Intel / article

State of agent skills

Source: vercel.com
Author: Amelia Charles
Date: Published Sep 25, 2026

From the Daily Brief

Vercel's State of agent skills report puts its skills.sh registry at one million published skills and roughly 280 million installs, seven months after Anthropic introduced the Agent Skills format. Vercel compares that pace favorably with how long GitHub, npm and the App Store took to reach their first million entries, though those comparisons come from the company that runs the registry. The numbers show packaged agent instructions becoming a distribution channel in their own right, with install counts large enough that supply chain questions familiar from npm now apply. A registry this size will carry duplicates, abandoned entries and skills that grant broad tool access. Teams adopting third-party skills should pin versions, read the instructions before installing them, and treat a skill as code that runs with the agent's permissions.

Read the 2026-09-26 Brief →

Context

Vercel's report on its skills.sh registry says the catalog reached one million skills in seven months, but installs are highly concentrated: 375 skills, 0.04% of the registry, account for 62% of installs, and nearly half of all skills were installed exactly once. A is a file of reusable instructions that tells an AI agent how to do a particular job, so the million figure counts available instruction packages, not how many are used. Report and methodology.

The measurement limit matters: the report says install figures are aggregate registry counters that do not represent unique people or necessarily independent choices. These figures establish concentration in recorded installs. They do not establish how often a skill is used successfully or how much it improves an agent's work, and the report itself says effectiveness measures are still to come.

Key takeaways · AI-distilled

Supply and demand diverge on skills.sh: more than half of listings teach technical work, software engineering alone about a quarter, yet no category draws more than a fifth of installs. Software engineering leads at 18%, then agent workflows at 15%.
Per listing, business operations skills draw 74% more installs than average, writing and documents 50% and cloud and infrastructure 42%. Software engineering skills draw about 30% fewer, education and productivity 39% fewer and research 55% fewer.
Installs are highly concentrated: nearly half of all skills were installed exactly once, 375 skills (0.04% of the registry) account for 62% of installs and the top 1.2% for 94%, yet no single skill reaches 1% of installs.
Cross-industry skills, such as spreadsheet cleanup or website deployment, make up 66% of classified skills but 87.5% of installs, averaging 3.6 times the installs per listing of industry-specific skills.
Vercel cautions that install figures are aggregate registry counters, not unique people or independent choices, and that category results come from a classified sample. It expects skills to be judged by tests and benchmarks of effectiveness rather than installs.

Terms in this piece · Glossary

AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
agent skill — A reusable instruction file that teaches an agent how to do one job well — the procedure, the tools, and what counts as done.

Read the source vercel.com