Skillselion Research · Edition of 2026-08-28
The Agent Skill Author Census
Who builds AI agent skills? We took a census of the whole Skillselion production catalog on 2026-08-28 and counted 5,690 publishing accounts behind 59,685 skills. Authorship is wide. Adoption is not: 8 accounts hold half of the 162,061,967 installs.
On 2026-08-28 we dumped all 82,157 catalog listings and aggregated the 59,685 skill rows by publishing account. The distribution is winner-take-most: two official accounts of one collaboration suite, Lark, sit on 16.75% of installs, official vendor accounts overall take 25.5% from only 9.3% of skills, and more than half of all authors have not recorded a single install. You can rebuild every number from the dataset; the counting rules and their limits are in the methodology.
Finding 01
8 accounts hold half of all installs
Sort the 5,690 accounts by cumulative installs and add from the top. The first 8 accounts reach 50.05% of the entire ecosystem: open.feishu.cn, mattpocock, microsoft, prime-skills, larksuite, vercel-labs, heygen-com and lllllllama. The top 10 reach 54.6%, the top 1% (57 accounts) reach 83.3%, and it takes just 120 of 5,690 accounts (2.1%) to cover 90% of every install ever recorded in the catalog. The Gini coefficient of the author-install distribution is 0.982.
- open.feishu.cn (28 skills)10.19%
- mattpocock (45 skills)9.46%
- microsoft (186 skills)7.67%
- prime-skills (60 skills)6.71%
- larksuite (42 skills)6.57%
- vercel-labs (117 skills)3.8%
- heygen-com (44 skills)3.2%
- lllllllama (45 skills)2.46%
- anthropics (336 skills)2.37%
- Leonxlnx (20 skills)2.18%
Accounts are case-folded GitHub owners and registry publishers, so an organization counts as one author. The full ranking is one sort of the dataset.
Finding 02
The largest publisher is a collaboration suite, twice
The two accounts at ranks 1 and 5 publish for the same product: open.feishu.cn and larksuite are two official developer accounts of Lark, the collaboration suite ByteDance operates, serving its Chinese (Feishu) and international editions. Smaller Lark accounts also exist in the catalog, so the pair is a conservative floor for the suite. Together they list 70 skills carrying 27,153,482 installs, 16.75% of the whole census. That is the largest publisher footprint in the catalog, ahead of microsoft (12,431,760 installs, 7.67%), anthropics (3,840,746, 2.37%) and vercel-labs (6,163,880, 3.8%).
Install totals count registry install events for skills published under each account. Earlier Skillselion analysis observed uniform daily deltas across Lark skills that look like bundled or suite-level install counting; the census reports the registry numbers as recorded and does not adjust them.
Finding 03
Official vendors: 9.3% of skills, a quarter of installs
Each listing carries an official-vendor flag: the publishing account is the vendor of the product the skill drives. 5,576 skills (9.3%) come from official vendor accounts, and they carry 41,384,836 installs, 25.5% of the census. The other 74.5% of installs go to community accounts. Community accounts still carry most installs, and vendors punch well above their listing share: one skill in eleven is official, one install in four lands on one. One flag caveat: the catalog does not mark the two Lark accounts from Finding 02 as official vendors, so their 16.75% sits in the community share here.
Finding 04
Publishing more does not mean being installed more
Publishing volume buys shelf space, and little else. The most prolific account in the catalog, affaan-m, published 544 skills that average 5,392 installs each and sum to 1.81% of the census. mattpocock published 45 skills that average 340,684 installs each and sum to 9.46%. One account out-published the other 12 to 1; the other out-earned it 5 to 1 on installs. The pattern repeats down the prolific list: sickn33 (445 skills, 1,303 installs per skill) and TheBushidoCollective (387 skills, 47 installs per skill) barely register in install share.
Finding 05
The median author has zero installs
The median author in this census has zero installs. 2,998 accounts (52.7%) have no recorded install on anything they published, and 3,539 accounts (62.2%) published exactly one skill. The long tail is a different population from the head: mostly single-skill authors whose work never found a first user. For every account in the top 1% there are 99 whose combined share rounds to 16.7%.
Method
Methodology
The census is a complete dump of the Skillselion production catalog taken on 2026-08-28: 82,157 listings in total, of which the 59,685 skill listings form this census, because the install signal lives on skills; MCP servers, plugins and marketplaces in the catalog carry no comparable install count and are excluded. Cumulative installs sum to 162,061,967, aggregating public registry data, chiefly the skills.sh registry, alongside GitHub and other public sources. Installs count registry install events, not active users.
An author is the publishing account of a listing: the GitHub owner or registry publisher, exactly as recorded in the catalog. Accounts are case-folded before aggregation because GitHub owner names are case-insensitive; that merged 34 casing variants and brought 5,724 raw spellings down to 5,690 authors. An organization is one author, so this census measures concentration across publishing accounts, not across individual people. A registry install-count defect affecting a small set of mirror publishers was corrected in the catalog before this dump; the background is in the clone census errata. Every number on this page recomputes from the dataset below with the verification script described in How Skillselion Research is done.
Skillselion is an independent project and is not affiliated with Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, Claude, Claude Code, or Codex, nor with any publisher named on this page.
Data
Download the dataset
The dataset has 5,690 rows, one per publishing account, with skill count, cumulative installs, install share, official-vendor skill count and official-vendor installs. It is free to use with attribution under CC BY 4.0: cite "Skillselion Agent Skill Author Census, August 2026" and link this page.
FAQ
Questions journalists ask
Who builds AI agent skills?
5,690 publishing accounts (GitHub owners and registry publishers, case-folded) authored the 59,685 agent skills in the Skillselion catalog as of 2026-08-28. Adoption is far narrower than authorship: 8 accounts hold 50.05% of the 162,061,967 cumulative registry installs, and the top 1% (57 accounts) hold 83.3%. The two official Lark developer accounts (open.feishu.cn and larksuite) are the largest publisher in the catalog at 16.75% of installs combined.
How concentrated is the AI agent skill ecosystem?
Very concentrated. The Gini coefficient of installs across the 5,690 authors is 0.982. 8 accounts hold half of all installs, 120 accounts (2.1%) hold 90%, and 2,998 accounts (52.7%) have zero installs on everything they published. The median author in this census has 0 installs.
Does publishing more skills earn more installs?
Not in this census. The most prolific account, affaan-m, published 544 skills and averages 5,392 installs per skill (1.81% of all installs). mattpocock published 45 skills and averages 340,684 installs per skill (9.46%). Catalog volume and adoption are different games.
Can I reuse these numbers or the dataset?
Yes. Cite "Skillselion Agent Skill Author Census, August 2026" and link this page. The raw dataset (5,690 rows, one per author, with skill count, installs, install share, official-vendor skill count and official-vendor installs) is downloadable on this page under CC BY 4.0.