.toml or ~/.codex/subagents.toml

execution_mode = "cli"
cli_binary = "auto"
default_backend = "codex"
FieldPurpose
execution_modecli (run commands) or api (use API)
cli_binaryWhich CLI to use: claude, codex, or auto
default_backendDefault API backend when using API mode

What Skrills Does NOT Save

Skrills keeps these things temporary:

  • Validation results — Run skrills validate each time
  • Analysis results — Run skrills analyze each time
  • User prompts — Never written to disk

Checking What’s Stored

See discovered skills

skrills validate --format json

Preview sync changes

skrills sync-status --from claude

Verify configuration

skrills doctor

Resetting Things

Clear synced skills

Remove skills that were copied from another tool:

rm -rf ~/.codex/skills/

Clear the cache

Force skrills to re-scan all directories:

rm ~/.codex/skills-cache.json

Full reset

Remove all skrills state and start fresh:

rm -rf ~/.codex/skills/
rm -rf ~/.codex/skills-mirror/
rm ~/.codex/skills-cache.json
rm ~/.codex/skills-manifest.json
rm ~/.codex/subagents.toml
rm ~/.claude/subagents.toml
rm ~/.skrills/analytics_cache.json

After a full reset, run skrills setup to reconfigure.

Legacy Files

Older versions of skrills used ~/.codex/skills-mirror/ to store a complete copy of Claude assets. Current versions sync directly to ~/.codex/skills/ instead. You can safely delete the mirror directory:

rm -rf ~/.codex/skills-mirror/