Best Claude Skills to Install in 2026

The best Claude skills worth installing right now lean hard in one direction: agents that make video. This list ranks them by momentum, meaning how fast each skill is actually gaining adoption, and it is dated and re-checked as the ecosystem moves, because a best-of list that quietly went stale is worse than no list at all.

Here is a number that shows how far the ecosystem has moved. The agency-agents roster has drawn more than 143,000 GitHub stars, and as of early July it installs its agents into Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor from a signed desktop app. A year ago a "skill" was a text file you copied into a folder. Now it has its own installer.

Key Takeaways:

• Video is the standout category: three separate skills for cinematic product clips, footage governance, and hand-drawn shorts landed in the same window.
• The two largest by raw stars are i-have-adhd (a ten-rule output-control skill) at 19,784 and text-to-cad (a CAD and robotics harness) at 13,289. i-have-adhd more than doubled since our July check and took the top spot.
• Skills now install across agents. Most of these skills run in both Claude Code and Codex, and some in Cursor.
• Every entry flags what the skill is bad at, not just what it is good at, and every number is a dated snapshot that drifts, so verify before you rely on it.

How We Rank the Best Claude Skills

All star counts, fork counts, licences and last-push dates on this page were pulled from the GitHub API on August 12, 2026. Where a number moved since our previous check, we say by how much, because on a list ranked by momentum the direction matters more than the total.

Star counts were re-checked against the GitHub API on August 7, 2026 for every repository linked below. Figures for skills without a public repository link are carried from the July 24 edition and may lag.

Most "best Claude skills" lists rank by total stars and never get updated, so the same mature repos win forever and the list slowly rots. We rank by momentum, meaning how fast a skill is gaining attention relative to how long it has existed, and we re-check the list as things change. A two-week-old skill adding two hundred stars tells you more about where builders are heading than a settled repo coasting on a large old total.

That choice has one honest cost. Momentum data is noisy, and star counts are a snapshot taken in late July 2026. Treat every number here as approximate, and reconfirm on the day you install anything. One more caveat before the list: installing a skill runs someone else's code, so it is worth reviewing what a third-party skill can touch before you add one you do not know. With that said, here is what moved.

What this section settles: you are reading a current, curated list of the best Claude skills ranked by real momentum, not a stale star-count.

Where to Find Claude Skills on GitHub

Search claude skills github and you land on repositories, not on a ranked list, which is a different job from the one this page does. Four places are worth knowing, in descending order of authority.

The official repository. Anthropic publishes anthropics/skills, created on 2025-09-22 and carrying 168,438 stars as of August 12, 2026 despite shipping no application code. Inside are 17 worked examples in skills/, the Agent Skills specification in spec/, and a single SKILL.md scaffold in template/. Licensing is the part worth reading carefully: there is no LICENSE file at the repository root, so GitHub's API reports no licence at all, while the README places many of the skills under Apache 2.0 and describes the four document skills — docx, pdf, pptx, xlsx — as source-available rather than open source. The answer to "what licence is this" is per-folder, not repo-wide. We break the repository down in Claude Anthropic Skills, Explained. It also registers as a Claude Code plugin marketplace with /plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills.

Curated indexes. awesome-claude-skills sits at 72,335 stars, and alirezarezvani/claude-skills at 24,328 stars under MIT, describing itself as 345 skills alongside 30-plus agents and 70-plus custom commands. Both are useful for breadth. Neither vets what it lists — an index tells you a skill exists, not whether it works or what it does to your machine.

Vendor repositories. nvidia/skills is the pattern here: 2,867 stars, Apache 2.0, skills scoped to one company's product line rather than to general use. Expect more of these.

Topic pages. github.com/topics/claude-skills sorts by recency rather than popularity, which surfaces what shipped this week instead of what won last quarter.

The gap between those four and this page is vetting. A star count records how many people bookmarked a repository, not how many ran it twice, and installing a skill means handing an agent a file of instructions it will follow — which is why we cover what to read before you install in our third-party skill permissions review.

Ecosystem News: The Skills Layer Grew Its Own Tooling

Two things happened around the skills themselves, not just inside them.

First, agency-agents shipped a native desktop app, built on Tauri 2, that browses the agent roster and installs into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and roughly a dozen other agents with one click. It reached v0.3.0 in early July, with signed macOS builds and Linux and Windows packages. Installing a skill used to mean reading a README and copying files into the right directory. Now there is a checkbox.

