The bastion wires the agent's +skills capability to a clone of GoogleCloudPlatform/gke-mcp, reading skills from that repo's skills/ directory. That directory no longer exists.
What happened
GoogleCloudPlatform/gke-mcp #511 ("chore(skills): deprecate and remove skills directory") merged on 2026-08-14 and deleted skills/ outright. The stated reason is that standalone skill workflows are deprecated, so there is no replacement path to point at. The leftover .agent/skills symlink still targets ../skills and now dangles.
Why it is quiet
In scripts/bastion/vm-setup.sh the clone still succeeds, so the failure never surfaces:
[ -d "${MCP_SKILLS_REPO}/skills" ] is falsegit clone succeeds, because the repo itself is fine- the success message runs
find .../skills -name SKILL.md | wc -l, which prints 0
The operator sees gke-mcp skills ready (0 skills). Meanwhile SKILLS_PATHS defaults to $HOME/mcp-skills/skills, a path that does not exist, so AGENT_SKILLS_PATHS points at nothing and the agent runs with no operational skills.
Impact
Any bastion provisioned after 2026-08-14 runs evals with an empty +skills. A bastion with an older clone still has the previous skills on disk and behaves differently, so results are not comparable across machines depending on when each one was set up.
Options
- Drop the
+skills wiring, matching the upstream deprecation
- Vendor the skills we actually want into this repo and point
SKILLS_PATHS there
- Keep the wiring but fail loudly when the resolved skills directory is missing or empty, instead of reporting "ready (0 skills)"
Option 3 is worth doing regardless of which of the first two we choose.
Context
Found while reviewing #53. That PR removed the stale comment naming four skills that no longer exist, but deliberately did not repoint the skills source, since that is a design change rather than a migration.
The bastion wires the agent's
+skillscapability to a clone ofGoogleCloudPlatform/gke-mcp, reading skills from that repo'sskills/directory. That directory no longer exists.What happened
GoogleCloudPlatform/gke-mcp#511 ("chore(skills): deprecate and remove skills directory") merged on 2026-08-14 and deletedskills/outright. The stated reason is that standalone skill workflows are deprecated, so there is no replacement path to point at. The leftover.agent/skillssymlink still targets../skillsand now dangles.Why it is quiet
In
scripts/bastion/vm-setup.shthe clone still succeeds, so the failure never surfaces:[ -d "${MCP_SKILLS_REPO}/skills" ]is falsegit clonesucceeds, because the repo itself is finefind .../skills -name SKILL.md | wc -l, which prints0The operator sees
gke-mcp skills ready (0 skills). MeanwhileSKILLS_PATHSdefaults to$HOME/mcp-skills/skills, a path that does not exist, soAGENT_SKILLS_PATHSpoints at nothing and the agent runs with no operational skills.Impact
Any bastion provisioned after 2026-08-14 runs evals with an empty
+skills. A bastion with an older clone still has the previous skills on disk and behaves differently, so results are not comparable across machines depending on when each one was set up.Options
+skillswiring, matching the upstream deprecationSKILLS_PATHSthereOption 3 is worth doing regardless of which of the first two we choose.
Context
Found while reviewing #53. That PR removed the stale comment naming four skills that no longer exist, but deliberately did not repoint the skills source, since that is a design change rather than a migration.