Where to Find Agent Skills

Start with what you already have. Every agent covered on this site ships skills you don't install — Cursor has 19 built in, OpenClaw bundles 51, Claude Code and Codex both ship their own. Those need no trust decision from you, and a surprising amount of what people go looking for is already sitting in the box.

For everything else, the useful question isn't "which directory has the most skills." It's who vouches for this, and what happens if they're wrong.

The seven kinds of source

The rest of this page is what separates them.

Bundled catalogues

Already installed, vendor-maintained, and the only category with no supply-chain question at all. Also the most overlooked — several runtimes ship skills for jobs people go hunting for.

Worth knowing: bundled skills can be conditionally hidden. OpenClaw gates most of its 51 on a binary, an environment variable, or an operating system, so a skill you can't see may be working exactly as designed rather than missing. See the OpenClaw catalogue and, for the others, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Hermes.

Vendor plugin marketplaces

The strongest trust signal available, because a named party stands behind the listing and applies a process before publication.

• Cursor Marketplace — Cursor's documentation states all listed plugins undergo manual review. The public repository is cursor/plugins (MIT).
• Claude Code marketplaces — claude-plugins-official is curated by Anthropic and added automatically on first interactive launch; claude-plugins-community accepts submissions that pass automated validation and safety screening, pinned to a commit SHA.

One structural caveat: a plugin is a packaging format, not a guarantee of contents. Reading the manifests in cursor/plugins directly, most of the third-party integrations there are MCP-only — a plugin.json and an mcp.json with no skills/ directory at all. "Available in the marketplace" doesn't mean "is a skill." See Agent Skills vs MCP.

Open registries

Anyone can publish. What differs is what happens after they do.

ClawHub (clawhub.ai) is the most developed model. Publishing requires a GitHub account old enough to pass an upload gate — a spam gate, not a review. The real screening is an automated audit whose result is public on every listing, combining SkillSpector, VirusTotal and ClawHub's own ClawScan, and reported as an audit status (Pass / Review / Warn / Malicious / Pending / Error) alongside a separate risk level (Low / Medium / High).

Those two answer different questions, and conflating them is the common mistake. In ClawHub's own words: risk level asks how much power is here; audit status asks what you should do about it. A publishing skill sitting at Review / Medium isn't a warning — it means the skill can act with real account authority and you should decide whether you want that. The full treatment is on are OpenClaw skills safe?.

skills.sh is run by Vercel and takes the opposite approach: no audit layer, but public install counts and topic browsing. It's the discovery front-end for the npx skills installer below.

Cross-agent installers

npx skills (Vercel Labs, MIT, ~29,000 stars as of 16 August 2026) is a transport rather than a source. Its README states support for 76 agents, and it installs from GitHub shorthand, full URLs, GitLab, any git URL, or a local path — including private repositories using your existing git credentials.

Two options change what you get:

• --copy copies files instead of symlinking them into agent directories. Given that symlinked skill roots break discovery in both Codex and Claude Code, this flag is worth knowing about before you need it.
• skills use generates a prompt from a skill without installing it at all.

Vendor skill packs

A distinct and under-appreciated category: a product publishing official skills for other agents to load, rather than implementing skills itself.

Repository metadata read via the GitHub API on 16 August 2026; these figures drift.

Their appeal is provenance: the organisation that owns the domain wrote the skill. Their catch is that many carry prerequisites — n8n's pack requires an n8n instance with instance-level MCP enabled before any of its 14 skills does anything useful. Read the README before installing.

Curated community lists

A maintainer's taste, expressed as a repository. Useful for the same reason any awesome-list is useful, and unreliable in the same ways.

VoltAgent/awesome-agent-skills is the largest general one; spencerpauly/awesome-cursor-skills (694 stars, CC0-1.0) is the strongest Cursor-specific one; travisvn/awesome-claude-skills (14,671 stars, no declared licence) is the Claude-oriented equivalent. Skill counts advertised in these READMEs are the maintainers' own claims and we have not audited them.

Third-party directories

Aggregators that index skills from elsewhere and present them with their own search and categorisation. They are genuinely useful for discovery and genuinely unreliable as evidence of anything: a listing count is inventory, not adoption, and the aggregator is rarely the party that would fix a bad skill.

Treat a directory as a search index that points at a repository, then evaluate the repository.

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What the popularity numbers actually count

This is the part worth reading before you rank anything by "downloads."

Two consequences. First, these are not comparable: a registry's install count and a repository's star count are different units and lining them up in one table produces a meaningless ranking. Second, most of the ecosystem has no popularity signal whatsoever, which is why every "best skills" page on this site states its evidence rather than implying a leaderboard.

We are deliberately not quoting current install totals here. The figures published on these surfaces move constantly, and the ones we observed on 16 August 2026 were internally inconsistent within a single reading — worth verifying at the source rather than trusting a number copied into an article weeks ago.

Evaluating a source before you install from it

The checklist is the same one this site applies per-ecosystem, and it doesn't change with the source:

1. Read the SKILL.md in full. It's the artifact. If it's too long to read, it's too long to trust.
2. Read everything in scripts/. Bundled executables are the real risk surface, and no automated audit reliably catches a well-written malicious instruction — ClawHub's own documentation says its audits "are not a guarantee that a release is risk-free."
3. Check that declared credentials match the job. A skill requesting environment variables it has no visible use for is the clearest red flag available.
4. Check the description for negative triggers. Good skills say when not to fire; it's a strong proxy for author care.
5. Check freshness and licence. Both are visible in seconds and both matter.

Two pages on this site work through that reasoning in more depth, with the runtime-specific risk model attached: evaluating Claude Code skill repositories and evaluating Hermes skill repositories.

Will it work in your agent?

A skill found in one place doesn't automatically run everywhere. The portable core — name, description, the markdown body, and the scripts/ / references/ / assets/ convention — travels well. Runtime-specific frontmatter does not, and in at least one case actively breaks: a Cursor paths field makes a skill completely undiscoverable in Claude Code.

Agent Skills compatibility covers what travels and where it stops.

Caveats

• We have not installed any skill from any source named here, and nothing on this page is a ranking.
• Repository metadata, registry behaviour, and marketplace review processes are as documented and observed on 16 August 2026.
• Audit statuses, telemetry behaviour and review pipelines are the operators' descriptions of their own processes. We have not evaluated their accuracy.

Sources

• ClawHub documentation and Security Audits
• vercel-labs/skills — the npx skills README
• Cursor — Plugins and cursor/plugins
• Claude Code — plugin marketplaces
• Repository metadata for every pack and list named above, via the GitHub API, 16 August 2026
• agentskills.io — the specification