DEV Community: Skillselion

Developers are installing taste: 4 of today's 7 fastest-rising Claude Code skill searches are design skills

Skillselion — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 08:09:25 +0000

Disclosure: I run Skillselion, a live catalog of agent skills refreshed daily from skills.sh, GitHub and MCP registries, ranked by real installs. Every number in this post was pulled from it on August 12, 2026.

Here is the finding up front: of the seven fastest-rising skill searches on Skillselion today, four are design skills. Together those four skills have 1,659,726 installs, and the search growth on them ranges from +20% to +70%. Agents can already produce a working frontend; the search now is for output that looks like a person cared.

What are developers searching for right now?

The full trending list, with search growth as shown on our homepage today:

#	Skill	What it does	Search growth
1	Grill Me	Pressure-tests your plan until every decision is resolved	+160%
2	Ui Ux Pro Max	Instant UI/UX decisions and component recommendations	+70%
3	Ponytail	Forces the simplest, most minimal solution at every step	+60%
4	Frontend Design	Production-grade interfaces that avoid generic AI aesthetics	+50%
5	Caveman	Targets a roughly 75% cut in output tokens while keeping technical detail	+50%
6	Impeccable	Polished, distinctive web and app UI in real code	+40%
7	Design Taste Frontend	Overrides generic LLM frontend output with intentional taste	+20%

Four of the seven (Ui Ux Pro Max, Frontend Design, Impeccable, Design Taste Frontend) are about visual and interaction quality. The other three are about discipline, and I will come back to them.

Which design skills are developers actually installing?

Ranked by install count, fetched from the live catalog today:

Frontend Design by Anthropic, 767,871 installs. Details | GitHub
Design Taste Frontend by leonxlnx, 350,625 installs. Details | GitHub
Ui Ux Pro Max by nextlevelbuilder, 311,742 installs. Details | GitHub
Impeccable by pbakaus, 229,488 installs. Details | GitHub

Worth noting: the taste-skill repo is not a one-off. The same author ships a whole family, and two siblings of the trending skill are themselves large: high-end-visual-design at 265,273 installs and stitch-design-taste at 223,682, both fetched today from the same catalog.

Why is taste the thing being installed?

Anthropic's own Frontend Design skill states the goal in its description: help with "making choices that don't read as templated defaults." That sentence, in an official skill from the company that makes the model, is the most honest admission in the ecosystem. Left alone, coding agents converge on the same rounded cards, the same gradient heroes, the same three-column feature grids. The output works. It also looks like everyone else's output.

A skill fixes this in a way a one-off prompt cannot. It is a versioned, reviewable file of opinions: spacing scales, type choices, what to refuse to build. When you install a taste skill, you are importing someone's design judgment into every session, the same way a lint config imports someone's code judgment. The install counts say developers understand this trade perfectly well.

What about the other three?

The non-design entries on the list share a different theme: restraint.

Grill Me by mattpocock, 832,797 installs, interrogates your plan before any code is written. Details | GitHub
Caveman by juliusbrussee, 429,065 installs, compresses agent communication to cut token spend. Details | GitHub
Ponytail by dietrichgebert, 33,353 installs, forces the smallest possible change and deletes what is not needed. Details | GitHub

Put the two themes side by side and today's list reads as one sentence: developers want agents that think before building, spend less doing it, and produce something distinctive at the end. Nothing on the list makes an agent generate more.

What should you install first?

If your frontend output looks generic, pick one taste skill, not all four. They overlap heavily, and stacking them mostly burns context. Frontend Design is the safe default given its adoption; Design Taste Frontend and Impeccable are the opinionated alternatives worth trying if the default still feels flat. The full frontend-design ranking lives at skillselion.com/best/skills-for-frontend-design. Pair whichever you choose with Grill Me at the planning stage, since bad plans produce confident, well-styled versions of the wrong thing. And treat install counts as adoption evidence, not proof of fit for your stack: the counts above are today's snapshot and they move daily.

Developers are not searching for skills that make agents produce more. They are searching for skills that make the output worth shipping.

I run Skillselion, where all install and trending data in this post comes from. Figures are a live snapshot taken August 12, 2026.

We ran the Gini coefficient on 58,751 AI agent skills. It came out at 0.96.

Skillselion — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:18:36 +0000

Disclosure: we run Skillselion, the directory this census was pulled from. Every number below is reproducible from the free CSV.

On 2026-08-09 we dumped the entire Skillselion production catalog and counted it: 79,827 public listings covering agent skills, MCP servers, plugins and marketplaces, holding 157,833,061 cumulative installs. Then we ran the statistic economists use for income inequality across the 58,751 of those listings that are agent skills.

The Gini coefficient came out at 0.96.

Gini measures how unevenly a quantity is spread across a population: 0 is perfectly even, 1 is one holder taking everything. Applied to install counts across 58,751 AI agent skills in August 2026, it is 0.96.

South Africa, which reports the highest national income Gini the World Bank publishes, sits near 0.63. Brazil is around 0.52. A 0.96 is not a country. It is closer to a raffle.

One honest caveat before you quote that. Income and software installs are different measurement domains, so read the comparison as a sense of scale and not a like-for-like ranking. A catalog where a tenth of entries have zero installs can reach a Gini that no national income distribution ever will. Long-tail software distributions run hot on this measure in general.

