Summary

Codex currently allows project-local and user-global skills with the same frontmatter name to both appear active in the runtime skill catalog. This causes ambiguous model-visible skill resolution.

For My Work Hub, the project-local skills under:

/Volumes/Samsung_T7/my-work-hub/.agents/skills

must override same-name user-global skills under:

/Users/mlnjtmnsnkitjmg26/.agents/skills

Observed Behavior

A fresh runtime session exposed both copies of these four skills:

• goal
• goal-prompt-author
• goal-mode-preflight
• goal-closeout-evaluator

The duplicate active paths included both:

/Volumes/Samsung_T7/my-work-hub/.agents/skills/.../SKILL.md

and:

/Users/mlnjtmnsnkitjmg26/.agents/skills/.../SKILL.md

This produced a PRECEDENCE_FAILURE risk because the runtime catalog did not deterministically suppress the lower-priority user-global entries.

Expected Behavior

Codex should deduplicate skills by parsed frontmatter name, not by file path.

Suggested precedence:

1. active workspace/project .agents/skills
2. repo-local configured skill roots
3. user-global ~/.agents/skills
4. bundled/system/plugin skills

Only the highest-priority skill should be model-visible. Suppressed duplicates may be retained in debug/audit output.

Repro Command

Run from a machine with duplicate project-local and user-global skill names:

codex exec -C /Volumes/Samsung_T7/my-work-hub -s read-only --ephemeral 'Read-only runtime skill catalog precedence check. Do not start /goal. Do not edit files. Inspect only the loaded skills list available to this fresh Codex runtime session. For the exact skill names goal, goal-prompt-author, goal-mode-preflight, and goal-closeout-evaluator, report every active SKILL.md path visible in the runtime catalog. Then print PRECEDENCE_OK only if all four active paths are under /Volumes/Samsung_T7/my-work-hub/.agents/skills and no active path for those four names is under /Users/mlnjtmnsnkitjmg26/.agents/skills. Otherwise print PRECEDENCE_FAILURE.'

Local Workaround

The current local workaround is to disable the four user-global paths explicitly in:

/Users/mlnjtmnsnkitjmg26/.codex/config.toml

[[skills.config]]
path = "/Users/mlnjtmnsnkitjmg26/.agents/skills/goal/SKILL.md"
enabled = false

[[skills.config]]
path = "/Users/mlnjtmnsnkitjmg26/.agents/skills/goal-prompt-author/SKILL.md"
enabled = false

[[skills.config]]
path = "/Users/mlnjtmnsnkitjmg26/.agents/skills/goal-mode-preflight/SKILL.md"
enabled = false

[[skills.config]]
path = "/Users/mlnjtmnsnkitjmg26/.agents/skills/goal-closeout-evaluator/SKILL.md"
enabled = false

After that workaround, the fresh runtime check reports only project-local paths and prints PRECEDENCE_OK.

Supporting Evidence

The project-side diagnostic already implements the intended precedence and passes:

cd /Volumes/Samsung_T7/my-work-hub/app
npm run agent-skills:check-goal-precedence
node --test test/agent-skill-catalog.test.js
npm run syntax:check

Verified again on 2026-05-30:

• npm run agent-skills:check-goal-precedence resolved all four goal* skills to /Volumes/Samsung_T7/my-work-hub/.agents/skills/... and reported the /Users/mlnjtmnsnkitjmg26/.agents/skills/... duplicates as suppressed.
• node --test test/agent-skill-catalog.test.js passed.
• npm run syntax:check passed.
• Fresh codex exec -C /Volumes/Samsung_T7/my-work-hub -s read-only --ephemeral ... reported only the four project-local active paths and printed PRECEDENCE_OK after applying the local path-filter workaround.

The runtime should implement equivalent precedence in codex_core_skills::loader so projects do not need user-config path filters.