The agent skills directory, read every fortnight

What an agent skill is, briefly

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file in it: YAML metadata naming the skill and describing when to use it, followed by instructions in Markdown, plus whatever scripts and resources the job needs. An assistant loads the instructions when the description matches what you asked for.

Anthropic published the format and documents it publicly, with its own skills open on GitHub. The important property for this article is the unglamorous one: a skill is instructions your agent will follow and scripts it may run. That is why the audit column on our page is not decoration.

What is on the shelf

As of the sync on 10 September 2026: 153 live skills, none withdrawn by their authors and three archived because the directory stopped returning them for two whole cycles. Between them they carry 5,271,974 installs, and the largest single skill accounts for 673,980 of those.

The categories are ours, and they exist because the directory has none for search work:

The part a leaderboard cannot do

A directory shows you today's install count. It does not keep yesterday's, so it cannot tell you which skill is climbing.

We keep every reading. 5,606 of them so far, across 140 sync runs — and that store is the whole point, because a trend needs two numbers and a leaderboard holds one. A skill that has gained 56% since we started counting looks identical, on a live directory, to one that has been flat for a year at the same size.

The rows in the fastest-growing tenth wear a flame. That is a rank rather than a threshold: "growing fast" has no absolute value that stays true as a directory ages, so the mark goes to the top decile of everything we can actually measure, and the page prints what the cut was. On the day this was written it was 16 skills out of the 152 we have read twice or more — everything above +26.4% since the first reading. A skill read only once is not in the running: growth needs two readings, and counting the single-reading rows would quietly make the tenth smaller than a tenth.

The audit column, and why it is worth as much as the install count

145 of the 153 live rows carry security audits, reported through skills.sh from independent auditors who read the skill's own files. The row shows the worst verdict any auditor gave, not the best, with the number of auditors beside it — because one auditor and four are different amounts of evidence for the same word.

The eight rows with none say none yet, and that is a fact about a skill's age rather than its safety: the directory generates an audit after a skill's first install. A green chip over an unaudited row would be the most misleading thing on the page, so there isn't one.

The briefs, and what the chips on a row mean

A directory entry tells you a skill's name and its author's one-line description. It does not tell you whether the thing is worth your afternoon. So we write a brief — our own reading of what a skill is for and who it suits — and 494 of them exist today: 286 in English, 181 in Ukrainian, 27 in Spanish.

The two-letter chips on a row say which languages a brief exists in. A row with none draws a dash, which means we have not written one yet and never the page is missing. That distinction is the same one the rest of this product keeps making: an absence stated is information, an absence implied is a bug.

What happens when a skill disappears

Two different things, and the page says which.

Withdrawn means a sync that read the directory to its end no longer found it — a claim about the author's decision, so it is only ever set by a complete pass. Archived means the directory has stopped returning the row for two whole cycles, whatever the reason. That second one is ours, not the author's: a skill can fall out of the budget we walk without anybody withdrawing anything, and the honest word for that is archived.

An archived row keeps its own page, marked, so a link that was published does not turn into a 404. And a row whose repository no longer contains the skill wears an amber source gone chip — checked again on every sync.

Why we keep it at all

Because the instrument and the directory are the same argument. A skill is a repeatable way of doing work; a reading is a repeatable way of measuring it. Both are worth more when somebody keeps the old copies, states whose number is whose, and refuses to report a cap as a total.

If you want the vocabulary these pages use, the glossary defines each term once in five languages. If you want to point an instrument at work of your own, the free tools are open to anyone.