A skill gives Claude Code a method: how to review a plan, how to lay out a page, how to write a figure that survives print. This list groups the skills worth installing by the job you want done. It mixes two kinds: community skills, open-source folders maintained on GitHub that SkillGild lists and credits, and hosted skills, which run through SkillGild with free monthly runs. Each entry links to its SkillGild page, where the install command, license and author are shown.
Every skill here installs with one command once the SkillGild CLI is set up:
skillgild install <slug> --agent claude-code
Use --agent codex, cursor or gemini-cli for other clients; the folder format is the same.
Writing
Humanizer by blader. Rewrites AI-sounding text so it reads like a person wrote it, using the patterns catalogued in Wikipedia's guide to AI writing, then audits its own output. The most-searched community skill of the year.
Stop Slop by Hardik Pandya. Seven rules that strip the tells (not-X-but-Y contrasts, staged openers, forced triads, filler closers) from any draft. Many people run it as the final pass after Humanizer.
Writing Guidelines by Vercel. Reviews documentation and product prose against 80-plus rules from Vercel's style guide. Best for docs and UI copy rather than essays.
Humanizer and Stop Slop are often confused: Humanizer vs Stop Slop sets out what each one changes and the order to run them in.
Planning and workflow
Superpowers by Jesse Vincent. A complete development methodology as composable skills: brainstorm, plan, work test-first, review, hand off. Install it when you want Claude Code to behave like a disciplined engineer rather than a fast typist.
grill-me by Matt Pocock. Interviews you about a plan, one question at a time, until the holes are gone. Run it before any non-trivial change. From the same author: Handoff compacts a long conversation into a document another agent can continue from, and TDD enforces a red-green-refactor loop.
GSD. A context-engineering framework that runs Claude Code through phases with planning, verification and fresh context per phase. Heavier than Superpowers; suits long builds.
Karpathy Guidelines. Four rules drawn from Andrej Karpathy's observations on how LLMs fail at code: think before coding, simplicity first, surgical changes, verify. Small, and worth installing everywhere.
Ponytail by Dietrich Gebert. The lazy senior developer ruleset: climb the dependency tree before writing anything, reuse what exists, write less code.
OpenSpec Propose (hosted). Spec-first proposals that turn an idea into a change proposal with requirements and tasks before any code, following the OpenSpec workflow.
Frontend and design
The full ranking, with four of these run on the same brief, is in the top 10 Claude frontend and design skills.
Impeccable by Paul Bakaus. A design language for AI harnesses with 24 commands to craft, audit, polish and harden interfaces. The most complete design skill available.
Taste Skill (hosted; from Leonxlnx's taste-skill). Anti-slop defaults for landing pages and product UI: layout, type, colour and spacing rules that keep generated pages from looking generic. We tested it on a real brief.
Frontend Design by Anthropic. Anthropic's own baseline for distinctive interface code, shipped in the official plugin marketplace. See what it changed on a real brief.
UI UX Pro Max. A searchable database of styles, palettes and font pairings that the agent reasons over before it codes. Good when you need options rather than one opinion (tested here).
Emil Kowalski's skills: Animate, Apple Design and design engineering. Motion and polish from a design engineer's point of view: easing, springs, when not to animate.
Logo Design (hosted). SVG logo marks from a brief, with variants and a review checklist.
Testing and review
Playwright Skill by lackeyjb. General-purpose browser automation: the agent writes and runs Playwright scripts to click through a flow, screenshot every route and capture console errors. Pair it with the Playwright MCP server from the best MCP servers for Claude Code.
Webapp Testing by Anthropic. A verification method for local web apps in a real browser.
Code Review and Security Guidance by Anthropic. Official plugins: a structured review of a diff or pull request, and pattern warnings on risky code as it is written.
Research and data
Deep Research by 199 Biotechnologies. An eight-phase pipeline (scope, plan, retrieve, triangulate, synthesise, critique) that returns cited reports with source-credibility scores.
Scientific Agent Skills by K-Dense. 177 validated skills for science: single-cell RNA-seq, structure prediction, statistics, figure generation.
Academic Plotting (hosted). Publication-quality matplotlib figures with a hosted palette validator. See the research plots walkthrough for a recorded run.
last30days. Researches any topic across Reddit, X, YouTube, Hacker News and GitHub for the last thirty days, which is what you want for "what are people saying about" questions.
