🧭 Why there's a "starter pack"
With 39.366 skills in the catalog, no one starts with the long tail. You start with skills that are, at the same time, widely installed (signal that they work), well-written (serve as models) and from trusted sources (vercel-labs, anthropics, supabase). Installing and reading these skills is the fastest shortcut to understanding what a good skill looks like on the inside.
✗ Start wrong
- ✗Installing random skills from the long tail
- ✗Copy a skill with 3 installs as a “template”
- ✗Trying to create your own before reading a good one
✓ Start with the pack
- ✓Install 4-8 canonical skills and read their SKILL.md files
- ✓See how serious players write descriptions and body text
- ✓Get immediate value while learning the format
💡 Installing is free reading
Each skill you install becomes a SKILL.md file in your project, at skills/ or .claude/skills/. Open these files: the starter pack is also the best collection of annotated examples you'll find.
🔎 The Essential One: find-skills
If you install just one, install this one. find-skills (vercel-labs/skills) is the most-installed skill on the planet — 1.802.925 installs — and does just one thing, perfectly: teaches the agent to find, evaluate, and install other skills from the catalog on its own. It's the meta-skill that unlocks all the others.
find-skills
1.802.925 installsWhat it does: gives the agent the ability to search skills.sh using natural language, compare candidates, and install the best one—without you having to open the site.
Why it’s included in the pack: turns the agent into a curator of its own ecosystem. You ask "find a skill for X" and it handles it. It's the entry point to everything.
install:
$ npx skills add vercel-labs/skills
💡 Why 1.8M and not 488k?
find-skills has twice as many installs as the runner-up because it is installed as a prerequisite for nearly every discovery flow. An advantage of "getting there early and becoming infrastructure" — exactly the install-count bias that Track 1.5 will dissect.
🎨 The frontend trio
Web & Frontend is the second-largest group in the catalog, and three skills dominate: the two design references from vercel-labs e a anthropics/skills. Even if you're not a front-end developer, reading them shows how to write a "guideline" skill — style instructions the agent applies without you having to repeat them.
frontend-design · anthropics/skills
488.299What it does: generates polished, tasteful interfaces that avoid the generic AI look. In the pack: is Anthropic’s own skill—a reference for writing a design skill and a trigger for immediate visual quality.
vercel-react-best-practices · vercel-labs/agent-skills
443.261What it does: encodes the React/Next best practices Vercel recommends—composition, server components, data patterns. In the pack: improves any React code the agent writes and shows how to condense an entire stack into a SKILL.md.
web-design-guidelines · vercel-labs/agent-skills
358.627What it does: layout, typography, spacing, and accessibility guidelines applied to any UI. In the pack: a perfect pairing with frontend-design — one handles “how to build,” the other “how it should look.”
install the trio:
$ npx skills add anthropics/skills $ npx skills add vercel-labs/agent-skills # traz react + design guidelines
🤖 The two agent skills: skill-creator and agent-browser
Two skills in the AI/Agents group deserve an early spot because they change what your agent can do. One teaches the agent to create new skills; the other gives it a browser.
skill-creator
246kanthropics/skills
Do: guides the agent to write, review, and optimize SKILL.md. In the pack: is the canonical source for “how a skill should be”—you’ll use it in Track 1.4 to create your own.
agent-browser
332kvercel-labs
Do: automates navigation, fills out forms, takes screenshots, extracts data from pages. In the pack: unlocks real use cases (testing UI, scraping data) with a single installation.
install:
$ npx skills add anthropics/skills # skill-creator $ npx skills add vercel-labs/agent-skills # agent-browser
💡 Skills from the same repo come together
Several names in the pack live in the same repository (anthropics/skills includes frontend-design + skill-creator; vercel-labs includes several). One npx skills add owner/repo you can install an entire package at once.
🗄️ Data and Process: supabase + TDD
To round out the pack with something beyond front-end, two skills from different domains show the catalog’s breadth: one for data (the Data group lead) and one from engineering process (the superpowers community reference).
supabase-postgres-best-practices · supabase
203kWhat it does: teaches the agent to write SQL, RLS, and Postgres schemas the way Supabase recommends. In the pack: is the most installed Data & Databases skill and a great example of a vendor skill made by the product team itself.
test-driven-development · obra/superpowers
107kWhat it does: makes the agent write the test before the code, in a red-green-refactor loop. In the pack: improves the quality of ANY coding task and is the canonical example of a "process" skill — it doesn't provide a tool; it changes behavior.
install:
$ npx skills add supabase/supabase $ npx skills add obra/superpowers
💡 Three skill flavors in the pack
Notice that the starter pack covers the three types you’ll encounter again in the course: meta (find-skills, skill-creator), guideline/vendor (frontend, react, supabase) and process (TDD). Knowing one of each already gives you the vocabulary for the rest.
📦 The recommended minimum kit
You don’t need to install all eight at once. Start with the minimum kit of 3 — the essentials for anyone — and expand as your work requires. Here’s the recommended order, step by step.
Minimum kit (everyone): find-skills + skill-creator
With discovery + creation, you can already find everything that exists and create what’s missing. This is the foundational pair. Add test-driven-development if you write code.
If you do frontend work: + frontend-design + web-design-guidelines
Anthropic’s and Vercel’s design pair covers “building” and “looking good.” Add vercel-react-best-practices if the stack is React/Next.
As needed: agent-browser and supabase
agent-browser when you need to automate the web; supabase-postgres-best-practices when the project uses Postgres. Install on demand—don’t accumulate skills you don’t use.
the minimum kit in two commands:
$ npx skills add vercel-labs/skills # find-skills $ npx skills add anthropics/skills # skill-creator + frontend-design
💡 Less is more
Each installed skill consumes some of the agent's context (the name + description are always loaded). A lean, relevant pack works better than 40 skills competing for attention. Install what you use; remove what you don't.
✅ Module Summary
Next:
1.4 — 🛠️ How to Create: Your First Skill in 10 Minutes. Now that you’ve read good skills, it’s time to write your own from scratch and get it working.