Key Takeaways
- Claude Code skill adoption is a winner-take-all market (Gini 0.96).
- Top 1% hold 77.4% of installs; median skill gets 56.
- Publish niche, bundle skills, or target the fast-growing interrogation category (grill-me: 787K installs).
What Changed — The Agent Economy Census, August 2026
On 2026-08-09, Skillselion dumped its entire production catalog: 79,827 public listings covering agent skills, MCP servers, plugins, and marketplaces — 157,833,061 cumulative installs. They then ran the Gini coefficient (the economic inequality metric) across the 58,751 listings that are agent skills.
The result: 0.96. That's not a typo. South Africa's income Gini is 0.63. Brazil's is 0.52. A 0.96 is closer to a raffle than a market.
For Claude Code users, this isn't abstract. The skills you install — or publish — live in this distribution.
What It Means For You — The Numbers That Matter
Here's what 0.96 looks like from the inside:
- Half of all 158M installs go to just 198 skills — that's 0.34% of the catalog.
- The median skill has 56 installs. Not 5,600. Fifty-six.
- 59.3% have fewer than 100 installs. 9.9% have zero.
- The top 1% hold 77.4% of every install.
What does this mean for your daily Claude Code workflow? When you install a skill, you're almost certainly pulling from that top 1%. When you publish one, you're entering a lottery where the median outcome is effectively zero.
But there's a second, more actionable layer: the fastest-growing category in the entire census is interrogation skills — tools that argue with you and grill your code. The cluster of 88 skills reached 2,425,925 installs and is growing at +160%, the #1 rising search in the platform.
Top interrogation skills:
- grill-me: 787,155 installs (mattpocock/skills)
- grill-with-docs: 669,499 installs
- triage: 534,688 installs
- grilling: 380,693 installs
Matt Pocock — an independent TypeScript educator — sits at #3 overall, above Vercel Labs, Anthropic, Google, and AWS combined. He's also the author of the top interrogation skills.
Try It Now — How to Compete in a 0.96 Market
1. Install an interrogation skill today.
If you're not using grill-me or a similar skill, you're missing the fastest-growing workflow in the ecosystem. It's the #1 rising search for a reason: developers want their Claude Code agent to challenge assumptions, not just execute.
# From mattpocock/skills repo
claude --add-skill grill-me
2. If you publish skills, bundle them.
ByteDance's Lark/Feishu suite holds 15.4% of all installs — but they're installed as bundles. One user action installs several skills at once, and each gets counted separately. This is the single biggest lever in the census for boosting install counts.
3. Target a niche, not a generalist audience.
The median skill has 56 installs. Skills that automate work reporting — standups, meeting notes, status reports — collectively hit 1,889,988 installs across 111 skills. Meeting summary, inbox triage, and resume tailoring are proven categories.
4. Don't read your numbers as a verdict.
These are cumulative all-time totals. Anything published this week starts from zero against a field that's been accumulating for months. The median skill has 56 installs, so if you're below that, you're not failing — you're average.
5. Consider charging.
Of 79,827 listings, only 55 carry a price (0.07%). If you build something genuinely useful, you'd be one of 55. The market hasn't built a paid tier yet — that's an opportunity, not a barrier.
The Bottom Line
The agent skill economy is brutally unequal. But the census also shows that a single independent developer with TypeScript education skills can outrank Google and OpenAI. The market rewards what developers actually install, not what companies fund.
If you want to win: build interrogation tools, bundle your skills, target the work-reporting niche, and don't expect overnight adoption. The median is 56 installs — beat that and you're in the top 40%.
Full methodology and raw CSV available at Skillselion's Agent Economy Census.
Source: dev.to
[Updated 12 Aug via devto_claudecode]
Design skills are now surging alongside interrogation tools. On 2026-08-12, Skillselion reported that four of the seven fastest-rising Claude Code skill searches are design-focused (Ui Ux Pro Max, Frontend Design, Impeccable, Design Taste Frontend), collectively holding 1,659,726 installs and growing +20% to +70%. Anthropic's own Frontend Design leads with 767,871 installs, explicitly aimed at avoiding "templated defaults." Independent leonxlnx's Design Taste Frontend (350,625) and its sibling high-end-visual-design (265,273) show a family of taste skills gaining traction. [per Skillselion]
[Updated 13 Aug via devto_claudecode]
The taste-skill trend extends beyond the top four: leonxlnx's family includes high-end-visual-design (265,273 installs) and stitch-design-taste (223,682), both fetched from the live catalog on 2026-08-12. Meanwhile, non-design risers signal a restraint theme: Grill Me now at 832,797 installs, Caveman (429,065) targeting a 75% token cut, and Ponytail (33,353) enforcing minimal changes. [per Skillselion]
