Cursor AI Skills Marketplace: Using SKILL.md with Cursor

Cursor has its own configuration format (.cursorrules), but it also supports SKILL.md skills. This means you can access the entire SKILL.md ecosystem — thousands of skills on GitHub and curated marketplaces like Agensi — alongside your existing Cursor setup.

Quick Answer: Cursor uses skills from .cursor/skills/ in your project directory. Download skills from Agensi or GitHub and place them into this directory, for example, by unzipping code-reviewer.zip into .cursor/skills/.

How Cursor uses SKILL.md

Cursor reads skills from .cursor/skills/ in your project directory. Each skill follows the standard SKILL.md format with frontmatter and markdown instructions.

your-project/
├── .cursor/
│   └── skills/
│       ├── code-reviewer/
│       │   └── SKILL.md
│       └── commit-writer/
│           └── SKILL.md
├── .cursorrules          # Still works alongside skills
└── src/

Both .cursorrules and SKILL.md skills can coexist. Cursor reads .cursorrules for project-wide instructions and loads skills for task-specific automation.

Installing skills for Cursor

Download a skill from Agensi or GitHub and place it in your project:

mkdir -p .cursor/skills
unzip code-reviewer.zip -d .cursor/skills/

Since Cursor skills are project-level, you'll need to install them in each project where you want them.

Migrating from .cursorrules to SKILL.md

If your .cursorrules file has grown long with both project conventions and task instructions, consider splitting the task parts into skills:

Keep project-level rules in .cursorrules: coding standards, architecture decisions, framework preferences.

Move task instructions to separate SKILL.md files: code review checklists, commit message formats, testing procedures.

The benefit is portability — the SKILL.md files also work in Claude Code, OpenClaw, and Codex CLI.

Sharing skills between Cursor and Claude Code

If you use both Cursor and Claude Code:

# Copy a Claude Code skill to Cursor
cp -r ~/.claude/skills/code-reviewer .cursor/skills/

# Or symlink for automatic sync
ln -s ~/.claude/skills/code-reviewer .cursor/skills/code-reviewer

The same SKILL.md file works on both without modification.

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Find Cursor-compatible SKILL.md skills on Agensi.