What 0.96 looks like from the inside

Half of all 158 million installs go to 198 skills. That is 0.34% of the catalog.
The median skill has 56 installs.
59.3% have fewer than a hundred installs. 9.9% have none at all.
The top 1% of skills hold 77.4% of every install in the census.

The median skill sits at 56 installs, and these are cumulative all-time totals, so anything published this week starts from zero against a field that has been accumulating for months. For most people who publish a skill, release produces no measurable adoption. That is worth knowing before you read your own numbers as a verdict on the work.

The economy sitting on top of it has almost no money in it

Of the 79,827 listings, 55 carry a price. That is 0.07%. Another 1,404 ask you to bring your own API key and 184 run a freemium tier. Everything else is free.

Adoption on this scale normally arrives with a paid tier, a store cut or a marketplace fee. Almost none of that has been built here yet. If you are weighing whether to charge for a skill, that is the competitive context: you would be one of 55.

Publisher rank stops matching company size

Combining the two publisher tables from the census, where ByteDance is broken out separately for the reason below:

Rank	Publisher	Installs
1	ByteDance Lark/Feishu (70 listings, bundled, see caveat)	24,261,658
2	Microsoft	11,153,893
3	Matt Pocock (independent educator)	10,584,924
4	Vercel Labs	5,576,605
5	Anthropic	3,484,550
6	Google	730,896
7	AWS	171,446
8	OpenAI	150,665

One caveat we owe you on row 1. ByteDance's Lark/Feishu suite holds 15.4% of every install in the census, but Lark skills frequently install as bundles: one user action installs several skills at once, and the counts record each bundled skill separately. Those per-skill totals are therefore not comparable to a hand-picked install, and row 1 should not be read as 24 million deliberate choices. The share is real, and the mechanism producing it is documented in the methodology.

Now look at row 3. One person, publishing TypeScript education material, sits above Vercel Labs, Anthropic, Google and AWS, and roughly 70 times ahead of OpenAI on installs. Reach here tracks what developers choose to install, which is a different contest from benchmarks or funding.

The fastest-growing thing in the census is a skill that argues with you

One whole category exists to give the developer a hard time. Across 88 skills built for interrogation the cluster reaches 2,425,925 installs, about 1.5% of the census. What makes it notable is the slope: it is the platform's #1 rising search at +160% over the census window, and nothing else in the census grew faster.

Skill	Installs	Repo
grill-me	787,155	mattpocock/skills
grill-with-docs	669,499	mattpocock/skills
triage	534,688	mattpocock/skills
grilling	380,693	mattpocock/skills

Install counts above are frozen to the census date of 2026-08-09. The linked pages show live totals, which have moved since.

A second cluster sits on the meeting layer. Skills that write standup updates, summarize meetings, triage inboxes, tailor resumes and draft performance reviews reach 2,101,631 installs between them. Standups, meeting notes and status reports account for 1,889,988 of that across 111 skills. Every cluster here automates the reporting of work.

Method, and the raw file

The census is a complete dump of our production catalog taken on 2026-08-09: 79,827 listings, of which 58,751 are agent skills and the rest are MCP servers, plugins and marketplaces. Install counts are cumulative all-time totals. They aggregate public registry data, chiefly the skills.sh registry, alongside GitHub and other public sources, and they count install events rather than active users.

The category clusters were built by keyword matching over names and descriptions, then curated by hand to drop false positives. A "brutalist" UI-design skill is not an interrogation skill.

All five findings, the charts and the full methodology: The Agent Economy Census

The raw dataset, all 79,827 rows as a CSV, is downloadable on that page. Take it, check our arithmetic, disagree with us in public. Cite it as "Skillselion Agent Economy Census, August 2026".

We run Skillselion, an independent directory of Claude Code, Codex and Cursor extensions ranked by real installs. Not affiliated with Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, Claude, Claude Code or Codex.

Developers now install the author, not the skill: 'matt pocock skills' searches are up 160%

Skillselion — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:43:29 +0000

The fastest-rising Claude Code skill search this week is not a skill name. It is a person.

"matt pocock skills" is up 160% as a search term on our trending rail today. Sitting at number 5 on the same rail is caveman, up 50%. Caveman is the brand name of a seven-skill set. Developers search for an author, then install everything the author ships.

Three numbers from today's catalog data make the case.

1. The #9 skill in the catalog exists to serve other skills

setup-matt-pocock-skills has been installed over 540,000 times, which makes it the ninth most-installed skill in our catalog. It is the companion setup skill for mattpocock/skills: it wires his issue-tracker conventions, triage labels and docs layout into your repo so the rest of his set works the way he intends.

Nobody installs a companion setup skill because they liked one skill. You install it because you adopted the system.

The weekly numbers show the subscription still compounding. Between July 29 and August 7, grill-me, his most-installed skill at over 750,000 installs, gained 96,462 installs. The setup skill gained 76,531 in the same window. For every 100 installs grill-me picked up this week, the setup skill picked up 79. Most developers arriving at the front door take the whole house.

