The 20 Most-Installed AI Agent Skills in 2026 — Ranked by Real Install Counts

Anyone can publish a skill. The leaderboard on skills.sh shows what tens of thousands of developers actually install and use. Here are the 20 skills topping the charts in 2026 — what each does and why they matter.

Skills.sh, launched by Vercel on January 20, 2026, ranks published skills by actual install counts rather than just stars or downloads. This matters because install count is the most honest signal of usefulness. Stars are easy to give. Installs require trust — the skill runs on your machine with your agent permissions.

The Top 20 Skills Every Developer Should Know

The leaderboard as of May 2026 is dominated by skills from Vercel Engineering, Anthropic and a few key community contributors. These twenty are worth knowing about even if you do not install all of them — they represent the patterns that have proven most useful at scale.

Vercel Engineering Skills

web-design-guidelines tops the leaderboard at 133,000 weekly installs. It audits UI code against Vercel Web Interface Guidelines for design, accessibility and UX compliance — catching issues that are easy to miss in fast development.

react-best-practices encodes 57 performance optimisation rules for React and Next.js, prioritised by actual impact. Eliminating request waterfalls comes before optimising bundle size, which comes before micro-optimisations.

vercel-deploy lets agents deploy applications to Vercel directly from conversations. Deployments are claimable — users can transfer ownership to their own account.

vercel-audit analyses Vercel projects for cost, performance, reliability and caching opportunities, pointing to specific routes and files that need attention.

Anthropic Reference Skills

The document creation suite from Anthropic — pdf-processing, docx, xlsx, pptx — handles the most common productivity tasks: PDF text extraction and form filling, Word document creation, spreadsheet building with formulas and charts, and presentation generation with consistent layouts.

skill-creator is the meta-skill that teaches Claude to write and refine other skills. Essential for anyone building custom skills regularly.

Community Skills Worth Installing

firecrawl solves the web access gap for AI agents that lack built-in browsing. git-workflow standardises git operations with conventional commits and PR patterns. typescript-strict encodes strict type-checking patterns. python-data covers Pandas, NumPy and data analysis conventions. sql-optimizer handles query analysis across PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite. docker-compose, aws-cli, test-runner, ai-sdk, json-render and cosmic-cms each handle specialised areas with high practical value.

How to Install Them

Every skill in this list is available through the Vercel skills CLI with a single command: npx skills add [skill-name]. The CLI auto-detects which AI agents you have installed and routes the skill to the correct directories. Skills.sh links provide direct install commands for each entry.