The State of Agent Skills — 2026 Q3

A reproducible snapshot of the public Agent Skills ecosystem on GitHub. Collected 20 October 2026.

Published by groclawa · data collected 2026-10-20

This is a reproducible snapshot of the public Agent Skills ecosystem on GitHub. It exists because the question we get most often isn't "how do I write a skill" — it's "which one should I install?" That's a discovery problem, and discovery problems need numbers.

Cite this page if you use the figures: groclawa, "The State of Agent Skills — 2026 Q3 snapshot", 20 October 2026, groclawa.com/research/state-of-agent-skills.

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Headline numbers

Measure	Value
Repositories tagged agent-skills	36,028
Repositories tagged claude-skills	12,548
Repositories tagged claude-code	101,543
Repositories whose metadata mentions SKILL.md	4,332
Stars across the top 20 agent-skills repos	1,867,707
agent-skills repos created since 2026-07-20	22,576 (63%)
SKILL.md repos created since 2026-07-20	1,993 (46%)

The last two rows are the story. Nearly two-thirds of the tagged ecosystem appeared in a single quarter. Supply is not the constraint anymore; selection is.

Method

• Source: GitHub REST search API (/search/repositories), unauthenticated, 20 results per query, sorted by stars.
• Queries: topic:agent-skills, topic:claude-skills, topic:claude-code, "SKILL.md", plus created:>2026-07-20 variants for the growth figures.
• Counting rule: total_count from the API, which counts repositories matching the query — not individual skills inside them. A monorepo with 200 skills counts once.
• Star totals are for the top 20 results of each query, not the whole population.
• Raw data: top-agent-skill-repos.csv in this folder.

Limits. Topic tags are self-assigned, so the population is noisy in both directions: repos with skills but no tag are missed, and repos with the tag but no SKILL.md are included. Treat the numbers as an order-of-magnitude signal, not a census.

What the top of the ecosystem looks like

Repo	Stars	What it is
morluto/rea	335,933	Reverse-engineering agent toolkit
anthropics/skills	182,216	The official Agent Skills repository
DietrichGebert/ponytail	168,030	"Laziest senior dev" reasoning skill
addyosmani/agent-skills	108,601	Production engineering skills
paperclipai/paperclip	104,689	Agent management app
nexu-io/open-design	102,510	Collaborative design agent workspace
Leonxlnx/taste-skill	99,326	Art direction and reference skills
tt-a1i/archify	85,828	Idea/codebase → interactive diagram

Two patterns worth noting:

1. The official repo is not the biggest. Community collections outrank it, which means discovery happens in lists, not in docs.
2. "Taste" repos are huge. Three of the top eight sell design judgement rather than engineering capability. That's the same thesis our catalog is built on.

What this means if you sell skills

1. A catalog is not a moat; curation is. With 36k repos, "we have 400 skills" is not a value proposition. "We tested 400 and kept 60" is.

2. Install counts beat star counts for buyers. Stars measure developer attention. A buyer wants to know whether the thing runs on their agent version. Publish both, and publish the failure cases.

3. Comparison pages will outperform list pages. In a crowded category, "X vs Y" and "best for Z" queries carry the intent. Lists get skimmed; comparisons get read.

4. The long tail is agent-specific. Skills that work in Claude Code may not load in Windsurf, and the folder layout differs. Pages that answer "does this work in my agent" convert far better than generic skill pages.

Reproducing this

curl -s "https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=topic:agent-skills&sort=stars&per_page=20"
curl -s "https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=topic:agent-skills+created:%3E2026-07-20&per_page=1"

Re-run quarterly. The delta between snapshots is more interesting than any single number.

Suggested citation formats

There are more than 36,000 repositories tagged agent-skills on GitHub, and 63% of them were created after July 2026 (groclawa, State of Agent Skills, Oct 2026).

The official anthropics/skills repository has 182k stars, but community collections outrank it — discovery happens in lists, not documentation (groclawa, Oct 2026).