2. The caveman family moves as one unit

caveman compresses agent output to cut token usage. It ships from juliusbrussee/caveman with six sibling skills. Here is what each gained between July 29 and August 7 in our catalog data:

Skill	Gained (Jul 29 to Aug 7)	Total installs
caveman	26,831	410,000+
caveman-commit	21,202	293,000
caveman-review	21,148	291,000
caveman-compress	21,126	289,000
caveman-help	21,001	283,000
caveman-stats	20,860	240,000
cavecrew	20,722	235,000+

Six of the seven gained between 20,722 and 21,202 installs. That is a spread of 480 on gains of about 21,000 each, or roughly 2%. The flagship runs about 5,600 ahead, which is the slice of developers who stop at the front door. Everyone else takes the family.

The same shape shows up in obra/superpowers: six of its skills sit on today's trending 100 together, including brainstorming at over 310,000 installs and using-superpowers at over 200,000.

3. Three trending slots are left for anyone without an author brand

On Tuesday we published 92 of today's 100 fastest-growing Claude Code skills come from three publishers. Two days later, 97 of today's 100 trending entries belong to just six author accounts (two of them are the same vendor, Lark). Three slots are left for everyone else.

That piece was about supply, meaning who ships the skills. Today's data is about demand, meaning how developers adopt them. The rising search terms are author names. The #9 skill in the catalog is an author's setup shim. The install curves inside each set move in lockstep. All three signals point the same way: the unit of adoption in the Claude Code ecosystem is now the author.

What this means if you ship skills

Distribution attaches to names. grill-me added 96,462 installs this week, second only to find-skills among today's trending 100, and the demand around it carried 28 entries from the same author onto the list.
A single standalone skill is fighting for three slots. Only three of today's 100 trending entries came from authors with a single entry on the list. If your skill stands alone, your bottleneck is discovery.
A setup skill is a subscription button. The install count on setup-matt-pocock-skills is the cleanest public measure of author-level trust we have seen in the catalog. If developers trust your system, they will run your setup.

There is one counterweight. find-skills by vercel-labs, the most-installed skill in the catalog at over 2.8 million installs, is the opposite bet: let the agent pick the right skill per task instead of following an author. Both bets are growing. What is fading is the middle, where a developer browses for one capability at a time.

The numbers at a glance

Signal	Value (August 7 catalog data)
"matt pocock skills" search trend	+160%
setup-matt-pocock-skills installs	540,000+ (#9 all-time)
Setup installs gained per 100 grill-me installs, Jul 29 to Aug 7	79
caveman family gain spread (6 of 7 skills, same window)	480 installs on ~21,000 each
Trending-100 entries held by six author accounts	97 of 100

Sources: our live catalog, refreshed daily from skills.sh, GitHub and MCP registries, ranked by real installs. Search trend figures are what our homepage trending rail shows today.

We run Skillselion, an independent directory of Claude Code, Codex and Cursor extensions ranked by real installs. Not affiliated with Anthropic, OpenAI or Cursor.

92 of today's 100 fastest-growing Claude Code skills come from three publishers

Skillselion — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:50:17 +0000

I pulled the 100 fastest-growing Claude Code skills this morning (August 5 data, ranked by installs added in the last day). 92 of them belong to exactly three publishers.

54 rows are the Lark suite (published under open.feishu.cn and larksuite)
31 rows are mattpocock/skills
7 rows are Julius Brussee's caveman family

Publisher	Trending rows	Installs added per day
Lark suite	54	14,122
Matt Pocock	31	3,018
Julius Brussee (caveman)	7	588
find-skills (the installer)	1	224
Everyone else	7	366 combined

One more slot goes to find-skills (repo), the installer that installs other skills, at +224 installs a day. That leaves 7 of the top 100 slots for everyone else.

The Lark bloc moves as one organism

The 54 Lark rows added a combined 14,122 installs in a day. Individually they run from +175 to +345 installs a day, and the biggest 27 of them sit between +342 and +345, which is as close to perfect lockstep as install data gets. Their totals cluster the same way: lark-approval leads at 528,408, with fifteen siblings packed within about a thousand installs of it.

Nobody hand-picks 54 skills at identical rates. This is what suite distribution looks like: the skills ship and install together, so every member of the bundle climbs the leaderboard together. The bloc now occupies more than half of the trending board on its own.

The Pocock bloc is a different machine

Matt Pocock's 31 trending rows added 3,018 installs a day combined, from grill-me at 754,978 installs (+188 a day) down to wizard, the slowest of the set at +45 a day (111,964 installs). All 31 point at the same repo.

The install pattern says subscription, not selection: developers add the repo once and take the whole set, so the author's entire roster rises on one decision. Google's search data backs that up. In this month's rising queries around Claude Code skills, "matt pocock" is up 180% and "matt pocock skills" is up 160% (Google Trends, worldwide, past month, captured today). Developers are typing the author's name into the search box.

The caveman family shows the same shape at smaller scale: seven trending rows, +81 to +92 installs a day each, led by the 410,360-install main skill, and "caveman skill" up 50% in the same rising-queries capture.

The Claude Code skills that break through alone

Seven skills made the top 100 outside the three big blocs, and even here the bloc pattern creeps in: four of the seven are obra's superpowers set, a fourth mini-bloc at around +50 a day per row, led by writing-plans. The genuinely solo climbers:

agent-browser (repo), Vercel's browser automation CLI, 628,408 installs, +52 a day
nia, a 54,152-install recent arrival on the board, +60 a day
wind-mcp-skill, a finance-data skill at +59 a day

A standalone skill growing +50 a day is doing well. The same day, every single Lark row grew at triple that rate or better.

