Agent Skills Hub and skills.sh High-Star Skills

Agent Skills Hub and skills.sh High-Star Skills

Scope

This page records a first-pass read of high-install/high-signal skills from Hermes Skills Hub and skills.sh. The instruction was to download and understand first, not install. Raw archives live under raw/articles/agent-skills-discovery-2026-06-19/.

Discovery sources:

• Hermes centralized skills index: https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/api/skills-index.json — 85,705 indexed skills generated 2026-06-18.
• skills.sh homepage embedded leaderboard — parsed top 600 entries by install count.
• GitHub raw files / codeload zip fallback for actual SKILL.md content.

What was archived

• 58 markdown records in raw archive.
• 56 had actual source content fetched; 2 remain metadata-only because raw path discovery failed without GitHub API quota: vercel-react-best-practices, remotion-best-practices.
• raw/articles/agent-skills-discovery-2026-06-19/_skills-sh-top-600.json preserves the parsed skills.sh leaderboard snapshot.

Highest-install skills observed

Patterns

1. Skill discovery is itself a skill

vercel-labs/skills/find-skills is by far the highest-install item. Its core pattern is not domain execution, but routing: clarify what the user wants, check leaderboards, search by capability, verify quality signals, then offer installation. For Hermes, this maps cleanly to Agent-Skill-Discovery: skill search should be an explicit research workflow rather than an immediate install reflex.

2. High-quality skills use aggressive trigger descriptions

anthropics/skills/skill-creator explicitly says description is the primary trigger mechanism and should be slightly “pushy” to avoid under-triggering. Several official platform skills (Supabase, Azure Foundry, Cloudflare) put product names, error classes, tools, and negative scope directly in description:. This supports a Hermes convention: the description field should include concrete user phrases and boundary conditions, not just a terse summary.

3. Strong skills are workflow contracts, not tips

The most useful files define phases, preconditions, verification, and fallback paths. Examples:

• microsoft-foundry resolves project context before acting, distinguishes azd defaults from real missing resources, and routes sub-skills.
• supabase encodes security invariants: server-side user validation, RLS, storage access control, migration creation discipline.
• browser-act-skill-forge separates site exploration from reusable skill generation and insists on network/DOM verification.
• skill-creator includes eval loops and baseline-vs-skill comparisons.

4. Ecosystem clusters matter more than single skills

Large install counts cluster around ecosystems:

• Azure skills: many narrow operational skills with similar install counts around 390k–400k.
• Vercel/React/web-design skills: frontend production quality and deployment guidance.
• Media generation skills: inference.sh / RunComfy style wrappers for AI image/video generation.
• Matt Pocock engineering skills: grilling, architecture, TDD, docs-driven questioning.
• Browser automation skills: reusable website operation/extraction playbooks.

This suggests Hermes should not blindly import individual high-star skills. Better: understand repository-level methodology, then selectively adapt stable workflows into native Hermes skills where they match user needs.

Repo-level notes

vercel-labs/skills

Archived 1 records. Top: find-skills (2,090,813).

anthropics/skills

Archived 2 records. Top: frontend-design (563,409), skill-creator (276,616).

vercel-labs/agent-skills

Archived 2 records. Top: vercel-react-best-practices (486,987), web-design-guidelines (401,018).

vercel-labs/agent-browser

Archived 1 records. Top: agent-browser (462,789).

microsoft/azure-skills

Archived 20 records. Top: microsoft-foundry (402,629), azure-ai (400,113), azure-deploy (399,757), azure-diagnostics (399,676), azure-prepare (399,631).

remotion-dev/skills

Archived 1 records. Top: remotion-best-practices (379,264).

mattpocock/skills

Archived 3 records. Top: grill-me (344,270), improve-codebase-architecture (282,126), grill-with-docs (277,962).

qu-skills/skills

Archived 5 records. Top: ai-video-generation (320,046), remotion-render (319,718), ai-image-generation (319,534), ai-avatar-video (0), twitter-automation (0).

supabase/agent-skills

Archived 2 records. Top: supabase-postgres-best-practices (239,883), supabase (128,887).

firebase/agent-skills

Archived 3 records. Top: firebase-basics (85,853), firebase-auth-basics (85,146), firebase-hosting-basics (83,162).

expo/skills

Archived 3 records. Top: building-native-ui (52,823), native-data-fetching (42,019), upgrading-expo (38,021).

browser-act/skills

Archived 2 records. Top: browser-act (47,652), browser-act-skill-forge (37,630).

firecrawl/skills

Archived 3 records. Top: firecrawl-build-search (41,805), firecrawl-build-scrape (41,784), firecrawl-build-interact (41,688).

addyosmani/web-quality-skills

Archived 2 records. Top: accessibility (29,657), seo (27,191).

jimliu/baoyu-skills

Archived 3 records. Top: baoyu-post-to-wechat (29,219), baoyu-image-gen (27,120), baoyu-markdown-to-html (26,772).

antfu/skills

Archived 3 records. Top: vite (26,964), vue (26,669), vitest (23,591).

cloudflare/skills

Archived 2 records. Top: cloudflare (25,742), wrangler (23,664).

Takeaways for Hermes

• Treat external skills as source material until reviewed. Installing unreviewed community skills is unnecessary when the goal is learning patterns.
• Favor skills that encode: trigger clarity, prerequisite checks, tool-specific commands, fallback paths, verification gates, and “do not use for” boundaries.
• Avoid copying platform-specific commands directly unless Hermes has the same tools and environment. Translate the method, not the surface syntax.
• Good candidate themes to adapt into Hermes later: skill discovery/ranking, skill eval harness, architecture grilling, browser-skill forging, Supabase/Cloudflare/Expo operational runbooks, web quality/accessibility checklists.

Related

• Agent-Skill-Discovery
• AI-Self-Improvement-Lab
• Karpathy-X-Radar