Which coding agents support disable-model-invocation (manual-only skills)?

A developer surveyed coding agents to determine which support the disable-model-invocation frontmatter field, which prevents AI models from automatically loading skills. The survey found that Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code Copilot, Factory, and pi support the field, while OpenAI Codex and OpenCode use alternative mechanisms. The developer also provided a deep dive into pi's implementation, noting that it strictly checks for the boolean true and only suppresses the skill from the system prompt, not from manual invocation.

Claude Code's Agent Skills format has an optional frontmatter field: disable-model-invocation — Set to true to prevent Claude from automatically loading this skill. Use for workflows you want to trigger manually with /name . Also prevents the skill from being preloaded into subagents. As of v2.1.196, also prevents the skill from running when a scheduled task fires with the skill as its prompt. Default: false . I went looking for which other agents support this or something equivalent . The agentskills.io https://agentskills.io open spec itself does not define this field — only name , description , and optionally license , compatibility , metadata , allowed-tools . So this is an extension various clients have converged on or diverged around . | Agent | Notes | |---|---| Claude Code | Origin of the field. Also blocks subagent preloading, and v2.1.196+ blocks scheduled-task triggers. | Cursor | Same name/semantics. true → only reachable via /skill-name . Their rules→skills migration auto-sets this for legacy slash commands. | VS Code Copilot | Same name. Paired with user-invocable default true , giving a 2×2 matrix: default, background-only, on-demand-only, or fully disabled. | Factory Droid CLI | Same name/semantics, also has the companion user-invocable field, same as VS Code. | pi | Implements it faithfully — see deep dive below. | | Agent | Mechanism | |---|---| OpenAI Codex | SKILL.md only supports name / description . Manual-only invocation is instead set in a sidecar agents/openai.yaml file: policy.allow implicit invocation: false . Explicit $skill invocation still works; implicit matching is disabled. | OpenCode | No per-skill frontmatter equivalent frontmatter only recognizes name , description , license , compatibility , metadata . Instead, access is controlled globally via opencode.json permissions: permission.skill.<name : "deny" or "ask" . This restricts access rather than offering a "model can't invoke it but user can" mode. | Amp — frontmatter docs only mention name / description . Roo Code — only name / description required/recognized; adds mode-specific skill directories instead. Gemini CLI — discovery/activation flow via an activate skill tool + user consent , but no documented field for suppressing automatic invocation. Looked at the actual source @earendil-works/pi-coding-agent + underlying pi-agent-core harness . Parsing core/skills.js : disableModelInvocation: frontmatter "disable-model-invocation" === true Strict boolean check — only literal true counts; anything else missing, false , or a stray string "true" leaves the skill enabled. No warning on misuse. What it suppresses: only the <available skills block injected into the system prompt. Implemented as a simple filter, present in both the CLI package and the underlying harness: js export function formatSkillsForPrompt skills { const visibleSkills = skills.filter s = s.disableModelInvocation ; ... What it does NOT suppress: the skill is still fully registered as a /skill:name command. The command list building code maps over all loaded skills with no disableModelInvocation check: js const skills = this. resourceLoader.getSkills .skills.map skill = { name: skill:${skill.name} , description: skill.description, source: "skill", ... And expandSkillCommand which inlines the skill body when you type /skill:name also ignores the flag — it always works. Things Claude's docs mention that don't apply to pi: Subagents — pi has no subagent concept in the codebase at all, so there's nothing extra to suppress there. Scheduled tasks — pi has no scheduled-task feature, so the v2.1.196 Claude behavior has no analog. Comparison table: | Behavior | Claude Code | pi | |---|---|---| | Hides from auto-load / system prompt | ✅ | ✅ | Still invocable via /name | ✅ | ✅ /skill:name | | Prevented from preloading into subagents | ✅ | N/A no subagents | | Prevented from firing via scheduled task | ✅ v2.1.196+ | N/A no scheduled tasks | | Value validated / warned on misuse | not documented | no, silently coerced via === true | | Can disable manual invocation globally | n/a per-skill | yes, but only globally via enableSkillCommands , not per-skill | So pi implements the core semantics faithfully — hide from auto-discovery, keep manual slash access — without the subagent/scheduled-task extensions Claude Code later added, simply because pi's architecture doesn't have those features yet .