Most-Starred Claude Code Skills

Short version: on Oct 26, 2026, the most-starred general-purpose skill pack for Claude Code was Superpowers, with 305,393 GitHub stars, followed by Matt Pocock's skills and ECC. All seven here are free to install. Five of them use the MIT license. Anthropic's own repo has no single license, and the popular Karpathy-inspired file has no license file (its README says MIT), so check both before you build on them at work.

A skill is a folder of instructions, sometimes with scripts, that Claude Code loads when a task calls for it. You need Claude Code to run these. It comes with Claude Pro, at $20 a month or $17 a month billed yearly, and it isn't on Claude's free plan. Six of the seven also work in other coding agents, such as Codex or Cursor.

The list, by GitHub stars

Star counts are as of October 26, 2026, from GitHub's public API, and they change daily. The date is when we last counted. Stars show how many people bookmarked a repo, not how well it works. Licenses are what GitHub detects for each repo, checked against its README.

How we chose: we searched GitHub for skill repos made for Claude Code and kept the general-purpose packs, the ones that change how the agent works on any project. We left out single-job skills, even big ones. UI UX Pro Max, a design skill, has 140,696 stars, and Graphify, which turns a codebase into a searchable graph, has 135,793. Single-job skills like REA, a reverse-engineering tool, are on our list of new Claude Code skills, and UI UX Pro Max is on our design skills page.

What each one does

Superpowers. A full working method for coding agents. Before it writes code, it asks what you're trying to build and writes a spec for you to sign off on. Then it makes a step-by-step plan and has subagents work through it, tests first. It's in Anthropic's official plugin marketplace, and it also installs in Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI and other agents.

Matt Pocock's skills. Small engineering skills that Pocock says he uses every day. They're built to be easy to adapt and to combine, and he says they work with any model. You can install them from Anthropic's official plugin marketplace, and there are setups for Codex, GitHub Copilot and Gemini CLI too.

ECC (formerly Everything Claude Code). A large pack of skills, memory, security checks and research-first habits for Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and other agents. The repo is free and MIT-licensed, and an optional paid GitHub app covers private repos. Its README asks you to install only from its official channels, because copies elsewhere may contain malware.

andrej-karpathy-skills. It isn't by Andrej Karpathy. It's a single CLAUDE.md file from the multica-ai account, based on a post Karpathy wrote about the mistakes coding models make. It sets four rules: think before coding, keep it simple, make surgical changes, and work toward goals you can check. The README says MIT, but the repo has no license file, so GitHub shows no license. It also includes a rule for Cursor.

Anthropic's skills. Anthropic's own example skills, from art and design to testing web apps. It also includes the document skills behind Claude's Word, PDF, PowerPoint and Excel files. There's no license for the whole repo. Anthropic says many of the skills are open source under Apache 2.0, while the document skills are source-available, not open source. It also says the skills are for demonstration and education.

Ponytail. It makes your agent write less code. Before writing anything, it checks whether the job needs doing at all, then whether your codebase, the standard library or a built-in platform feature already covers it. Only then does it write the smallest version that works.

gstack. The Claude Code setup of Garry Tan, Y Combinator's president and CEO. Its slash commands act as a CEO, an engineering manager, a designer, a code reviewer, a QA lead, a security officer and a release engineer. It needs Git and Bun to install.

Before you install one

• Install from the official repo. ECC warns that unofficial copies and mirrors may contain malware.
• Check the license if it's for work. Five are MIT. Anthropic's repo mixes Apache 2.0 with source-available files, and the Karpathy-inspired file has no license file.
• Read what it will run. A skill is a set of instructions your agent follows, and some include scripts. Skim the SKILL.md files first.
• Expect to use more of your plan. Skills run on your own Claude plan, and Claude Code shares your plan's usage limits with your chats.

Need the agent first? See our shortlist of terminal coding agents.