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:
- The
npx skillsCLI — 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. - A bundle of SKILL.md files —
find-skillsis one of them; others includefrontend-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
- Identify the domain and the specific task the user needs
- Check the skills.sh leaderboard for established solutions
- Run
npx skills find [query]if the leaderboard doesn’t cover it - Verify quality by checking install counts (prefer 1K+), source reputation, and GitHub stars
- Present options with installation commands and links
- 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 skillsCLI, 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 skillsCLI 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 skillsCLI on opt-in, then anonymized and hourly-deduplicated by skills.sh (full methodology at skills.sh /about).