What this does to install counts

Install counts used to be a decent proxy for "developers chose this". On today's board, they are mostly a measure of distribution: whether a skill ships inside a suite, inside a followed author's repo, or alone. If you are evaluating a skill, the question is not just how many installs it has. It is whether those installs arrived one decision at a time or 54 rows at a time.

Numbers source: live catalog, refreshed daily from skills.sh, GitHub and MCP registries, ranked by real installs. Search figures: Google Trends rising queries, worldwide, past month, captured August 5.

I run Skillselion, an independent directory of Claude Code, Codex and Cursor extensions ranked by real installs. Not affiliated with Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor or ByteDance.

grill-me just passed Anthropic's frontend-design to become the #2 most-installed Claude Code skill

Skillselion — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 10:12:53 +0000

On the August 4 skills leaderboard, Matt Pocock's grill-me sits at 745,804 installs, 7,599 ahead of Anthropic's own frontend-design at 738,205. Six days ago it trailed by 25,070. A community skill that interrogates your plan before any code gets written now outranks the skill Anthropic ships for its flagship use case, and only Vercel's find-skills (2,806,813) sits above it.

We wrote on July 29 that the entire top 10 belonged to three authors: Matt Pocock with 5 skills, Vercel Labs with 4, Anthropic with 1. Six days later that snapshot is already broken, in two places.

Break 1: the #2 slot changed hands

Between July 29 and August 4, grill-me added 55,111 installs. frontend-design added 22,442 over the same six days. That is roughly 2.5x the pace, and it was enough to close a 25,070 deficit and open a 7,599 lead.

grill-me does not write code. It runs a relentless interview about your plan or design until every branch of the decision tree is resolved, then lets you build. The fact that it now outranks frontend-design, a code-generating skill from Anthropic itself, says something about where developers feel the pain. The misunderstandings that pile up before generation starts seem to hurt more than the generation itself.

Break 2: a media-automation bundle took two top-10 slots

The July 29 cut line for the top 10 was 495,226 installs. Today, positions 9 and 10 belong to ai-video-generation (570,274) and ai-image-generation (568,471), both from the 101-skills repo (which now redirects to inference-sh/skills on GitHub). Two more from the same repo, ai-avatar-video (568,250) and twitter-automation (568,202), sit at 11 and 12. Four skills, one repo, all within 2,072 installs of each other.

That spread is the tell. When four skills from one repo track each other that tightly at half a million installs, the simplest explanation is that they are being installed as a set rather than chosen one by one. Since they all sat below the 495,226 cut on July 29, each has added at least 72,900 installs in six days. Whatever is driving that bundle, it is moving faster than any skill whose July 29 number we published.

Compare that to Matt Pocock's repo, where his five top-25 entries alone spread from 745,804 (grill-me) down to 536,845 (setup-matt-pocock-skills), and the rest of the repo runs lower still. His skills rise at different speeds because developers pick them individually. Inside one repo, a wide spread is the signature of per-skill demand and a tight spread is the signature of a bundle. Raw install rank cannot tell you which skill developers actually reached for; the spread can.

The new top 10, August 4

#	Skill	Author	Installs
1	find-skills	Vercel Labs	2,806,813
2	grill-me	Matt Pocock	745,804
3	frontend-design	Anthropic	738,205
4	grill-with-docs	Matt Pocock	632,931
5	agent-browser	Vercel Labs	622,750
6	improve-codebase-architecture	Matt Pocock	609,303
7	vercel-react-best-practices	Vercel Labs	603,739
8	tdd	Matt Pocock	587,398
9	ai-video-generation	101-skills	570,274
10	ai-image-generation	101-skills	568,471

Out since July 29: setup-matt-pocock-skills (536,845, now #14) and Vercel's web-design-guidelines, which no longer appears in today's top 25.

The three-author monopoly lasted less than a week. The ownership count now reads Matt Pocock 4, Vercel Labs 3, Anthropic 1, and one media bundle 2. The interesting question for next week is whether the bundle keeps its lockstep climb, and whether any single hand-picked skill besides grill-me can hold a top-10 slot against sets that install four at a time.

We run Skillselion, an independent directory of Claude Code, Codex and Cursor extensions ranked by real installs. Numbers in this post come from our live catalog, refreshed daily from skills.sh, GitHub and MCP registries, and were verified against the live leaderboard on August 4, 2026.

Vercel's agent-browser just crossed 600k installs: the fastest-accelerating skill in the Claude Code top 100

Skillselion — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:59:57 +0000

Vercel's agent-browser sits at 612,890 installs on the skills.sh leaderboard as of August 2. It was under 600,000 on July 29. Over those four days it averaged roughly 5,450 installs a day, against roughly 3,370 a day across the previous week. That +62% jump in daily rate is the sharpest acceleration of any skill in the top 100 right now, and it is not close: the next-fastest is at +17%.

We track daily install snapshots for every skill in the Skillselion catalog, so we can compare each skill's current install rate against its own recent baseline. The top 100 as a whole is not surging: the median skill is running at 0.94x its late-July rate, slightly below it. The four fastest-accelerating skills, though, are all the same kind of skill. (The next block after them is a five-skill AI-media bundle from one author, all at +13% in lockstep, which is bundle behavior rather than individual demand.)

