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:

Location	Purpose
`~/.agents/skills/`	Skills for Codex, also loaded by Cursor and Copilot CLI
`~/.codex/skills/`	Codex skills written by skrills before 0.9.1 (still read)
`~/.claude/skills/`	Claude Code 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
}

Field	Purpose
`priority`	Search order for skill directories
`expose_agents`	Include agent definitions in discovery
`cache_ttl_ms`	How 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. With it set, skrills serve also saves analytics when the server exits, over stdio or HTTP, including when it exits with an error.

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"

Field	Purpose
`execution_mode`	`cli` (run commands) or `api` (use API)
`cli_binary`	Which CLI to use: `claude`, `codex`, or `auto`
`default_backend`	Default 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

Skills synced to Codex are folders under ~/.agents/skills/. Other tools write there too, so remove the folders you no longer want rather than the whole directory. Skills synced by versions before 0.9.1 are under ~/.codex/skills/:

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 skills to ~/.agents/skills/ instead. You can safely delete the mirror directory:

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

skrills Book