The best Claude skills in 2026: top picks by use case

There are now thousands of Claude skills on GitHub. Most are prompts in a folder, some are excellent, and a few are worth installing on day one. This list is the short version: the skills that are widely used, actively maintained and do something a plain prompt cannot, grouped by the job they do.

If skills are new to you, start with what Claude skills are and how they work. Every recommendation here comes with the same caveat: a skill runs with your permissions, so read it before you install it. The review checklist takes five minutes, and the section below covers scanning.

Repositories, star counts and install commands were checked on GitHub on 12 October 2026.

The top 10 Claude skills at a glance

Ranked by GitHub stars, which measure attention rather than quality. Every one of these is maintained and does something a prompt alone cannot.

The rest of the page goes through these by job, with install commands and the runners-up worth knowing.

How we picked

A skill made the list if it is:

• Widely used: among the most-starred skills or collections on GitHub, or official from Anthropic.
• More than a prompt: it carries scripts, references or a procedure that changes results.
• Maintained: recent commits and a clear install path.

Not every popular "skills" repository is a skill. andrej-karpathy-skills, one of the most-starred, is a single CLAUDE.md file of coding guidelines. Useful, but it belongs in your project's CLAUDE.md, not in your skills folder. The skills guide explains the difference.

Official skills from Anthropic

Anthropic's anthropics/skills repository is the reference collection. In Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills
/plugin install document-skills@anthropic-agent-skills
/plugin install example-skills@anthropic-agent-skills

In Claude.ai, these are already available; enable them under the Skills settings.

Note the licences: most are Apache 2.0, but the four document skills are source-available under a proprietary licence. You can use them with Claude; you cannot fork them into your own product. More detail in our Anthropic skills guide.

Best Claude skills for coding

superpowers (obra/superpowers) is the most widely used skill collection for developers: brainstorming, writing plans, executing plans, test-driven development, systematic debugging, sub-agent-driven development and working with git worktrees. It is more a methodology than a single skill.

/plugin install superpowers@claude-plugins-official

If you adopt it, adopt it as a team. Its value is that every developer's agent works the same way, plans before code, tests before claiming done. Our Superpowers guide walks through the workflow, every skill in it and what it costs in tokens.

caveman (JuliusBrussee/caveman) makes the agent answer in short, structured sentences while leaving code, commands, paths and error messages exactly as they are. The project's own example cuts a 63-token answer to 20. It comes in levels (/caveman, /ultracave, /megacave); the first is the one to try.

/plugin marketplace add JuliusBrussee/caveman
/plugin install caveman@caveman

ux-lint (Walma-Labs/ux-lint), our own, is a UX linter that measures a page in a real browser (tap targets, layout shift, LCP, click-to-paint) and reasons from the numbers rather than guessing from source code. We use it as the worked example in our skills guide.

From Anthropic's set, webapp-testing and mcp-builder belong here too. Pick one methodology collection, superpowers or something like it, not several: two sets of rules about when to plan and when to test give the model conflicting orders.

Best Claude skills for planning

planning-with-files (OthmanAdi/planning-with-files) solves the most common planning problem in long tasks: an agent forgets its plan when the context is cleared or compacted. It keeps the plan, findings and progress in markdown files in the project and re-injects them every turn, so a long task resumes at the right phase. The project reports re-orientation after a reset dropping from about 13 turns to 5.

npx skills add OthmanAdi/planning-with-files --skill planning-with-files -g

llm-council style skills run several sub-agents as "advisors" who argue, review each other and reach a verdict, inspired by Andrej Karpathy's LLM Council experiment. tenfoldmarc/llm-council-skill is the most used version. Good for decisions with real trade-offs, expensive in tokens.

Best Claude skills for design and websites

Three skills target the same problem, AI-generated interfaces that all look alike, from different angles.

ui-ux-pro-max (nextlevelbuilder/ui-ux-pro-max-skill) is the broadest: a searchable library of styles, colour palettes, font pairings and UX rules that the agent consults while it builds. It is the one to try for a whole website or app.

/plugin marketplace add nextlevelbuilder/ui-ux-pro-max-skill
/plugin install ui-ux-pro-max@ui-ux-pro-max-skill

taste-skill (Leonxlnx/taste-skill) is a family of variants (minimalist, brutalist, soft, redesign, image-to-code and more), so you pick a direction rather than a generic "make it good".

npx skills add https://github.com/Leonxlnx/taste-skill

frontend-design (official, above) is the conservative choice and already available in Claude.ai. hallmark (Nutlope/hallmark) is a newer anti-slop design skill that works across Claude Code, Cursor and Codex.

As with writing skills, use one design skill per project. They each have opinions about type and colour, and two sets of opinions average out to the generic look you were trying to avoid.

banana-claude (AgriciDaniel/banana-claude) adds image generation through Google's Gemini image model ("Nano Banana") to Claude Code. It installs disabled, because each image is a paid API call; enable it deliberately.

Best Claude skills for writing

The two most popular writing skills do the same job from different angles: they make Claude's prose sound less like Claude.

humanizer (blader/humanizer) rewrites text to remove common AI patterns: "not X but Y" constructions, forced lists of three, dashes everywhere, inflated vocabulary.

