find-skills: let Claude Code find the right skill for you

The problem: a booming ecosystem, no real method to sort it

A few numbers as of 2026-05-17:

• The anthropics/skills repo has 136k stars and hosts about a dozen official skills (frontend-design, document skills, etc.).
• vercel-labs/agent-skills ships skills with 100k+ installs each (react-best-practices, web-design-guidelines).
• microsoft/azure-skills publishes half a dozen skills at 250k+ installs each.
• Add to that the community lists in awesome-claude-skills, awesome-agent-skills, and so on.

Concrete fallout: a developer wondering "how do I e2e-test a Next.js app with Claude Code?" has to know which organization to look at, in which repo, compare candidates, check stars, and read every SKILL.md. That's exactly the work find-skills automates.

What it is (and what it isn't)

Four concepts overlap in this ecosystem. The rest of this page assumes you can tell them apart:

How find-skills works

When Claude detects discovery intent (phrases like "find me a skill for…", "how do I do X?", "is there a skill that…"), it loads the SKILL.md and runs the following workflow:

Install find-skills (one command)

npx skills add vercel-labs/skills@find-skills -g -y

The -g flag installs the skill at the user level (available in all your projects). The -y flag skips the interactive confirmation.

To verify the install worked:

npx skills check

Once installed, there is no slash command to invoke. The skill triggers automatically when Claude detects the patterns documented in its SKILL.md (triggers like "find me a skill…", "how do I…", etc.).

Three concrete examples

Example 1: optimize a Next.js app

"I need help optimizing the perf of my Next.js app"

Expected output from Claude once find-skills is loaded:

I found a skill that should help. The "react-best-practices" skill provides
the Next.js performance guidelines from Vercel Engineering.
(~405k installs as of 2026-05-17, official source vercel-labs)

To install:
npx skills add vercel-labs/agent-skills@react-best-practices -g -y

View the skill: https://skills.sh/vercel-labs/agent-skills/react-best-practices

Example 2: review my React PRs

"do you know a skill for code-reviewing my PRs?"

Claude first runs npx skills find pr review, then filters results against the quality criteria and proposes the best one or two candidates, with their install count, source, and install command.

Example 3: a niche domain with no existing skill

"is there a skill to generate Mermaid diagrams from a SQL dump?"

Expected output when no credible match is found:

I searched for skills related to "mermaid sql diagram" but didn't find a
credible match (only two candidates with under 100 installs).

I can still help you with this task directly using my native capabilities.
If you do this often, you could also initialize your own skill:
npx skills init mermaid-sql-diagram

That is exactly the right behavior: refusing to recommend a low-quality skill just to fill the silence.

The quality criteria the skill enforces

The find-skills SKILL.md sets explicit thresholds before any recommendation. These are not soft hints, they are the rules Claude follows:

Install count is the most discriminating signal. A skill with 2 installs, however nicely written, may hide a bug, a hostile dependency, or simply fail to deliver what it claims. The SKILL.md formalizes this caution so the agent doesn't pollute your environment out of overzealousness.

The seven categories to know

The SKILL.md lists seven common search categories. Knowing these labels helps you phrase more effective queries:

Pair it with the rest of the Codex

Once find-skills is installed, you can chain it with the other skills pages on the Codex:

• What is a Skill? to understand the core concept and how a skill differs from a CLAUDE.md file.
• Top Skills for 2026 for the Codex's own editorial picks, independent from the skills.sh leaderboard.
• Skills vs Agents vs Plugins to situate a skill against the other extension mechanisms.
• Create your own skill when a search returns nothing and you need to package your own know-how.

Limits and caveats

Going further

• Publish your own skill: npx skills init <name> scaffolds a SKILL.md ready to push to GitHub, then to list on skills.sh.
• The official repo: github.com/vercel-labs/skills (ouvre un nouvel onglet) (18.9k stars as of 2026-05-17, MIT license, skills package v1.5.7) to track CLI changes.
• The directory: skills.sh (ouvre un nouvel onglet) to browse the catalog by installs, by topic, or by 24h trending.
• The Anthropic repo: github.com/anthropics/skills (ouvre un nouvel onglet) (136k stars, Apache 2.0) which hosts Anthropic's official skills and the reference specification of the SKILL.md format.

Ultimately, find-skills is less a tool than a discipline: forcing Claude to apply an explicit reading grid before suggesting that you install third-party code into your environment. That discipline becomes more valuable as the ecosystem grows, which is probably why it tops the leaderboard.