Second, ComposioHQ's awesome-claude-skills index, a directory of more than a thousand skills, surfaced on GitHub's daily trending and now sits above 72,000 stars. A curated list drawing that much attention is its own signal: enough skills now exist that people need a map.

Third, a joke got 100,000 people's attention and is worth one line. /bro is a single-file skill whose entire instruction is to restate the agent's last message in plain language with no jargon. The version that spread is the seven-line SKILL.md in Dillon Mulroy's dotfiles, which reached Hacker News on August 4 2026; a separate standalone repo, luchasarie/bro-skill, has 134 stars but a single commit and has not been touched since July 25. It is not on the list below because a one-line prompt is not a skill in the sense the rest of this page uses. It is on this page because it is the clearest evidence yet that the format's floor is very low, which is both its strength and the reason directories now need curation.

Here is what builders actually shipped and said on X across the month:

What this section settles: the skills wave stopped being a pile of loose files and grew installers, indexes, and a public argument about quality.

The Best Video and Creative Skills Right Now

video-shotcraft

What it does. Turns Claude Code or Codex into a motion-design studio for product video. You describe a shot; the agent writes React and renders it locally through Remotion. It ships roughly 106 shot recipe cards and about 161 motion previews you can point at, plus a runnable template that outputs a 36-second, 1080p, 30fps, ten-shot cut.

Stars and velocity. 4,709 stars and 413 forks, Apache-2.0, created July 19 2026, commits landing today. Up about 25% since our July check.

Install. npx skills add Vincentwei1021/video-shotcraft, in Claude Code or Codex.

Who it's for. Founders and marketers who want a demo video without opening a timeline. One caveat worth knowing before you commit: Remotion is free for individuals and small teams, but companies need a paid Remotion license.

Verdict. The most complete of the video skills this month, and the reason video leads this list. We put it through a full real-world run, written up in the tutorial linked further down.

qiaomu-cut-skill

What it does. A video-director skill built around footage governance. Its asset layer pulls from stock sources and local files, tracks provenance and license for each clip, then renders through ffmpeg and adds three-layer bilingual subtitles in ASS format.

Stars and velocity. 315 stars, MIT, but note the last push was July 19 2026. The idea is good; the repo has been quiet for close to a month.

Install. Via npx skills, using the generic agent-skills layout rather than a Claude-Code-only path.

Who it's for. Editors who care where each clip came from. The docs are Chinese-primary, and the workflow assumes that context, so budget for the language gate if your team reads English only.

Verdict. Narrow but opinionated. The provenance tracking is the part worth stealing, because most skills ignore licensing entirely.

story-to-handdrawn-video

What it does. Turns a written story or script into a silent, 3:4 short in a hand-drawn diary-comic style. You hand it text; it runs the image generation and the render, and wraps the whole pipeline as a skill.

Stars and velocity. 1,254 stars, MIT, last push August 8 2026. It has roughly tripled since our July check, one of the steeper curves on this list.

Install. Packaged as a Codex and Agent Skill, so it runs on Codex, Claude Code, Kimi Code, and other runtimes that read the skill format.

Who it's for. Creators making story or explainer shorts in a sketch aesthetic. The input and docs assume Chinese, so budget for that if your team writes in English.

Verdict. A one-trick skill, and the trick is genuinely charming. The cost of entry is the Chinese-first workflow.

design-judge-skills

What it does. An evidence-driven toolbox for design awards. It runs case-study research, critiques a design, matches your work to the right award, helps prepare the submission, and runs a pre-submission check before you send it.

Stars and velocity. 1,126 stars, Apache-2.0, commits landing today. It has more than quadrupled since our July check.

Install. Its badges list Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, OpenCode, and Hermes; the docs also cover Cursor, Cline, and Gemini CLI.

Who it's for. Designers actually entering awards, or teams who want award-grade critique framed as evidence rather than taste.

Verdict. The broadest scope of the design skills here. It treats "is this any good" as a research question, which is either exactly what you want or more process than you need.

human-writing

What it does. A writing and editing skill aimed at one narrow failure mode: prose that reads smoothly and sounds like nobody. It applies editing passes that push a draft toward a specific voice instead of a neutral one.

Stars and velocity. 2,463 stars, MIT, repo created August 5 2026 and pushed August 11. Roughly 2,400 stars in its first week, the fastest start on this list by a wide margin.

Install. No CLI. Send your agent the repo URL and ask it to install the skill; it shows up as 活人感写作. Failing that, copy the human-writing folder into your skills directory.

