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.
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