What is this? How does it work? How are skills ranked? Seems a little bit fishy to me that you can only tell it's from Vercel if you click the top left corner, and the top two skills come from vercel... despite there definitely being much more used skills in the overall AI coding ecosystem.
The UI looks nice, otherwise. I had thought about building something like this - maybe this just increases my confidence that this is needed, just not affiliated with a company.
The leaderboard is ranked by the weekly download count by their "npx skills" command. This is Vercel new "standard" skills installer so obvious their skills are at the top.
As someone who has found skills useful, seeing skills like this[0] raises the same question about (a subset of) skills as did MCP: why not just have the agent run ‘tool --help’?
Nice work! I don't think Vercel is the first to do this, but it's a good idea and I'm glad to see more players in this space.
A small UI suggestion: it would be helpful if hovering on a row showed the skill description, along with a button to copy the install command.
For anyone interested, there are two other sites already doing something similar:
- claudemarketplaces.com - A comprehensive directory with 1900+ marketplaces, shows descriptions directly in the list view with copy-to-install commands
- skillsmp.com - Has 77K+ skills indexed from GitHub. Cool developer-style UI, but honestly the UX could use work—the search is hidden behind cryptic command-style buttons and it's not obvious how to actually search
Also worth checking out the Claude Code Mastery guide (thedecipherist.github.io/claude-code-mastery) for a deeper dive into skills, hooks, MCP, and CLAUDE.md.
Honest question: has anyone found skills that fundamentally changed their workflow vs. ones that are just ‘nice to have’? Curious what the actual power-user stack looks like.
Anyways, great work on this btw, the agent-agnostic approach is the right call
One simple but useful flow is to ask cc to review a session and find miss-matches between initial skills / agent.md and current session, and propose an edit. I then skim over it and add it. It feels like it helps, but I don't have quantitative data yet.
Define "fundamental", but I added skills to run complicated evaluation procedures for my ML research. This way I can open 5 CC instances, let them run and iterate on research without intervention. After that, I can do the final review.
Try installing the Claude Superpowers skills - you can install them one by one from here, but it's easier to install the superpowers plugin. Try using it for a couple of sessions and see how it works for you.
For a full test, try starting with the brainstorming one which then guides you from brainstorming though planning, development etc.
I've been using it for a few days and I would say it's enhanced my workflows at least.
I would double - do skills reliably work for you? I mean are they reliably injected when there is a need, as opposed to being actively called for (which in my opinion defeats the purpose of skills - because I can always ask the llm to read a document and then do something with the new knowledge).
I have a feeling that codex still does not do it reliably - so I still have normal README files which it loads quite intelligently and it works better than the discovery via skills.
Basically skills are /commands that can have attached scripts, that's about it.
If your "skill" doesn't come with scripts/executables, it's just a fancy slash command.
I've had success with code quality analysis skills that use PEP723 Python scripts with tree-sitter to actually analyse the code structure as an AST. The script output and switches are specifically optimised for LLM use, no extra fluff - just condensed content with the exact data needed.
I've been using Nix to manage my skills instead. It's been great. Especially because I can now declaratively manage all the cli tools and mcps my skills depend on.
I wish I knew why my skills are never called…including my custom sub agents.
Maybe it’s my own ignorance, but Claude loves to ignore its CLAIDE.MD which says it’s mandatory to leverage sub agents to delegate tasks and use skills for accomplish specific workflows.
Every time I call Claude out it tells me it knows and chose to ignore it, even going as far as saying it’s not my decision.
This is a really good implementation, but I don’t lean too heavily into skills especially not other people‘s. If I’m doing design who’s to say I want instructions in there in the first place like “pick an extreme“ (instructions in the design skill featured on the homepage)
From the docs, `add-skill` auto detects from 16 different potential paths to copy skills to in a repository (.claude/, .codex/, .Gemini/, etc).
`add-skill` also let's you install skills globally (~/). From the code, `skills` looks like it doesn't support global installs but under the hood it passes all args to add-skill, so you should be able to install skills globally or install multiple skills (even if the wrapper doesn't expect it).
Aside: although lots of agents have adopted SKILLS.md conventions, they're currently all using their own paths. There doesn't seem to be a consensus yet, like there is with AGENTS.md. There are even 3 generic paths: .agent/skills/, .agents/skills/ and just skills/
At risk of piggybacking off someone elses post, my team just published noriskillsets.dev. It's maybe not as polished as this beautiful vercel site, but I think it solves a bigger problem: every skill in noriskillsets.dev is something that we've personally battle tested and evaluated as best in class for that particular task.