The acceleration top 4 is browser hands and frontend eyes

agent-browser (GitHub) - 612,890 installs, 39.7k stars. ~3,370/day in the last week of July, ~5,450/day since July 29 (+62%). A Rust CLI that gives a coding agent a real browser: navigate, click, type, screenshot, read the accessibility tree.
web-design-guidelines (GitHub) - 509,313 installs. ~2,460/day to ~2,880/day (+17%). Audits existing frontend code against Vercel's web interface guidelines.
vercel-react-best-practices (GitHub) - 599,350 installs, about to cross 600k itself. ~2,550/day to ~2,960/day (+16%).
frontend-design (GitHub) - Anthropic's own design skill, 732,170 installs. ~3,580/day to ~4,100/day (+15%).

For contrast, the biggest skill on the leaderboard, find-skills, is dead flat: ~15,160/day in late July, ~15,090/day since (2,783,463 installs total). The catalog is steady. This specific cluster is not.

The demand side agrees

Our homepage trending rail tracks which skill searches are rising on Google. Right now search interest in Anthropic's frontend-design skill is up 120%, and searches for ui-ux-pro-max, a UI/UX decision skill with 290k installs, are up 140%. Developers are searching for frontend taste at the same moment they are installing browser control and design review at above-baseline rates.

What we think is happening

Claude Code shipped an in-app browser in early July, and agents that can see a rendered page need two things: hands to drive the browser and eyes that know what good frontend looks like. agent-browser is the hands. The other three are the eyes. We cannot attribute the acceleration to a single launch or post, and we are saying so rather than inventing one. What the data supports: the growth is concentrated in one coherent capability cluster, not spread across the leaderboard.

Methodology, honestly

Numbers come from our own daily install snapshots of the skills.sh all-time leaderboard. Our snapshot series has a gap between July 29 and August 2 (three missed collection days), so the "since July 29" rates are that four-day window averaged per day. Late-July baselines are true daily snapshots, July 23 to 29. Every install count above is the live number at time of writing and every skill link goes to a page showing the same data.

Data: live catalog, refreshed daily from skills.sh, GitHub and MCP registries, ranked by real installs. We run Skillselion, an independent directory of Claude Code, Codex and Cursor extensions. Not affiliated with Anthropic, OpenAI, Vercel or Cursor.

The entire Claude Code skills top 10 belongs to three authors. Anthropic holds one slot.

Skillselion — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 08:00:45 +0000

Pull the all-time install leaderboard for Claude Code skills today and count the authors. The ten most-installed skills come from exactly three names: Matt Pocock has five, Vercel Labs has four, and Anthropic, the company that created the skill format, has one.

We run Skillselion, a directory of Claude Code, Codex and Cursor extensions ranked by real installs. The numbers below are from our live catalog this morning, July 29 (refreshed daily from skills.sh, GitHub and MCP registries).

The top 10, with installs

#	Skill	Author	Installs
1	find-skills (repo)	Vercel Labs	2,723,091
2	frontend-design (repo)	Anthropic	715,763
3	grill-me (repo)	Matt Pocock	690,693
4	agent-browser (repo)	Vercel Labs	591,076
5	vercel-react-best-practices (repo)	Vercel Labs	587,496
6	grill-with-docs (repo)	Matt Pocock	585,310
7	improve-codebase-architecture (repo)	Matt Pocock	565,718
8	tdd (repo)	Matt Pocock	544,478
9	web-design-guidelines (repo)	Vercel Labs	497,786
10	setup-matt-pocock-skills (repo)	Matt Pocock	495,226

How three names ended up owning the board

Each of the three got there a different way.

Matt Pocock's five slots are an author subscription. Developers install his whole engineering workflow in one motion: the grilling interviews, the architecture pass, the TDD loop. The tell is slot 10. setup-matt-pocock-skills is a one-time per-repo configuration skill that scaffolds what his other skills assume (where issues live, triage labels, docs layout). A skill whose only job is to prepare a repo for his other skills has nearly half a million installs. You install that because you adopted the author, not because you needed a skill.

Vercel's four slots are a product surface. find-skills at number 1 is the discovery layer itself, the skill that installs other skills (we wrote about it two days ago). The other three ship Vercel's opinions about React, web design and browser automation straight into every agent that installs them. When agents write a large share of frontend code, the style guide the agent follows is worth owning.

Anthropic's single slot is the format itself doing its job. Anthropic defined SKILL.md and ships a first-party skills repo, and its one entry, frontend-design at 715,763 installs, sits at number 2. The community out-shipped the format's creator on its own format. That is what an open format is for, and install-ranked lists make it visible.

The 1,600-install cliff at position 10

Positions 11 through 25 explain the cliff. All fifteen are Lark skills covering Feishu/Lark docs, calendar, mail, spreadsheets and more, packed into an 863-install band between 492,763 and 493,626, the signature of a bundle installed as one unit.

setup-matt-pocock-skills holds position 10 by exactly 1,600 installs. If the bundle adds its next 1,600 installs before setup-matt-pocock-skills does, the bottom of the top 10 stops being individual skills developers chose and starts being whatever arrived attached to something else.

