State of agent skills: 1M skills and 280M installs on skills.sh

On September 25, 2026, Amelia Charles, Andrew Qu, and Jonathan Hefner reported that Vercel's skills.sh registry reached one million agent skills and nearly 280 million installs in seven months. A skill is reusable instructions that teach an AI agent how a specific person, team, or company does a job — often plain language — so agents stop being generic and start matching local practice.

Using aggregate registry data, the report finds supply leans technical (software engineering about a quarter of listings) while demand is broader: software engineering leads installs at 18%, then agent workflows at 15%, with business operations and writing near 11% each. Installs are concentrated — the top 375 skills (0.04% of the registry) account for 62% of installs — and seven in eight installs go to cross-industry skills. The authors argue the next wave will encode company-specific judgment, with effectiveness measured by tests rather than popularity alone.

Agent skills sit next to the same Vercel and Next.js tooling you use in Chapter 1 when you ship full-stack apps.

Read original: State of agent skills — Vercel

Related in the book: Chapter 1