Cursor Skills vs Cursor Commands
The Cursor forum asks this every week. Skills and commands can look like the same markdown. They are not the same job.
Commands are typed. Skills are loaded.
Type /ship and you asked for a pipeline. You did not ask the agent to decide whether shipping was relevant. A saas-patterns skill may load because the task matched its description, or because /ship told the session to read it.
Same job, both files
SEO work uses both. /seo-audit is the command: scan titles, H1s, schema, emit a report. on-page-seo and entity-seo are the skills: what “good” means. Run the command without the skills and you get a generic audit. Load the skills without the command and you get a lecture.
When to write which
- You do the same multi-step job weekly → command.
- You need a standard many jobs share → skill.
- You need a hard ban on a path → rule, not either of these.
Related pages
Frequently asked questions
Can the agent run a command by itself?
No. Commands are manual. Skills can be chosen by the agent when the description matches.Should I put my /review checklist in a skill instead?
If you want to type /review, keep a command. If reviewers should apply the checklist whenever they see a PR, make a skill the code-reviewer agent reads.
Browse both directories
61 skills. 47 commands. The command is the trigger. The skill is the standard.