What this means when you pick skills

Install counts are a trust signal, but the top 10 shows the trust attaches to authors and bundles more than to individual skills. Practical reading:

A famous author's fifth-most-installed skill rides on the trust his first one earned. Judge it on its own SKILL.md.
Bundle skills carry near-identical counts by construction. Fifteen Lark skills at ~493k each is one distribution decision counted fifteen times.
A standalone skill that earned six figures without an author brand or a bundle behind it is the strongest signal on the board.

The full live leaderboard, filterable by category, is at skillselion.com/skills.

We build Skillselion, a directory of Claude Code, Codex and Cursor extensions ranked by real installs. Live catalog, refreshed daily from skills.sh, GitHub and MCP registries.

Developers are googling Claude Code skills that barely exist yet

Skillselion — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 08:28:05 +0000

Google Trends data captured today (July 28) shows rising searches for Claude Code skills that supply has not caught up with. Searches like "task observer skill" and "claude record a skill" are surging this month and match nothing in a catalog that tracks 58,971 skills. Two more risers match skills so small they are effectively invisible. That is demand sitting in public search data, waiting for someone to ship against it.

What the search data says

We pulled the rising queries around "claude skill" and "claude code skills" from Google Trends (worldwide, past month). Three clear buckets came out.

Bucket 1: demand that supply already meets. These rising searches map cleanly to existing, heavily-installed skills:

"ponytail" (+200%) - ponytail (GitHub), 21,720 installs. The output-compression skill keeps climbing week over week.
"ui-ux-pro-max-skill" (+140%) - ui-ux-pro-max (GitHub), 287,987 installs.
"front end design skill claude code" (+120%) - Anthropic's own frontend-design (GitHub), 711,652 installs, the second-most-installed skill anywhere.
"grill me skill" (+80%) - grill-me (GitHub), 680,248 installs.

Bucket 2: demand with no supply at all. These are risers with zero matching skills in the catalog:

"task observer skill" (Breakout, Google's label for a query growing faster than 5,000%) - developers want a skill that watches long-running agent tasks and reports on them. Nothing shipped matches it. The only near-name hit is a design-patterns skill about the observer pattern, which is a different thing entirely.
"claude record a skill" (+350%) - people want to record a workflow and turn it into a skill, the way you record a macro. No skill does this today.

Bucket 3: demand outrunning tiny supply. The searches are Breakout risers, the matching skills exist but have barely been found:

"i have adhd skill claude" (Breakout) - one matching skill exists: i-have-adhd, an output style that leads every reply with the next concrete action and suppresses tangents. It has 2,799 installs against a Breakout search curve. The demand is visibly bigger than the distribution.
"dataviz skill" (Breakout) - dataviz-skills exists with 163 installs. A Breakout query against a triple-digit install count is a positioning gap, not a supply gap.

Why this matters if you write skills

The skill ecosystem's biggest install counts went to skills that met an obvious, repeated need: making agents argue back (grill-me), compressing output (ponytail), designing frontends (frontend-design). Every one of those needs showed up in search before it showed up in install counts.

A Breakout search with zero or near-zero matching supply is about the strongest free product signal there is. Whoever ships a competent task-observer skill, or a record-to-skill workflow, or simply out-executes the tiny incumbents in bucket 3, gets the default position for a search that is already growing.

The full rising list refreshes on the Trending in search rail as new Trends data lands.

We run Skillselion, the catalog referenced here. Data: Google Trends (worldwide, past month, captured July 28, 2026) cross-checked against the live catalog, refreshed daily from skills.sh, GitHub and MCP registries, ranked by real installs. Skillselion is independent and not affiliated with Anthropic, OpenAI or Cursor.

The most-installed Claude Code skill does not write code. It installs other skills.

Skillselion — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 08:00:59 +0000

As of July 27, 2026, the all-time install leaderboard for Claude Code skills has a strange number one. Top spot belongs to find-skills, a Vercel Labs skill whose whole job is discovering and installing other skills. It sits at 2,688,992 installs in our live catalog, almost 4x the number two, Anthropic's frontend-design at 707,696.

And it is not coasting on an old lead. In the last day find-skills added 224 installs, ahead of every standalone skill in the catalog, including Matt Pocock's grill-me at 188.

What find-skills actually does

When you ask your agent how to do something, find-skills (GitHub) routes the question through a discovery flow instead of letting the model improvise: understand the task, check the skills.sh leaderboard for proven options, search with npx skills find, verify install counts and source reputation, then present install commands. Its quality gates prefer skills with 1,000+ installs from trusted sources like vercel-labs and anthropics.

In other words: it is a package manager with taste, running inside your agent.

Why a meta-skill tops the Claude Code skills leaderboard

We index 58,979 Claude Code skills. Nobody browses that. The scarce resource in this ecosystem is selection. Capability got cheap. Every skill you install is a standing instruction that competes for your agent's attention, so installing the wrong ten skills is worse than installing none.

That is why the discovery layer is compounding faster than any individual capability. The same pattern played out with npm: once the registry got big enough, the tools that won were the ones that told you what to install.