Who it's for. Chinese-language writing specifically. The repo tags itself chinese-writing and its rules are built around Chinese prose, so the payoff does not carry over to English drafts.

Verdict. Strong inside its language and honest about the boundary. It earns a place here because the star curve says the "make it sound like a person" problem is universal even when a given solution is not.

gathered-scenes-zine-skill

What it does. Turns ordinary photos into a designed zine page. A small-press layout treatment rather than a filter, with the typography and composition decisions already made.

Stars and velocity. 2,742 stars, created August 1 2026, pushed August 11. Up roughly 4.7x since our last check, the steepest curve in this update. One caveat: GitHub cannot classify its licence, so do not assume MIT before you ship anything with it.

Install. git clone the repo, then copy the skill folder into ~/.codex/skills. There is an English README alongside the Chinese one.

Who it's for. People with a full camera roll and no layout software.

Verdict. Narrow, and unapologetic about it. The kind of skill that exists because someone made a set of design decisions once and encoded them, which is the format at its best.

The Best Engineering and Workflow Skills

text-to-cad

What it does. A bundle of skills that turns a coding agent into a CAD and robotics engineer. Describe a part and it exports STEP, STL, 3MF, GLB, and DXF; it also generates URDF robot descriptions, slices meshes to validated G-code, and can send jobs to a Bambu Lab printer. It runs locally with browser previews.

Stars and velocity. 13,289 stars and 1,401 forks, MIT, commits landing today. The oldest repo here, created April 2026, and now the second-largest by stars rather than the first.

Install. npx skills install earthtojake/text-to-cad, in Claude Code or Codex.

Who it's for. Hardware and robotics people who were stitching six tools together, from CAD software to slicers to URDF exporters.

Verdict. The most ambitious skill on the list by a wide margin. If it holds up outside the demo videos, it collapses a real toolchain into a prompt.

icm-architect

What it does. Turns a process description into a working folder structure an agent can operate from. ICM stands for Interpretable Context Methodology: the idea that folder layout and markdown files can carry an agent's state instead of orchestration code. Build mode scaffolds a fresh workspace; Restructure mode audits an existing folder and proposes a migration.

Stars and velocity. 666 stars, MIT. Tripled since July, but like qiaomu-cut-skill its last push was July 19 2026, so the stars are moving and the code is not.

Install. Drop it into ~/.claude/skills/, or upload it in Claude's settings.

Who it's for. People wiring up multi-step agent workspaces who are tired of gluing steps together in code.

Verdict. The most abstract entry here, and the one most likely to either click immediately or bounce off, depending on how you already think about context. It validates its own output with a "walk test": a memoryless agent has to orient itself from the files alone.

i-have-adhd

What it does. An output-control skill that lives in a single SKILL.md. Roughly ten rules: lead with the answer, number multi-step work, restate progress like "step 3 of 5", cap lists at five items, give concrete time estimates, and cut the closers. "Hope this helps" is banned outright.

Stars and velocity. 19,784 stars, MIT, pushed August 10 2026. It more than doubled since our July check and is now comfortably the largest on this list.

Install. One command through the plugin marketplace. It works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and the generic agentskills layout.

Who it's for. Anyone whose agent buries the one line they needed under three paragraphs of warmup.

Verdict. The best install-to-value ratio in the roundup. Ten rules, and your agent stops padding.

One skill that did not make the cut, in the interest of not misleading you: whathappened, an X-sentiment briefing workflow, currently runs only on Grok's X-native build. It installs through npx skills but will not function in Claude Code or Codex today, because it depends on native X API tools those agents do not expose.

What these sections settle: the range this month runs from robot arms to design juries to a ten-line file that just makes your agent shut up and answer.

open-kimi-ppt-skill

What it does. An unofficial skill that reverse-engineers Kimi Slides so a coding agent can create, edit, replicate and read presentations. It emits an editable PPTD file plus a real PPTX export, and ships a local browser editor for the touch-ups you would otherwise do by hand.

Stars and velocity. 1,602 stars against 1,197 forks, an unusually high fork-to-star ratio that suggests people are copying it rather than watching it. Created August 5 2026, last push August 7. No licence is declared on the repo, which matters if you plan to reuse the prompt.

Install. npx open-kimi-ppt-skill@latest. Needs Node 18 or newer.

Who it's for. Anyone whose work ends in a deck, who would rather hand the agent an outline than fight a template.

