Find Skills

What it does

The skills ecosystem is growing fast, but figuring out which skill to install — and where to find it — is the biggest onboarding hurdle. With Find Skills installed, users describe what they want to accomplish and the agent searches skills.sh plus the broader catalog, presenting vetted recommendations with one-line install commands.

How find-skills relates to vercel-labs/skills

find-skills is a single SKILL.md. The vercel-labs/skills repository it lives in is bigger and bundles two things together:

1. The npx skills CLI — the command-line tool that searches, installs, and updates skills. It supports 54+ agents (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, Cline, Gemini CLI, and more) as install targets.
2. A bundle of SKILL.md files — find-skills is one of them; others include frontend-design, skill-creator, and so on.

find-skills itself doesn’t search or install anything directly. It’s a meta-skill: user intent → find-skills (recommendation flow) → npx skills CLI (actual search and install) → the agent’s skills directory (where the chosen skill lands).

Activation triggers

The skill auto-activates when users:

• Ask procedural questions — “how do I…”
• Explicitly seek skills for specific tasks
• Inquire about specialized capabilities
• Want to extend functionality in particular domains
• Search for tools, templates, or workflows

How it works

1. Identify the domain and the specific task the user needs
2. Check the skills.sh leaderboard for established solutions
3. Run npx skills find [query] if the leaderboard doesn’t cover it
4. Verify quality by checking install counts (prefer 1K+), source reputation, and GitHub stars
5. Present options with installation commands and links
6. Install via npx skills add <owner/repo@skill> once the user consents

Reference: npx skills CLI commands

These belong to the underlying CLI that find-skills calls into; you can run them directly from your shell with the same effect.

Command	Purpose
npx skills find [query]	Interactive or keyword-based search
npx skills add <package>	Install a skill
npx skills check	Check for updates
npx skills update	Update installed skills

Notes

• find-skills’s role is recommendation, not execution — the actual search and install work runs through the npx skills CLI, and the work itself is done by whatever skill gets installed.
• Activation reach ≠ install reach — the find-skills SKILL.md activates wherever SKILL.md auto-activation is supported, while the npx skills CLI underneath it covers a broader set of 54+ agents as install targets.
• Pairs with skills.sh, the public skills directory, for users who want to browse manually.
• Public-index bias — recommendations come from popularity signals (install counts ≥1K and similar), so internal or private skill catalogs aren’t surfaced.
• Install counts come from skills.sh — the install number on the card is collected by the npx skills CLI on opt-in, then anonymized and hourly-deduplicated by skills.sh (full methodology at skills.sh /about).