Problem

When new skills are added to .zeph/skills/ in the repo (e.g., PR #2088, a3fbaa5), they are not automatically deployed to the managed dir (~/.config/zeph/skills/).

The config loader normalizes the legacy .zeph/skills path to the managed dir at runtime (normalize_legacy_runtime_defaults()), so the managed dir is the actual runtime source. After a git pull, new skills in .zeph/skills/ are invisible to users until they manually /skill install <path> each one.

Impact

The docs rewrite in a3fbaa5 added 9 new skills: archive, cron, database, json-yaml, network, process-management, qdrant, regex, ssh-remote, text-processing. None of these are available after upgrade without manual installation steps.

Proposed Fix

On startup, compare skills present in ~/.config/zeph/skills/ against a bundled skill manifest (or the .zeph/skills/ directory in the project root). Auto-provision missing skills that are part of the default distribution.

Alternative: Ship skills embedded in the binary and provision on first run and on version change.

Workaround

Manually copy new skill directories:

cp -r .zeph/skills/archive ~/.config/zeph/skills/
# repeat for each new skill

Found In

CI Cycle 52 (2026-03-21)