I love vercel, but I think the 'collect a bunch of random skills' approach just isn't it. You need versioning, linking between skills, an easy install client...basically a full package manager, which this is not.
If any of that is interesting, check out noriskillsets.dev. Would love to get feedback!
Cool! I built with https://enact.tools and can see several other competitors here.
I think this really has a future. Skills are going to be the way forward for portable ai tools. I think the skills standard needs to adapt to allow forward slashes so we can name things @vercel/somecategory/sometool. I've already brought it up in the agentskills GitHub.
24 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 47.7 ms ] threadThe UI looks nice, otherwise. I had thought about building something like this - maybe this just increases my confidence that this is needed, just not affiliated with a company.
https://skills.sh/ubie-inc/agent-skills/codex
https://zzbbyy.substack.com/p/what-are-skills
In my experience it doesn’t work too well with codex, but I expect llm providers to train them on that use case and improve the situation soon.
A small UI suggestion: it would be helpful if hovering on a row showed the skill description, along with a button to copy the install command.
For anyone interested, there are two other sites already doing something similar:
- claudemarketplaces.com - A comprehensive directory with 1900+ marketplaces, shows descriptions directly in the list view with copy-to-install commands
- skillsmp.com - Has 77K+ skills indexed from GitHub. Cool developer-style UI, but honestly the UX could use work—the search is hidden behind cryptic command-style buttons and it's not obvious how to actually search
Also worth checking out the Claude Code Mastery guide (thedecipherist.github.io/claude-code-mastery) for a deeper dive into skills, hooks, MCP, and CLAUDE.md.
openskills.space
[yup, my project :)]
Anyways, great work on this btw, the agent-agnostic approach is the right call
Try installing the Claude Superpowers skills - you can install them one by one from here, but it's easier to install the superpowers plugin. Try using it for a couple of sessions and see how it works for you.
For a full test, try starting with the brainstorming one which then guides you from brainstorming though planning, development etc.
I've been using it for a few days and I would say it's enhanced my workflows at least.
I have a feeling that codex still does not do it reliably - so I still have normal README files which it loads quite intelligently and it works better than the discovery via skills.
If your "skill" doesn't come with scripts/executables, it's just a fancy slash command.
I've had success with code quality analysis skills that use PEP723 Python scripts with tree-sitter to actually analyse the code structure as an AST. The script output and switches are specifically optimised for LLM use, no extra fluff - just condensed content with the exact data needed.
https://github.com/arianvp/claude-nix
Maybe it’s my own ignorance, but Claude loves to ignore its CLAIDE.MD which says it’s mandatory to leverage sub agents to delegate tasks and use skills for accomplish specific workflows.
Every time I call Claude out it tells me it knows and chose to ignore it, even going as far as saying it’s not my decision.
Any tips?
Here's the `skills` package on NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/skills - it's MIT licensed but I can't find it on Github.
`skills` looks to be a wrapper around `add-skill`: https://github.com/vercel-labs/add-skill
From the docs, `add-skill` auto detects from 16 different potential paths to copy skills to in a repository (.claude/, .codex/, .Gemini/, etc).
`add-skill` also let's you install skills globally (~/). From the code, `skills` looks like it doesn't support global installs but under the hood it passes all args to add-skill, so you should be able to install skills globally or install multiple skills (even if the wrapper doesn't expect it).
Aside: although lots of agents have adopted SKILLS.md conventions, they're currently all using their own paths. There doesn't seem to be a consensus yet, like there is with AGENTS.md. There are even 3 generic paths: .agent/skills/, .agents/skills/ and just skills/
Nice.
The page should properly advertize that this is a corporate built/sponsored site so people can understand that it's totally biased.
I love vercel, but I think the 'collect a bunch of random skills' approach just isn't it. You need versioning, linking between skills, an easy install client...basically a full package manager, which this is not.
If any of that is interesting, check out noriskillsets.dev. Would love to get feedback!
I think this really has a future. Skills are going to be the way forward for portable ai tools. I think the skills standard needs to adapt to allow forward slashes so we can name things @vercel/somecategory/sometool. I've already brought it up in the agentskills GitHub.
posted last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46435383