Anthropic Skills: A Tour of the anthropics/skills Repo and Which Ones to Install

Anthropic skills are the agent skills Anthropic itself publishes on GitHub, mainly in the anthropics/skills repo. The repo contains 18 skills indexed in our catalog, led by frontend-design with 649,620 installs (skills.sh registry, July 2026) and skill-creator with 309,452 installs. "Anthropic-published" here means provenance, not a quality endorsement: these are the skills shipped from Anthropic's own GitHub org, and they sit in the same install-ranked catalog as everyone else's.

Key takeaways

• anthropics/skills is Anthropic's public repo of agent skills; every skill is a folder with a SKILL.md plus bundled scripts and references.
• The two heavyweights are frontend-design (649,620 installs) and skill-creator (309,452 installs, skills.sh registry, July 2026).
• A document suite (pptx, pdf, docx, xlsx) covers file generation and manipulation - together over 600,000 installs across the four skills.
• Anthropic publishes from several repos: anthropics/skills, anthropics/claude-code (plugin-dev skills), anthropics/claude-plugins-official, and anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins.
• Anthropic-published does not mean best-in-category: community skills like vercel-labs' find-skills (2,438,642 installs) and mattpocock/skills' grill-me (515,987 installs) out-install most of the repo.

What is the anthropics/skills repo?

github.com/anthropics/skills is the repo where Anthropic publishes reference agent skills for Claude Code, Claude.ai, and the Claude API (160,146 stars, skills.sh registry, July 2026). Each skill is a directory containing a SKILL.md file - frontmatter with a name and trigger description, then instructions - plus optional bundled scripts, references, and assets that the agent loads on demand.

The repo serves two purposes. It ships working skills you can install today, and it acts as the canonical example set for the agent skills format: if you want to see how Anthropic structures progressive disclosure, trigger descriptions, or bundled helper scripts, this is the source. New to the format itself? Start with what Claude Code skills are.

Which Anthropic-published skills are in the repo, and what does each do?

All install counts below are from the skills.sh registry, July 2026 snapshot, via the Skillselion catalog.

Design and frontend

• frontend-design - 649,620 installs. Forces a deliberate aesthetic direction before any UI code ships: typography pairings, color systems, motion, spatial composition. Explicitly bans generic AI-default looks (Inter everywhere, purple gradients). Full breakdown in the frontend-design guide.
• web-artifacts-builder - 79,098 installs. Multi-component interactive HTML artifacts with React, Tailwind, and shadcn/ui.
• theme-factory (66,993), brand-guidelines (65,351), canvas-design (85,021), algorithmic-art (65,244) - smaller design utilities for palettes, Anthropic's own visual identity, strategy canvases, and generative art.

Documents

• pptx - 172,817 installs. Editable PowerPoint generation.
• pdf - 154,234 installs. Read, create, merge, split, encrypt, fill forms, extract tables.
• docx (148,231) and xlsx (131,105) - Word and Excel with real formatting, not markdown dumped into a file.

Building and testing

• skill-creator - 309,452 installs. The end-to-end loop for authoring skills: draft SKILL.md, run with-skill vs baseline evals in parallel, grade outputs, iterate. Pairs with our custom skills guide.
• webapp-testing - 113,149 installs. Drives a running local web app to verify frontend behavior, capture screenshots, and inspect logs.
• mcp-builder - 87,902 installs. Scaffolds MCP servers that let LLMs call external APIs safely.
• claude-api (48,654) - writes and migrates code against the Claude API and SDKs.

Workflow

• doc-coauthoring (66,800), internal-comms (58,017), slack-gif-creator (54,929), template-skill (52,800) - documentation co-writing, status updates, Slack-sized GIFs, and a starter template for new skills.

Anthropic also publishes skills from other repos our catalog indexes: anthropics/claude-code carries the plugin-development set (skill-development, hook-development, mcp-integration, each around 10,000-15,000 installs), and anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins covers non-coding workflows like data-visualization and incident-response.

How do Anthropic-published skills differ from community skills?

Three distinctions matter. First, provenance vs performance: Anthropic-published skills come from the format's author, but the install leaderboard is dominated by community authors - vercel-labs' find-skills has 2,438,642 installs and mattpocock/skills' grill-me has 515,987 (skills.sh registry, July 2026), both ahead of everything in anthropics/skills except frontend-design. See the Matt Pocock skills map and the live leaderboard.

Second, scope: Anthropic's skills skew toward broad, stack-agnostic capabilities (documents, design direction, skill authoring). Community skills go deeper on specific stacks - vercel-labs on React and Next.js patterns, mattpocock on TypeScript workflows and plan-grilling.

Third, the repo is not the spec. The agent skills format (SKILL.md, frontmatter, progressive disclosure) is defined in Anthropic's docs and works with any author's skills; anthropics/skills is just one implementation of it, held to the same rules as yours.

How do you install a skill from anthropics/skills?

The fastest path is the skills CLI: npx skills add anthropics/skills installs from the repo, or add a specific skill like npx skills add anthropics/skills@frontend-design. Alternatively, copy the skill folder into .claude/skills/ in your project (or ~/.claude/skills/ for all projects). Claude Code picks it up automatically; the trigger description in the frontmatter decides when it activates.

Which 2-3 should you start with, by role?

• Frontend developer: frontend-design for UI output quality, webapp-testing to verify what shipped, and web-artifacts-builder if you build interactive prototypes.
• Skill author: skill-creator for the eval loop, template-skill as the starting scaffold, then the plugin-dev skills in anthropics/claude-code when you package for distribution.
• Anyone shipping documents: pdf plus whichever of docx/xlsx/pptx matches your output format.

Install counts come from the skills.sh registry via the Skillselion catalog, snapshot July 2026.

Common questions