Two things the install data shows that a leaderboard screenshot will not:

Trust signals became install signals. find-skills filters by install count, which means high-install skills get recommended more, which raises their install counts. The rich get richer. This week's top risers behind find-skills are almost all from one author with an already-huge repo (mattpocock/skills, 189,813 stars): grill-me (GitHub) +188/day, tdd +148/day, grill-with-docs +143/day.
Raw install counts need filtering before you trust them. Whole bundles of skills move in lockstep when a vendor ships them together, so treat any riser list that mixes bundles with standalone skills with suspicion. Otherwise a calendar-integration bundle looks like the hottest thing in AI coding.

What this means for your Claude Code setup

If your agent does not have a discovery step, you are the discovery step. Either install a meta-skill like find-skills, or keep a vetted shortlist handy: our leaderboard ranks every skill by real installs, refreshed daily.

The most-installed skill in the ecosystem is the one that admits you should not have to guess. That is probably the clearest sign yet that agent skills are infrastructure now.

Data: live Skillselion catalog, July 27, 2026. We run skillselion.com, a directory of Claude Code, Codex and Cursor extensions, refreshed daily from skills.sh, GitHub and MCP registries, ranked by real installs.

Matt Pocock now owns all 8 of this week's fastest-growing Claude Code skills

Skillselion — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 07:56:42 +0000

All eight of this week's fastest-growing Claude Code skills were written by one developer: Matt Pocock. Pull the week-over-week install numbers for the 100 most-installed skills, set aside two bundle clusters that install in lockstep plus Vercel's find-skills discovery utility, and that is what falls out.

Pocock is the TypeScript educator behind Total TypeScript. In the Claude Code skill ecosystem he has become something the install charts have not shown before: an author brand. Here are the eight, ranked by installs added over the past week (live catalog data, July 26):

grill-me (GitHub) - 661,353 installs, +6,034 this week. Interviews you about your plan until the holes are gone, before any code gets written. I wrote about this one in depth yesterday.
grill-with-docs (GitHub) - 560,474 installs, +5,179. The same interrogation, run against your project's domain model and ADRs, updating the docs as decisions land.
improve-codebase-architecture (GitHub) - 543,251 installs, +4,821. Surfaces architectural friction and proposes deeper fixes instead of local patches.
prototype (GitHub) - 425,267 installs, +4,739. Scoped throwaway builds so you learn before you commit to a design.
handoff (GitHub) - 441,337 installs, +4,715. Compacts a long session into a document another agent can pick up cold.
tdd (GitHub) - 522,446 installs, +4,664. Holds the agent to the red-green loop: failing test first, then code.
setup-matt-pocock-skills (GitHub) - 474,118 installs, +4,480. One-time setup that configures a repo for the rest of this list.
triage (GitHub) - 442,854 installs, +4,246. Sorts incoming bugs and requests into a workable order before anything gets built.

For honesty's sake: one skill did add more installs than any of these. find-skills, Vercel's skill-discovery utility, grew by 11,361. It is the tool developers use to find everything else, so it rises with the whole market rather than on its own merits. The two bundle clusters I excluded gain near-identical counts across every skill in the bundle at once, 26 skills within a 15-install spread in one case and 5 skills in the other, which is the signature of bundled installs rather than separate decisions.

Number seven is the tell

setup-matt-pocock-skills is useless on its own. It exists to configure a repo for the other skills in this list: which issue tracker you use, which triage labels, where the domain docs live. 474,118 installs of a companion setup skill scoped to a single author's catalog is a striking data point: that many developers stopped evaluating skills one at a time and adopted one person's way of working wholesale.

There is a reason the wholesale bet feels safe here. Look at what the eight actually do. Not one of them generates features: they grill your plan, guard your architecture, force tests first, sort your backlog, and write your handoff notes. It is a complete software discipline layer, the parts of engineering that agents skip when you let them sprint. Developers keep telling us the same thing with their installs: the scarce resource in agentic coding is judgment, and they will take it from an author whose judgment they already trust from his TypeScript work.

What to watch: the next author brand in Claude Code skills

Whether a second author brand emerges at all. Anthropic's official skills and Vercel's labs sets grow steadily but read as vendor toolkits, and their per-skill weekly adds trail Pocock's: frontend-design gained 2,828 this week and Vercel's agent-skills entries under 2,000 each, against 4,246 to 6,034 across all eight of his. Whoever becomes the second author brand will get there the way Pocock did: by shipping an opinionated way of working, with the code generation left to the model.

The numbers come from the live Skillselion catalog, refreshed daily from skills.sh, GitHub and MCP registries, ranked by real installs. Browse all skills at skillselion.com/skills.

I run Skillselion, a directory of Claude Code, Codex and Cursor extensions ranked by real installs.

grill-me just passed 650,000 installs. Claude Code developers are reaching for skills that argue before they code.

Skillselion — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 07:51:52 +0000

Matt Pocock's fastest-growing skill this week is grill-me (GitHub), a skill whose whole job is to interrogate you about your plan before Claude Code writes a single line. It sits at 654,849 all-time installs, with 9,611 added in the last week, leading every other skill in the most popular skill repo we track.

It's not alone. The whole "grilling" family is climbing:

grill-me (GitHub): 654,849 installs, +9,611 this week. Runs a grilling session that challenges your feature idea until the spec stops being vibes.
grill-with-docs (GitHub): 554,895 installs, +8,074. Same interview, but it stress-tests your plan against your project's own documented decisions and updates the docs as answers land.
grilling (GitHub): 266,286 installs, +7,827. The underlying interrogation engine the other two invoke.

