Best Claude Skills in 2026: 13 Worth Installing

The best Claude skills for most people are Anthropic's own: the document skills for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF, frontend-design, and skill-creator for building your own. For coding, superpowers and Matt Pocock's grill-me add a real engineering process. For writing, humanizer and stop-slop strip AI tells from text. For web design, taste-skill pushes Claude away from generic-looking pages.

We picked these 13 by publisher, adoption, license and how clearly they do one job. Star counts move fast; ours are from GitHub on October 30, 2026.

How we researched this: each skill's GitHub repository and SKILL.md, Anthropic's skills repository and skills docs, checked October 30, 2026. We haven't benchmarked these skills ourselves, so we describe what each one does and who it fits, not test scores.

Best Claude skills at a glance

Stars measure popularity, not quality. A skill with 2,000 stars can be the right one if it does exactly your job.

Anthropic's official skills

All of these live in anthropics/skills. In Claude Code, add the repo as a plugin marketplace, then install a bundle:

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

Anthropic notes the repo's skills are "provided for demonstration and educational purposes only," so treat them as strong starting points rather than products with support.

1. Document skills (docx, xlsx, pptx, pdf)

These let Claude create and edit Word documents, spreadsheets with formulas and charts, slide decks, and PDFs, including merging, splitting, filling forms and OCR. They're already built into the Claude apps and the API, so most people don't need to install them. In Claude Code you add them through the marketplace above.

Unlike most of the repo, these four are source-available, not open source. Their license file says "Proprietary."

2. frontend-design

Anthropic's skill for interfaces that look designed rather than generated. Its description promises "distinctive, intentional visual design" that doesn't "read as templated defaults." If Claude's web pages all look the same to you, start here before trying community design skills.

3. skill-creator

The skill for making skills. It drafts a new skill, writes test prompts, runs them, evaluates the results and helps you revise. If you're going to write your own, this saves the trial and error. Our guide to what Claude skills are covers the format it produces.

4. webapp-testing

Lets Claude test a web app running on your machine using Playwright, with screenshots and browser logs. It's a good partner for any front-end work: build, then have Claude check its own result in a real browser.

5. mcp-builder

A guide for building MCP servers in Python or TypeScript. Useful if you want to connect Claude to an internal tool; our explainer on what an MCP server is covers the basics first.

Best Claude skills for coding

6. superpowers

superpowers describes itself as "a complete software development methodology for your coding agents." It's the most-starred skill collection on this list and installs as a plugin:

/plugin install superpowers@claude-plugins-official

It suits developers who want Claude to follow a consistent process across projects instead of improvising. It's also the heaviest install here, so try it on one project before making it global.

7. grill-me (Matt Pocock)

Part of Matt Pocock's skills collection, which he calls "Skills for Real Engineers". The grill-me skill is described as "a relentless interview to sharpen a plan or design." Claude questions your plan until the weak spots are out in the open. It only runs when you call it, which is right for a skill like this.

claude plugin install mattpocock-skills@claude-plugins-official

Use it before a big refactor or a new feature, when the cost of a bad plan is highest.

8. caveman

caveman makes Claude reply in terse, stripped-down language and compresses logs, JSON and test output before the model reads them. The project reports "33.2% fewer" input tokens across 54 Claude Code runs. That's the author's own measurement, and the README says results "will vary."

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

It's worth trying if you keep hitting usage limits. Our Claude pricing guide explains how those limits work.

Best Claude skills for writing

9. humanizer

humanizer is an "agent skill that removes signs of AI-generated writing from text." Run it on drafts that read like a chatbot wrote them.

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

Several forks with the same name exist. blader/humanizer is the original.

10. stop-slop

stop-slop is "a skill file for removing AI tells from prose." It's smaller and more focused than humanizer, which makes it easy to read in full before installing. To install it in Claude Code, copy the skill folder into ~/.claude/skills/stop-slop/.

Humanizer or stop-slop? Try both on the same draft and keep the one whose edits you agree with. Neither replaces reading your text aloud.

Best Claude skills for design and marketing

11. taste-skill

taste-skill pushes Claude toward distinctive web design, using art direction, reference images and a check in a real browser. It's a stronger opinion than Anthropic's frontend-design, so use one or the other, not both.

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

12. marketingskills (Corey Haines)

marketingskills is a set of 52 skills for "CRO, copywriting, SEO, analytics, and growth engineering." Install the set, then keep only the skills you use, since every installed skill adds its description to Claude's context.

npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills

For big decisions

13. LLM council

claude-skills-llm-council "runs your decisions through 5 AI advisors with peer review," based on Andrej Karpathy's LLM Council idea. It's useful for decisions where you want opposing views before you commit.

One caveat: its README has Claude fetch the skill file from GitHub when you install it. Copy the file into your own skills folder and read it first, so it can't change after you've checked it.

Where to find more Claude skills

• awesome-claude-skills by Composio is a curated list with about 78,000 stars.
• Skills marketplaces such as SkillsMP index thousands of public SKILL.md files. They're independent of Anthropic and don't vet what they list.

How to choose and install skills safely

• Install for a job you have now, not "just in case". Each skill costs about 100 tokens of context all the time, so 30 unused skills cost about 3,000 tokens in every session.
• Read SKILL.md and every script before installing. Anthropic's docs say to use skills only from sources you trust, because a malicious skill could exfiltrate data.
• Be wary of skills that download instructions or code at runtime.
• Prefer skills with a clear license and recent commits.
• If two skills do the same job (taste-skill and frontend-design, humanizer and stop-slop), keep one, or Claude may follow conflicting instructions.

Most of these also work outside Claude, since the format is an open standard that Codex, Cursor and GitHub Copilot read. If you're comparing coding agents, our best AI for coding roundup covers them.

FAQ

What are the best Claude skills for beginners?

Anthropic's official ones: the document skills (already built into the Claude apps), frontend-design, and skill-creator to build your own. They're maintained by Anthropic and safe to start with.

Where can I find Claude skills?

Anthropic's repository at github.com/anthropics/skills, curated lists like ComposioHQ's awesome-claude-skills, and community marketplaces. Treat anything outside Anthropic's repo as third-party code and read it before installing.

How do I install a Claude skill?

In Claude Code, install a plugin with /plugin install, or copy the skill folder into ~/.claude/skills/. In the Claude apps, upload the skill as a ZIP under Customize, then Skills.

Are Claude skills free?

The skills on this list are free to download. Skills work on every Claude plan, including Free with code execution turned on, but using them counts toward your plan's usage.