The State of AI Agent Skills 2026
As of 2026, the Skillselion catalog tracks 82,914 AI coding-agent tools - 60,442 agent skills, 9,676 MCP servers and 10,411 marketplaces - with 170M combined installs. Here's what the agent-tooling ecosystem looks like for developers shipping with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.
Source: the Skillselion catalog (skills.sh registry & GitHub), 2026. Data as of September 21, 2026. Free to cite with a link.
The ecosystem by tool type
Agent skills and MCP servers make up the overwhelming majority of the catalog - skills are the largest single category, with MCP servers close behind as the connective tissue that gives agents real-world tools. Marketplaces, which bundle and distribute the rest, are a smaller but structurally important slice.
Tools by build stage
The catalog is heavily weighted toward the Build phase - the hands-on-keyboard work of writing the product - and much thinner across the earlier and later stages, where the agent-tooling ecosystem is still maturing and a new tool faces the least competition.
The biggest categories
By subject, developer- and AI-tooling categories dominate - unsurprising for tools built to help engineers build with agents. The long tail (finance, data, infrastructure) shows the ecosystem spreading well beyond pure coding.
The most-installed agent skills
| # | Agent skill | By | Stars | Installs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Find Skills | vercel-labs | 30.5k | 3M |
| 2 | Grill Me | mattpocock | 253k | 1M |
| 3 | Grill With Docs | mattpocock | 253k | 919k |
| 4 | Improve Codebase Architecture | mattpocock | 253k | 881k |
| 5 | Frontend Design | anthropics | 175k | 862k |
| 6 | Tdd | mattpocock | 253k | 853k |
| 7 | Agent Browser | vercel-labs | 42k | 801k |
| 8 | Setup Matt Pocock Skills | mattpocock | 253k | 787k |
The most-starred mcp servers
| # | MCP server | By | Stars |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sequential Thinking MCP | modelcontextprotocol | 90.1k |
| 2 | Labelhead Artist Momentum MCP | paperclipai | 80.1k |
| 3 | Scrapling MCP | D4Vinci | 78.6k |
| 4 | Context7 MCP | upstash | 61.7k |
| 5 | Chrome DevTools MCP | ChromeDevTools | 51.1k |
| 6 | Metabase MCP | metabase | 49.1k |
| 7 | Codebase Memory MCP | DeusData | 42.4k |
| 8 | PostHog MCP | PostHog | 39.6k |
The most-starred marketplaces
| # | Marketplace | By | Stars |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Superpowers | Jesse Vincent | 282k |
| 2 | Ecc | Affaan Mustafa | 250k |
| 3 | Anthropic Agent Skills | Keith Lazuka | 175k |
| 4 | Prompts.Chat | Fatih Kadir Akın | 169k |
| 5 | Ponytail | Dietrich Gebert | 128k |
| 6 | Ui Ux Pro Max Skill | nextlevelbuilder | 125k |
| 7 | Open Design | nexu-io | 94.3k |
| 8 | Claude Mem | Alex Newman | 93.3k |
How this report is compiled
Every figure is a live count over the Skillselion catalog - agent skills, MCP servers and marketplaces ingested from the skills.sh registry and GitHub, updated automatically and ranked by real installs. Install counts come from the registry; star counts from GitHub. The numbers regenerate daily, so this page always reflects the current state of the ecosystem rather than a frozen snapshot.
Free to cite. Reference these figures in articles, talks or research with a link to this page (https://skillselion.com/state-of-ai-agent-skills-2026). Browse the full catalog by type or best-of phase.
Need numbers that will not move? Because this page recounts daily, a figure you cite today may read differently tomorrow. For a frozen, dated edition — fixed numbers, a stated method and the raw dataset as a download — see the Agent Economy Census, the Agent Skill Security Census, the Agent Skill Clone Census, or browse every edition in Skillselion Research. Standing method: How Skillselion Research is done. For one page of headline numbers with their sources, see AI Agent Statistics.
Go deeper with the guides: what Claude Code skills are, how to install a skill, Matt Pocock's skills, mapped, and the full guides library.