The Most Popular AI Coding Skills Right Now

It's really amazing. There are some GitHub projects out there that have more stars than Vue.js and the repos are not that old. What I'm talking about today is Agent Skills. Now, Agent Skills are a way that you can give more information to your coding agent and they have become wildly popular. I'm going to show you my favorite skills that I use every day and the ones that I think maybe you should avoid. So, watch all the way to the end. The first I want to give out is a shout out to the Andre Karpathy skills. It has 175,000 stars, which is crazy. It the repo isn't that old and by the way, this isn't actually created by the Andre Karpathy. It actually is just inspired by him. Essentially, it comes down to this one markdown file. Now, you can install this using agents.md or as a claw.md or as a skills file itself. Now, one thing that makes it worth installing is it has these four different steps. So, as your coding agent is going through and you're asking questions, you always want it to think before coding, make sure things are very simple, so minimum code that solves the problem, that you do surgical changes instead of making a whole bunch of different changes, and the one I like the best is this goal-driven execution. What this says is going to have a success criteria and it will loop until it's verified. So, you can have it validate your tasks that you're adding, you can fix your bugs, but basically it's going to loop and make sure it is correct. So, I would highly try to install this as either the agents.md file that gets loaded every time the coding agent works or as a skill itself. The next one I would highly recommend is Matt Pocock's skills. It has over 130,000 stars as of this recording and he has been doing a lot of videos on this. If you don't know, he's a popular YouTuber. He has used to do a lot of TypeScript videos, and now he is doing all videos on AI. And you can install it using this NPX skills. And there's a whole bunch of different skills that are installed. Pretty much the most popular one that he's been known for recently is the {slash} grill me and {slash} grill me with docs. {slash} grill me with docs is like an upgraded of {slash} grill me. So, it works when you start asking tasks to your coding agent, it'll start grilling you or asking you clarifying questions about the task you want it to do. And then grill me with docs also has some nice new things where it's going to look at the domain and the file structure and the docs that are already in there. So, it asks better qualifying questions. There's also other skills that I would recommend. He has a ton of different ones, so you may want to try out the test-driven development one. He also has this idea of of two issues, so you can break any plan spec or PRD into an independently grabbable GitHub issues. He actually famously doesn't really like spec-driven development, but he has tools to help you if you're using that flow. The one I think is also really popular is the {slash} caveman. Because the token economics we're seeing nowadays with coding agents becoming more expensive and tokens becoming more expensive, you can use this caveman skill that that actually ultra compresses your communication mode and reduces the token usage. Now, when I've tried it, I've noticed a little bit or slight token decrease in usage. I haven't seen it be a huge. However, I would imagine if you use this over a long period of time, it is going to save you tokens. So, I would try this caveman out if that's important to you. And then just try out some of the other skills and see what you like. Another one that's really popular is this one called G stack. It has over 110,000 stars and it's by Garry Tan. If you don't know Garry Tan, he is of Y Combinator fame. He is the president and CEO of Y Combinator and this is the agents that he has been using. So, you can kind of take a look here. He has the office hour skill. It asks you kind of qualifying questions or clarifying questions almost like Matt Pocock skills. And then he has all these skills as if you're different specialists. I really think this is the future where we're going to use spec driven development for these big features, but when we get down to the implementation part, we're going to use different agents that act as different types of people. So, in this case he has all sorts of different ones from debuggers to testers to QA leads to performance engineers. Your mileage may vary. This is also going to use a bunch of a bunch of tokens, but it's worth trying out. And by the way, I'll make sure I put a link to all these in the description below. The next one I want to highlight is the agent toolkit for AWS. This is brand new. We just released this recently. Caveat, I am a senior developer advocate at AWS, so just want to get that out of the way. Even if you don't use AWS, I would install this so that way you have it available for later if you want to use AWS services in the future. It supports all the different coding agents out there including Claude Code Cursor and of course my favorite Kiro. Kiro is an agentic coding agent for the CLI, web and IDE. So, this has a ton of different skills that you can use to work with AWS services. It's going to detect when you ask it different questions to build different stuff and on AWS. It also includes an MCP server. Basically, everything you need to build an AWS in one place. Definitely recommend to install it. Link will be in the description. The next two I want to talk about are these almost like spec-driven development wrappers that give you some more things. The first one is called Superpowers. It has 228,000 stars on GitHub. It works with a bunch of different coding agents. You can can get it working with Kiro as well if you like. I tried this out. It really felt like spec-driven development. It even has this built-in web server that you can refer to as it's creating your app to see what's going to look like, which is really neat. And it's really walk walks you through. I was using the brainstorming one. It really walks you through like getting your idea, asking you clarifying questions, showing you the interface, building the spec file spec files and maybe the implementation, the design, the requirements, and then actually implementing it. So, it it's it's a very fully featured. If you want to use it in Kiro, by the way, you can do that. I would use the Opera Superpowers Opera. It's NPX Skill-X. Uh you can install it with Kiro as well using this. There's the other one that uh I've seen a lot of interest in. It's also kind of a wrapper around the spec-driven development is this GSD Core, which is Get Ship Done. And it's another really heavy framework. You can use it to build your app from scratch or build a feature. It's very integrated into the spec-driven development, so it's going to help you create requirements and your specifications, uh design, and then implementation details. It's also very popular. And there's also different forks of this as well. If you don't like this GSD Core that you might want to check out. I mentioned this in a previous video, and this is an honorary mention here. If you're using Vue, this Vue.js AI Skills is the community version of this. It's not the official one, but I think in the future it's going to become the official Vue.js Skills. It's experimental. But this is everything you need to use when you're using View. Uh it has a lot of great information in it. And then of course skills.sh, use this website to find more skills, try to experiment with them. Be careful though that some people put some malicious things inside skills. Always read them through before you install them just in case. And by the way, if you use this, there is a a bug I found in only the Cura IDE. The Cura CLI works fine, but if you're using Cura IDE, don't do symbolic links right now if you're installing skills. They just don't work. We have that open right now. So, I hope you guys learned a little bit about skills and the ones that I recommend. What ones are you using? Leave a comment below, and then make sure you share this with a friend and subscribe. I really appreciate it. Thanks.