The Skills Worth Installing Before Ours

A skill is a folder with a Markdown file in it. The file tells Claude what job the skill does, when to use it, what it needs, and what the output has to look like. Claude loads it when the request matches. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why skills have become the unit in which working methods get shared: a good one is a procedure written down by somebody who has done the job many times, in a form the model can follow and you can read.

We sell skills. Before you buy any of ours, install the two public libraries below. They are free, they are well made, and they cover ground we deliberately stay off. This post says what each one is for, what the licences allow, and where the gap is that our Field Kits fill.

Superpowers

Superpowers is a software development methodology for coding agents, packaged as skills. It is opinionated, and the opinions are good ones: brainstorm before you build, write the plan down, test before you write the code that passes the test, debug systematically instead of guessing, verify before you claim you are done, and review your own work the way a colleague would.

The skills are named for those habits: brainstorming, writing-plans, executing-plans, test-driven-development, systematic-debugging, verification-before-completion, requesting-code-review, receiving-code-review, using-git-worktrees, dispatching-parallel-agents, subagent-driven-development, and a pair of meta-skills, writing-skills and using-superpowers, that teach the agent to write more of them and to actually use the ones it has.

Two of these matter to people who never write code. brainstorming refuses to let the model start building before it has asked what you actually want, which is the right first move for a campaign, a report or a decision memo as much as for a feature. verification-before-completion makes the model check its own output against what was asked before it says “done”, and that habit is worth more than any prompt trick.

Licence: MIT. You can install it, modify it, and use it commercially. If you redistribute it, the licence and copyright notice travel with it. The README gives a one-line install as a Claude Code plugin.

Anthropic’s skills repository

anthropics/skills is the reference library from the company that built the format. It contains the Agent Skills specification, a template for writing a skill, and around twenty worked skills across four groups: creative and design, development, enterprise communication, and documents.

The ones worth a marketing or leadership team’s attention:

• skill-creator writes skills. If you want your own procedures in this format, start here; it is what the format’s authors use.
• brand-guidelines and internal-comms are examples of how a company’s own standards become something the model follows every time rather than something a person has to remember to paste in.
• docx, pptx, xlsx and pdf are the skills behind Claude’s own document creation. They are published so you can see how a production skill is built.
• mcp-builder, frontend-design and webapp-testing are for the people on your team who build things.

Licence: most of the repository is Apache 2.0, which permits use, modification and redistribution with attribution. The four document skills are the exception: they are source-available, not open source, published as a reference and not for redistribution. Read them, learn from them, do not repackage them.

Where the gap is

Between them, these two libraries cover how to build software carefully and how to produce documents well. Neither of them knows what a decision memo is for, how a paid social account should be structured so that it keeps learning, what a retail media proposal is hiding, which questions to ask an AI vendor before the pilot, or what a board update has to contain in a bad month.

That is the gap our Field Kits fill. Each kit is five or six skills that run one discipline’s repeating jobs, built from the field manual it pairs with, to one standard: every skill says when to use it, what it needs, what it refuses, and what comes back; no skill invents a number; every unverified figure is stated as a limitation. The Executive Desk runs the leadership rhythm. The Reporting Engine turns exports into numbers a client can be shown. The Search Shift Kit earns the citation where the click used to be. The Vendor Desk runs the buying decision as a test. The full shelf is on the library page.

They are written to sit next to the public libraries, not instead of them. Install Superpowers and let brainstorming open the conversation; then ask for the decision memo and the Executive Desk takes over. Use skill-creator or our own Agent Foundry to write the skills that are specific to your company; keep the ones that are specific to your discipline from us.

Four rules for installing anything

1. Read the SKILL.md before you enable it. A skill is instructions to a model that will act on your behalf. Thirty seconds of reading tells you what it will do and what it can touch. If a skill’s file is longer than you are willing to read, that is information.
2. Prefer skills that say what they refuse. A skill that only says what it does will do it in every situation, including the wrong ones. The best public skills, and all of ours, list refusals.
3. Keep the number small. Claude picks a skill by matching your request against every description it has loaded. Fifty skills with vague descriptions match each other. Ten with precise triggers match the job.
4. Keep a list. What is installed, from where, under what licence, and who on the team owns it. When a skill changes behaviour after an update, that list is how you find out which one.

What we will not do

We will not bundle the public libraries into our kits. It would inflate the skill count on the product page at no cost to us and no benefit to you, since you can install them for free in a minute. It would also break the standard we hold our own skills to. Every skill you buy from us was written by us, for the job it names, and is checked against the manual it comes from. The public libraries are the floor; we sell what goes on it.