Two search terms broke out on Skillselion's trending rail this week. "Andrej Karpathy skills" is up 1,900 percent. "Corey Haines marketing skills" is up 1,600 percent.
Neither one is a tool name. Both are people.
That is a new pattern. For months the breakout searches were capabilities: browser automation, frontend design, token efficiency. This week, developers typed names into the search box. With 60,000+ skills in the catalog, I think that shift was inevitable.
Reputation is becoming the discovery layer for agent tooling.
The Karpathy case: demand without supply
Andrej Karpathy has never published a Claude Code guidelines repo.
Search his name in the catalog and the top results are other people packaging his public advice:
- karpathy-guidelines (GitHub): 18,059 installs. Behavioral rules distilled from his observations on LLM coding pitfalls: think before coding, simplicity first, surgical changes that touch only what you must.
- karpathy-llm-wiki (GitHub): 5,289 installs. Builds a Karpathy-style LLM wiki as your project's knowledge layer.
- andrej-karpathy-perspective (GitHub): 2,607 installs. Six of his mental models, applied in first person.
The closest thing to a first-party Karpathy skill is read-arxiv-paper (GitHub), a utility that ships inside his nanochat repo. It has 2,281 installs.
In other words: the third-party distillation of Karpathy's advice out-installs the skill in Karpathy's own repo by roughly 8x. The demand for one person's taste is strong enough that three different authors packaged it independently, and the packages are winning.
The Corey Haines case: the person who did ship
Corey Haines took the other path. He put his marketing playbook into a single repo, marketingskills, as installable skills.
The result, from live install data: 46 skills, 2,501,391 combined installs.
The top of the list:
- seo-audit (GitHub): 162,532 installs
- copywriting (GitHub): 152,682 installs
- marketing-psychology (GitHub): 112,008 installs
- content-strategy (GitHub): 107,419 installs
- programmatic-seo (GitHub): 103,132 installs
SEO audits. Copywriting. Pricing pages. Cold email. These are not coding skills, and yet they sit in the same install rankings as debuggers and test frameworks, because the people installing them are software engineers who now ship marketing through the same agent that ships their code.
A year ago "marketing advice from a person you follow" meant a newsletter. Now it is 2.5 million installs of executable playbooks.
What this means if you build or use skills
First: when a catalog gets this large, names beat keywords. A trusted name compresses evaluation cost the same way a brand does. You cannot audit 60,000 skills, but you can decide you trust how Karpathy thinks about code review or how Corey Haines thinks about SEO, and search accordingly. Expect more of the top search terms to be people.
Second: if you have a public point of view, someone will eventually ship it as a skill. The only open question is whether that someone is you. Karpathy's coding advice reached 18,000+ installs without him lifting a finger, under someone else's repo. Haines shipped his own playbook and owns all 2.5 million installs of the distribution. If you have written advice developers act on, a SKILL.md is the highest-leverage format it can take right now.
If you want to watch this shift happen, the live data is public: the install leaderboard and the trending searches on the Skillselion homepage update daily.
Disclosure: I work on Skillselion, the directory these numbers come from: a live catalog, refreshed daily from skills.sh, GitHub and MCP registries, ranked by real installs. Install counts pulled July 16, 2026.
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