The Next New Thing’s Andrew Warner and Robbie Abed (founder of NoMiddle) go through the ten most-installed agent skills on GitHub, ranked by installs through Vercel’s skills CLI. It is a short episode — twelve minutes — and four of the ten entries are Matt Pocock’s, which is its own finding: a handful of small text packages are becoming the default instruction layer for coding agents.

The top 10

  1. find-skills — the most-installed skill is a skill for finding skills. You ask your agent for something (“find a skill for writing tests”) and it comes back with candidates to install. Warner’s framing: the community needed an app store and built one as its first app.
  2. grill-me — a few lines that invoke the grilling skill. Warner ran it to prep for the episode and it opened by asking what he was trying to convince the listeners of, which he calls the endgame question, asked before any work started.
  3. frontend-design — Anthropic’s skill for stopping the signature AI look, starting with that warm cream background. The episode shows the same site built before and after: same request, different color logic and more deliberate layout.
  4. agent-browser — headless browser control for an agent, no visible mouse. The examples on screen are the practical ones: log into the dashboard and screenshot the billing page; open staging, sign up as a test user, and tell me if it works.
  5. setup-matt-pocock-skills — a one-time scaffold that wires his engineering skills into a repo and configures the things those skills assume: issue tracker, triage labels for the five canonical roles, where domain docs and ADRs live, and how consumers should read them. Robbie’s read: it is the first 60 days of a consultant, delivered as setup.
  6. vercel-react-best-practices — roughly 70 React and Next.js performance rules handed to the agent as rules. You do not have to understand all of them for the skill to be worth installing, since the point is the mistakes the agent now avoids.
  7. grilling — the engine behind grill-me, split out so it can be reused anywhere the agent needs to interrogate you: how to sequence the questions, how to read the answers, what to push on. Both hosts treat it as the same idea in a reusable container.
  8. lark-doc — ByteDance’s workplace platform, Feishu outside China and Lark inside: contacts, messenger, the spreadsheet equivalent, calendar, wiki, video conferencing. Warner is candid that almost nobody watching will use it — it is on the list because the user base is enormous.
  9. teach — turns the agent into a tutor that accumulates lessons across sessions as numbered HTML files in a lessons folder. Matt’s demo teaches him to solve a Rubik’s cube; the interesting part is that it remembers where he stopped and what he stumbled on, and builds the next lesson on both.
  10. web-design-guidelines — Vercel’s web standards as an agent checklist: icon-only buttons need an aria-label, form controls need labels and autocomplete, plus typography and animation rules. The demo has the agent review a checkout page and report that the icon button has no accessible name.

Where the list is really coming from

  • Vercel shows up four times (find-skills, agent-browser, React best practices, web design guidelines) and Matt Pocock four times (grill-me, setup, grilling, teach). Two authors account for eight of the ten slots.
  • The grill-me / grilling split is the pattern to notice: one skill is the entry point (“grill me before I build”), the other is the reusable engine underneath it.
  • Install counts measure the install path as much as the content — Vercel’s CLI is the thing people install skills through, so its own skills are the easiest to install.
  • Skills are readable. The hosts keep pointing out that you can open the file and read plain English instructions, which is what makes them inspectable rather than magic.

Where two skills disagree

  • frontend-design and web-design-guidelines can pull in opposite directions: one optimizes for a distinctive, animated interface, the other for accessibility compliance.
  • Robbie’s example is a healthcare clinic — the animation that reads as tasteful on a portfolio site fails an accessibility review, and the two installed skills will argue about it through your agent.
  • The practical upshot: skills stack, and stacking them means owning the conflicts rather than assuming they compose.

The takeaway

Ranked by installs, the top of the list is not about making the model smarter. It is infrastructure around the model: discovering other skills, interrogating a plan before it is built, keeping the codebase’s rules in front of the agent, and controlling a browser or a workspace. The two that lean hardest on taste — frontend-design and web-design-guidelines — are also the two most likely to contradict each other, which is a fair description of where agent tooling is right now.