Documents and productivity
Anthropic's document skills: pptx, docx, xlsx and pdf. Create and edit PowerPoint decks, Word documents, Excel workbooks with live formulas, and read, merge, split and fill PDFs. They are source-available rather than open source: install and use them, but do not redistribute them.
Obsidian Skills by Steph Ango. Official skills from Obsidian's CEO that teach an agent Obsidian-flavoured Markdown, canvases and properties so it edits a vault correctly.
I Have ADHD. Stops the agent burying the answer: short, action-first, numbered. Useful far beyond its name.
Marketing and SEO
Marketing Skills by Corey Haines. Sixty-plus skills for CRO, copywriting, SEO, paid ads, email, pricing and analytics. The largest marketing set and the one to install first.
Claude SEO by Agrici Daniel. 26 sub-skills and 19 specialist agents for full SEO audits: technical, content, schema, local, e-commerce, backlinks, sitemaps and generative-engine readiness.
Marketing is the deepest category here, so it has its own page: best Claude skills for marketing covers these two sets plus the copy, creative and research skills that go with them.
Video
Brag (hosted). Turns a repository into a launch video. Remotion Skills by Remotion are the official skills for video in React. HyperFrames renders HTML compositions to video, and Lyric Music Video times animated lyrics to the syllable. Compare them in Claude Code video skills.
Images
Nano Banana by Keanan Koppenhaver. Generate and edit images from Claude Code with Google's Gemini image models; bring a Gemini API key. Excalidraw Diagram draws diagrams as editable Excalidraw files and renders them to check the layout.
Making your own
Skill Creator by Anthropic scaffolds a correct SKILL.md and runs an evaluation loop over your examples. The step-by-step version is in how to create a Claude skill.
Claude Code skills on GitHub
Almost every community skill above lives in a public GitHub repository, and most people find them through a handful of large lists. These are the places to look, with star counts and last-push dates checked on 9 October 2026:
| Repository | What it is | Stars | License |
|---|---|---|---|
| anthropics/skills | Anthropic's own skills: Frontend Design, Skill Creator, Webapp Testing, MCP Builder and the document skills | 180k | Varies per skill |
| anthropics/claude-plugins-official | The official Claude Code plugin directory, which bundles several of those skills as plugins | 37.5k | Apache-2.0 |
| obra/superpowers | The Superpowers methodology listed under planning above | 297k | MIT |
| ComposioHQ/awesome-claude-skills | The largest "awesome Claude skills" list | 76.7k | None stated |
| hesreallyhim/awesome-claude-code | A broader list for Claude Code: skills, hooks, commands and workflows | 55.3k | Not standard |
| VoltAgent/awesome-agent-skills | 1,000+ agent skills from official teams and the community, across agents | 35.4k | MIT |
| travisvn/awesome-claude-skills | A curated list of skills and resources; last pushed in April 2026 | 15.3k | None stated |
| BehiSecc/awesome-claude-skills | Another curated list of Claude skills | 10.2k | None stated |
Stars measure attention, not quality. An awesome list links to repositories; it does not review them. Before you install a skill from any list, open its SKILL.md and any scripts it runs, check that the repository has a license, and look at when it was last updated. A skill can tell your agent to run commands on your machine.
You can install a GitHub skill by hand: clone the repository and copy the skill's folder into ~/.claude/skills/ (or .claude/skills/ in a project). The install guide covers the folder locations for each agent. Every community skill in this article is also listed on SkillGild with its author, license and source credited, and skillgild install <slug> copies the same folder from its upstream repository.
How we chose
Each pick does one job well, is maintained by a named person or organisation, and is used widely enough that people search for it by name (see the state of Claude skills for the search data). We read every README and verified the repository, author and license before listing it on SkillGild; licenses marked "not stated" on a listing mean the repository had no license file at the time of review, so treat the code as all rights reserved until one is added.
Community skills run locally in your agent with your own model; SkillGild lists and credits them and installs them from source. Hosted skills run through the SkillGild MCP server, which keeps private prompts and server tools off your machine and counts runs against a monthly allowance. Both appear in the same catalog, and the Claude Code skills page lists everything that works in Claude Code.
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