Verdict. The deliverable most knowledge work actually ends in, and the first skill here that produces it as an editable file rather than a screenshot. Being unofficial is the risk: Kimi Slides compatibility is something the upstream product can break without warning.

The Standout Trend: Agents That Make Video

Three video skills in one month is not a coincidence. video-shotcraft, qiaomu-cut-skill, and handdraw-story-video each solve a different slice of the same job: turning a prompt into a rendered clip without a human opening a video editor. Agent-made video is becoming its own subtrack.

The reactions bear that out. Josh Pigford, who runs Presscut, used the Remotion skill inside Claude Code with the ElevenLabs API to generate a full product demo, voiceover and background music included, in about two to three hours, all without leaving the terminal. Magnus Müller ran a shorter loop: install the remotion skill, point it at his product, ask for ten demos, then ask for ten more like the one he liked. Neither touched a timeline.

If you want the full teardown, including the parts that broke, we installed video-shotcraft and made a real MoClaw product video with it in our step-by-step tutorial.

What this trend settles: the interesting video tool this quarter is not another editor. It is your coding agent.

The Wider Shift: Skills That Ship a Deliverable

Video was the first visible cluster, but it looks like a symptom of something broader. Consider what has landed since: a skill that exports an editable PPTX, one that lays out a zine page, one that rewrites prose toward a voice, on top of the CAD bundle that emits STEP files and G-code. None of these make the agent better at programming. They produce the thing the work was for.

That is a different bet from the first wave, and a harder one to hit. A deliverable skill is judged on whether the artifact is usable without a human reopening it in the native tool, which is a steeper bar than "the code compiles". It also explains why so many of them ship their own preview or editor: the last mile is where these break.

Worth watching rather than concluding. Every star curve quoted above is days old, and a skill that produces a file is only ever as good as the file.

How to Install a Claude Skill

Most skills on this list install one of two ways. The common path is npx skills add owner/repo or npx skills install owner/repo, which drops the skill where your agent expects it. For Claude Code specifically, you can also place a skill folder in ~/.claude/skills/ by hand, or upload it in Settings. A few skills use the plugin marketplace instead, which the entry above notes when it applies. The official Claude skills documentation covers the SKILL.md format and the frontmatter each skill needs, and if you want to write your own instead of installing one, we have a walkthrough on building Claude skills for agent workflows.

What this section settles: installation is a one-line command for almost everything here.

Running These Skills Without the Local Setup

Every skill in this roundup runs inside Claude Code or Codex on your own machine, which means your laptop handles the installs, the dependencies, and the rendering. That is fine until the render is long, the dependency tree fights you, or you want the agent to keep working after you close the lid.

MoClaw runs the same kind of agent in the cloud, with skills and memory managed for you, so a long job finishes whether or not your machine is awake. If you would rather assign the work than babysit the setup, that is the tradeoff MoClaw is built around. See how it maps to real jobs on our use-cases page.

What this section settles: local skills are great until setup and runtime become your problem; managed agents move that problem off your machine.

FAQ

What are Claude skills?

A Claude skill is a SKILL.md file, plus any supporting scripts, that teaches an agent how to do a specific job (here is a fuller primer on agent skills). Anthropic shipped the format as an open standard, so a well-written skill works across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other agents that read the agent-skills layout. You install one, and your agent gains a capability it did not have before.

How current is this list?

Every entry carries a dated snapshot of its star count and compatibility, and the list is re-checked as the ecosystem moves rather than published once and forgotten. Most competing best-of lists never get updated after they rank, which is exactly the gap this list of the best Claude skills fills.

Do these skills work in Codex too?

Most of them, yes. video-shotcraft, text-to-cad, and i-have-adhd explicitly support both Claude Code and Codex, and handdraw-story-video is packaged as a Codex skill. whathappened is the exception: it runs only on Grok's X build today.

How often is this updated?

Whenever the ecosystem shifts enough to change the ranking, not on a fixed calendar. Star counts and compatibility are reverified in place each time, so the URL stays the same and the content stays current.

Install One Claude Skill This Week, Not Ten

The fastest way to get nothing from this list is to install the top five and forget which one changed what. Skills alter how your agent behaves, and stacked together they interact in ways that are genuinely hard to attribute.

Pick the one that matches work you already did badly this week. Run it for five days without adding anything else. If the output changed in a way you can describe out loud, keep it and add the next one. If you cannot describe the difference, remove it. That loop is also the only reliable defence against the thing this ecosystem now has plenty of: a repo whose star count is climbing much faster than its commit history, of which there are two on this page and both are flagged above.