Antigravity CLI discovers global skills in ~/.gemini/config/skills, not ~/.gemini/skills

Google Antigravity CLI (agy) has crossed the threshold into being genuinely usable for daily coding work since Gemini 3.8 Flash (High) landed. But when I set out to make my custom agent skills available globally across projects, I found a discrepancy between the paths the CLI’s TUI displays and where the runtime actually discovers them.

The CLI’s /skills catalog panel lists three discovery tiers:

skills
  Workspace: {workspace}/.agents/skills/{skill_name}/SKILL.md
  Global:    {appDataDir}/skills/{skill_name}/SKILL.md
  Shared:    ~/.gemini/skills/{skill_name}/SKILL.md

When I launched agy inside ~, {workspace} evaluated to ~, picking up ~/.agents/skills/. But running agy inside any project repository shifts {workspace} to that repository, dropping my personal skills. Testing both global paths showed that agy ignores both {appDataDir}/skills (~/.gemini/antigravity-cli/skills) and ~/.gemini/skills. The actual machine-wide customization root where agy discovers global skills is ~/.gemini/config/skills/.

Usage

I follow the AGENTS.md convention and keep my personal skills in ~/.agents/skills/ so they remain portable across agents. To make them discoverable globally in agy, create a symbolic link directly into Antigravity’s config root:

ln -s ~/.agents/skills ~/.gemini/config/skills

Verifying from an isolated directory (/tmp) immediately discovered all 22 personal skills alongside builtins and plugins.

Declarative Alternative: skills.json

If you avoid symlinks, agy also discovers skills declared in ~/.gemini/config/skills.json:

{
  "entries": [
    {
      "path": "/Users/fran/.agents/skills"
    }
  ]
}

Passing the full absolute path is required because the Go runtime’s path resolver leaves tildes (~) unexpanded inside JSON entries.

Notes

• Symlinks vs hard links: Use ln -s. macOS (APFS) and POSIX kernels disallow hard links on directories to prevent circular filesystem graphs.
• Precedence: Antigravity prioritizes workspace skills (<repo>/.agents/skills/) over global skills (~/.gemini/config/skills/), allowing project-specific runbooks to override personal defaults when naming collisions occur.
• Why Gemini 3.8 Flash matters: Earlier model versions struggled with tool calling reliability and progressive skill disclosure. With Gemini 3.8 Flash (High), latency, context discipline, and instruction adherence make agy consistent enough to use. I used the 3.6 and 3.7 models briefly, so I really could not test them properly, but the previous models (Gemini 3, 3.1) where simply not RLHF’d enough to be useful comparing with the alternatives.

References

• Google Antigravity Documentation. Platform and CLI reference.
• Antigravity Skills Reference. Skill format and loading order.
• AGENTS.md Specification. Portable agent guidelines and directory standards.