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 136,000 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 biggest movers by raw stars are text-to-cad (a CAD and robotics harness) and i-have-adhd (a ten-rule output-control skill), both climbing into the thousands.
• 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

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.

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. A curated list drawing that much attention is its own signal: enough skills now exist that people need a map.

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. Around 624 stars, Apache-2.0, and young enough that the climb is the whole point.

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. About 245 stars, MIT, only a handful of commits old.

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. Around 468 stars, active this month.

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. Around 267 stars, updated this week.

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.

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. Around 9,682 stars, MIT, with a release landing around July 10. One of the busiest repos on this list.

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. About 222 stars, MIT, and new.

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. Around 8,794 stars, MIT, actively maintained. The highest total on this month's 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.

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.

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.