4 Claude Code Skills That Actually Survived Out of 100K

AI coding agent skills are shipping at a pace that’s hard to keep up with. Hundreds appear every day, and the open-source skill count on GitHub has crossed 100,000.

I’ll be honest: I used to install anything that looked promising. About 90% of those skills sat unused after the first day. So this weekend, I went through everything I’ve actually been using and narrowed it down to the four I reach for every single day.

Superpowers: Stop Your Agent from Writing Code First

GitHub: obra/superpowers

With 41K GitHub stars, this is effectively the number one skill in the ecosystem. It’s not a code generation helper - it’s a framework that restructures how your agent approaches software development itself.

Once installed, the agent starts by asking what you’re trying to build. It drafts a design document before writing a single line of code. The built-in workflow covers seven stages: brainstorming, planning, test-driven development (TDD), implementation, code review, git worktree management, and deployment.

What sets it apart is task decomposition. It breaks work into 2-5 minute chunks, delegates them to independent sub-agents, and runs a two-stage automated review process on the output.

The thing that surprised me most was how long Claude Code could work autonomously without drifting from the plan. That alone makes this skill worth installing.

Humanizer: Catch 24 Patterns of “AI Smell” in Your Writing

GitHub: blader/humanizer

This one is built on patterns identified by the Wikipedia Wiki Project AI Cleanup team, who analyzed thousands of AI-generated texts to catalog the most common tells.

It detects AI-characteristic vocabulary like “testament,” “landscape,” and “showcasing.” Beyond individual words, it checks for 24 distinct patterns: meaning inflation, triple-word lists, em-dash overuse, emoji abuse, and more. Each pattern comes with before-and-after examples so you understand why the change matters.

Here’s the practical reality: if you draft something with AI and publish it as-is, readers spot it in the first sentence. This skill converts “statistically most common phrasing” into “sentences a human would actually write.”

One note: this skill is tuned for English. If you write in other languages, you may need to adapt the patterns accordingly.

UI/UX Pro Max: Remove the Template Look from AI-Generated Interfaces

GitHub: nextlevelbuilder/ui-ux-pro-max-skill

This skill packs 67 UI styles, 96 color palettes, 57 font combinations, and 100 industry-specific reasoning rules into a single package.

Tell it “build a beauty spa landing page” and it generates an entire design system tailored to that industry - colors, typography, layout patterns, and even a list of what not to do in that vertical. It supports 13 tech stacks including React, Next.js, Vue, SwiftUI, and Flutter.

The biggest differentiator is anti-pattern detection. It identifies the most obvious AI design clichés - purple-to-pink gradients, emoji icons, default template layouts - and suggests concrete alternatives. That’s where I’ve seen the most noticeable improvement in output quality.

Find Skills by Vercel: Search and Install from 100K Skills in One Command

GitHub: vercel-labs/skills

Built by Vercel Labs, this is a CLI tool specifically for managing agent skills. The more skills you work with, the more valuable it becomes.

You can browse available skills at skills.sh.

• npx skills find to search by keyword
• npx skills add to install instantly
• npx skills check to see available updates
• npx skills update to batch-update everything

It supports 27 agents simultaneously - Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, and more. This single tool handles discovery, installation, and maintenance, turning skill management into a proper workflow instead of an afterthought.

Installation

All four can be installed in one go:

npx skills add obra/superpowers
npx skills add blader/humanizer
npx skills add nextlevelbuilder/ui-ux-pro-max-skill
npx skills add vercel-labs/skills

The Bigger Picture

Consider what a solo operator’s workspace looks like today. Multiple monitors, multiple terminals, multiple agents running in parallel. One agent writes code, another generates design, a third organizes documentation. The human isn’t doing the work directly - they’re the control tower, orchestrating the agents.

This is what a one-person unicorn company’s workflow looks like in practice. If you want to handle development, design, writing, and deployment simultaneously by yourself, investing time in your skill setup isn’t optional.

A single weekend spent configuring the right tools eliminates hundreds of hours of repetitive work over weeks, months, and years ahead.