Duplicate skill names
Every surface resolves a skill name the same way: Across directories , the higher-precedence directory wins ( project → local → skills.create_dir → external_dirs ), including for the same relative path ( productivity/xdup local and external loads the local copy). The shadowed copy is hidden and a warning is logged. Inside one directory , two different skills that share a name are never guessed between. Both are listed under their exact relative path (for example a/one and b/two ), and loading the bare name fails with Ambiguous skill name dup-demo: use one of a/one, b/two . That message is also what hermes -s dup-demo and cron jobs report. Identical copies of one skill (a symlink view or byte-identical copy) resolve to the shallowest path. Plugin skills use their own plugin:skill names and never collide with these.
From the official Hermes Agent documentation.