Show HN: Agent Skills Leaderboard

The install is very opaque. It's not clear where these skills are installed, how to upgrade them or remove them.

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/

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’?

https://skills.sh/ubie-inc/agent-skills/codex

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.

posted last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46435383

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.

https://github.com/arianvp/claude-nix

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.

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

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!

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.

So this is a page made by Vercel which conveniently puts the Vercel skill as top of the list.

Nice.

The page should properly advertize that this is a corporate built/sponsored site so people can understand that it's totally biased.

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)

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.

Why do none of these “npm for Skills” document any way to do basic package management things like updates, version-pinning, or even uninstalls?

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.

Any tips?

Please make a rest API!