That's roughly 25,500 installs in seven days for one idea: make the agent push back.

Anthropic moved the same week

On July 22, Claude Code v2.1.218 changed /code-review to run as a background subagent, so review work no longer eats your conversation. Three days earlier, v2.1.215 stopped Claude from running /verify and /code-review on its own, handing the trigger back to the developer.

Read those together with the install data and a picture forms. The tooling is converging on two bookends around code generation:

Before code: interrogation. grill-me forces the spec conversation you were going to skip.
After code: review. code-review (GitHub) is at 174,051 installs, +7,191 this week, and tdd (GitHub), the red-green loop that makes the agent prove its work, holds 517,422 installs, +7,296.

The middle part, writing the code, is the part with no breakout skill. Generation is table stakes now; the growth is at the bookends.

Why developers want an AI that argues

Agents made wrong code cheap to produce in bulk. A misunderstood requirement used to cost you an afternoon; now it costs you a 2,000-line diff that compiles, passes a smoke test, and is wrong. The expensive failure moved upstream, from writing code to deciding what to build.

The install numbers say developers have noticed. Last week the fastest risers in our search data were restraint skills that make Claude quieter and terser. This week it's skills that make Claude harder to satisfy. Same trend, next stage: first developers muzzled the agent, now they're hiring it as the skeptic in the room.

There's something honest about a market where the top of the charts is an AI that says "convince me first."

The full ranked list, refreshed daily from skills.sh, GitHub and MCP registries and ranked by real installs, is at skillselion.com.

I run Skillselion, a directory of Claude Code, Codex and Cursor extensions ranked by real installs. Install numbers above are from the live catalog, pulled today.

oh-my-claudecode hit 38,017 stars. Its most-installed skill is the AI slop cleaner.

Skillselion — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:19:43 +0000

This week's Breakout riser in Claude Code skill searches is "oh my claude code". The query maps to an entire configuration framework: oh-my-claudecode, a 38,017-star repo whose pitch is multi-agent orchestration with zero learning curve. Its motto: "Don't learn Claude Code. Just use OMC." Its most-installed skill, at 845 installs, is a cleanup guardrail called ai-slop-cleaner; the headline autopilot ranks sixth.

Every successful tool eventually grows this layer. zsh existed for nearly two decades before oh-my-zsh turned its configuration surface into a one-line install. Vim got vim-plug; Neovim got whole distributions like LazyVim. The pattern repeats because the base tool's power outgrows the average user's willingness to configure it, and someone packages taste. Claude Code crossed that line in well under two years.

What OMC is

A plugin that installs a stack of orchestration skills on top of Claude Code: planning loops where multiple agents debate, QA cycles that rerun until checks pass, a persistence loop that keeps working until every story in a PRD passes, and an autopilot that claims to take a 2-3 line product idea to shipped code. The project's own website calls it "a weapon, not a tool."

What developers actually install from it

We track installs per skill across the catalog of Claude Code agent skills. The ranking inside OMC inverts its own marketing:

Rank	Skill	Installs	What it does
1	ai-slop-cleaner (GitHub)	845	Deletion-first cleanup of AI-generated code, scoped to never change intended behavior
2	ralplan (GitHub)	824	Planning by consensus: Planner, Architect and Critic agents debate until they agree
3	ultraqa (GitHub)	805	Autonomous QA cycling: test, verify, fix, repeat until the goal passes
4	hud (GitHub)	775	A statusline heads-up display showing what the orchestrator is doing
5	deepinit (GitHub)	664	Writes hierarchical AGENTS.md documentation across your repo
6	autopilot (GitHub)	653	Full lifecycle from a short product idea, autonomously
7	ralph (GitHub)	636	Self-referential persistence loop until every PRD story passes verification

The three most-installed skills are the bounded ones: clean up slop without changing behavior, argue a plan to consensus before touching code, loop QA against real checks. The two headline autonomy features, autopilot and ralph, sit at the bottom of the table.

The gap is narrow (845 vs 636, and these numbers move daily), so don't read it as a chasm. But the ordering agrees with what we have measured in recent weeks: the fastest-growing skill searches are restraint layers (token diets, taste constraints), and now, inside the most maximalist framework in the ecosystem, the guardrail skills out-install the weapon.

The framework layer is spreading to Codex

The same author ships oh-my-codex for OpenAI's Codex CLI, and "codex-plugin-cc" is another fast-rising search this week (+80%) as Codex users go looking for Claude Code's plugin mechanics on their side of the fence. Configuration frameworks are becoming portable across agents, the way oh-my-zsh themes outlived any single shell setup.

If you try it

The install data suggests a sane order: start with ai-slop-cleaner and ralplan (bounded, easy to evaluate on a single diff), keep ultraqa pointed at a real test suite, and treat autopilot and ralph as demos until you have seen what the bounded skills do to your codebase.

Data: live catalog, refreshed daily from skills.sh, GitHub and MCP registries, ranked by real installs.

Skillselion is a directory of Claude Code, Codex and Cursor extensions ranked by real installs. We are not affiliated with Anthropic, OpenAI or Cursor.