/plugin marketplace add blader/humanizer
/plugin install humanizer@humanizer

stop-slop (hardikpandya/stop-slop) is a skill folder with reference files of phrases, structures and examples to avoid. There is no install command; add the folder to ~/.claude/skills/, or upload it in Claude.ai.

Use one, not both: they overlap, and two sets of style rules in context make the model second-guess itself.

Best Claude skills for research and knowledge work

last30days (mvanhorn/last30days-skill) searches Reddit, Hacker News, GitHub and Polymarket out of the box, and X, YouTube and more once you add keys, then scores what it finds by engagement and writes one brief. Good for "what are people saying about X this month"; less good where the answer is in documentation rather than discussion.

/plugin marketplace add mvanhorn/last30days-skill
/plugin install last30days

obsidian-skills (kepano/obsidian-skills), from Obsidian's CEO, teaches the agent Obsidian's CLI and its file formats (Markdown, Bases, Canvas), so Claude can work directly in a vault.

/plugin marketplace add kepano/obsidian-skills
/plugin install obsidian@obsidian-skills

archify (tt-a1i/archify) turns an idea, plan or codebase into an interactive architecture diagram. For academic work, academic-research-skills covers the research, write, review and revise loop, and K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills is a large library for scientific workflows.

Best Claude skills for marketing

The largest collection is marketingskills (coreyhaines31/marketingskills), MIT-licensed, with around fifty skills: copywriting, CRO, SEO audit, programmatic SEO, AI SEO, pricing, launch, cold email, ads, analytics and more.

npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills

We cover it, the alternatives and how to combine them with live data from Google Ads, GA4 and Search Console in Claude marketing skills. A marketing skill knows how to write an ad; it does not know how your ads performed last week. That part comes from an MCP server, and our MCP directory lists which marketing tools have one.

Skills, plugins and marketplaces

Searches for "best Claude skills and plugins" mix three things that are worth keeping apart:

• A skill is one folder with a SKILL.md file. Claude reads its description, and loads the rest when a task matches.
• A plugin is a Claude Code package that can bundle several skills with slash commands, subagents, hooks and MCP servers. superpowers and marketingskills are plugins that ship many skills.
• A marketplace is a catalogue of plugins, usually a GitHub repository. /plugin marketplace add owner/repo adds one; /plugin install name@marketplace installs from it. anthropics/claude-plugins-official is Anthropic's own.

Claude.ai has skills but no plugins, so there you upload the skill folder itself. npx skills (vercel-labs/skills) sits beside both: it installs the same skill folders into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and other agents.

Check a skill before you enable it

Popularity is not a security review. NVIDIA analysed over 31,000 public skills and found vulnerabilities in 26.1% and likely malicious intent in 5.2%: instructions that exfiltrate data, scripts that fetch and run remote code, prompt injection hidden in reference files.

Two steps cover most of the risk:

1. Read it. SKILL.md in full and every script. Look for anything that sends data out, touches credentials, writes outside the project or tells the agent to skip confirmations. The five-minute checklist lists what to look for.
2. Scan it. NVIDIA SkillSpector is an open-source scanner for agent skills: 71 patterns across prompt injection, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain and MCP tool poisoning, with a 0–100 risk score. It reads a Git repository, a zip or a folder, so you can scan before anything lands in ~/.claude/skills/.

Then pin the version you reviewed. A skill installed from a moving branch can change under you.

Where to find more

• anthropics/claude-plugins-official: the official Claude Code plugin directory, including skill-creator, frontend-design and superpowers.
• skills.sh and npx skills (vercel-labs/skills): a cross-agent installer and directory.
• Curated lists: ComposioHQ/awesome-claude-skills, VoltAgent/awesome-agent-skills (1,000+ skills, including official ones from vendors' own teams) and hesreallyhim/awesome-claude-code. Useful for discovery, but they list without reviewing.
• NVIDIA/skills: a smaller catalogue of skills that passed NVIDIA's scanning and signing pipeline.

How to choose, in practice

1. Start from a task you do every week, not from a list. A skill earns its place by changing a recurring result.
2. Install two or three, not twenty. Every skill's description sits in the agent's context, and overlapping skills compete.
3. Review and scan before installing, pin a version, and keep a team copy of the ones you adopt.
4. Write your own for what is specific to you. The best skill for "how we write release notes" is the one you write. skill-creator makes that a half-hour job.

Rolling skills out to a team

Everything above is easy for one developer and hard for fifty. Once a team uses skills, three questions come up:

• Which skills are approved? Someone has to review and scan them once, so that every employee does not have to.
• Is everyone on the same version? A team skill for "how we review pull requests" only helps if every agent runs the same copy, updated centrally.
• Who may run what? A skill that deploys or sends email should only work for people allowed to do that. Skills cannot enforce it; the tools they call can.

That is the same governance question as which MCP servers a company allows, and it has the same answer: one approved catalogue, one policy, one log. Walma AI Hub distributes approved skills and MCP servers to every employee's Claude client, decides per role which tools an agent may call, and logs every call, inside the customer's own EU region. See how AI Hub works, or book a 20-minute walkthrough below.