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

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.

Skillselion

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.

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