SkillsMP is the largest community marketplace for Claude Code skills, hosting over 66,000 skills as of January 2026 (SmartScope, January 2026). It's an Anthropic-partnered platform where developers upload, share, and install SKILL.md files. Think of it as npm for Claude Code skills, but with dramatically more variance in quality between the top and the bottom of the catalog. At AEM, we've tested hundreds of SkillsMP listings across client deployments, which gives us a specific view of where the quality floor actually sits.

TL;DR: SkillsMP is where most Claude Code skills are shared. The volume is high, the quality is inconsistent, and the search is most effective when you filter by download count (500+) and preview the SKILL.md description field before installing. The platform supports browsing, previewing, and one-click download. Publishing your own skill is free and takes under 10 minutes.

How Does SkillsMP Work?

SkillsMP is a web-based directory where each listing is a Claude Code skill packaged as a folder containing a SKILL.md file and any supporting reference files. Visitors browse by category, search by keyword, or filter by download count and update date.

The underlying SKILL.md format became an open standard in December 2025, and OpenAI subsequently adopted the same format for Codex CLI (VentureBeat, December 2025), which explains why the marketplace is growing so fast across platform boundaries.

Each skill listing shows:

  • The skill name and description
  • A preview of the SKILL.md file (the full text, not a summary)
  • Download count and last-updated date
  • Tags assigned by the creator
  • A rating from other users

The download is a zip file containing the skill folder. Unzip it, copy the folder into .claude/skills/ in your project, and the skill is installed. The platform reached 115,000 active Claude Code developers by July 2025 (ppc.land, 2025), which explains the catalog growth rate: thousands of new listings appear each month. The most-installed skill across the ecosystem was "find-skills" by Vercel Labs at 418,600 installs as of March 2026 (skills.sh leaderboard), a signal of how quickly community curation scales when install counts are visible.

"The single biggest predictor of whether an agent works reliably is whether the instructions are written as a closed spec, not an open suggestion." — Boris Cherny, TypeScript compiler team, Anthropic (2024)

The same applies to skills on SkillsMP. A skill listing with a precise description field is the closed spec. A listing with a vague one-sentence description is an open suggestion. Before downloading anything, read the description line in the SKILL.md preview.

How Do I Find the Right Skill on SkillsMP?

Search by the task you need automated, not by the technology involved. Then apply two filters: downloads over 500 and updated within the last 12 months. After filtering, open the SKILL.md preview for each candidate and check the description field before committing to a download. Those three steps cut the noise by roughly 90%.

Instead of searching "Python" or "code review," search "code review checklist" or "PR description generator." The skill names and descriptions that surface first are the ones that match your workflow vocabulary, not the underlying tool.

After running a search, apply two filters:

  • Downloads over 500: this threshold removes abandoned experiments and one-off personal skills that were accidentally made public. High download count doesn't equal quality, but it does mean real people have installed the skill and some of them would have left comments if it was completely broken.
  • Updated within 12 months: Claude Code's behavior changes between versions. A skill built 2 years ago references conventions that no longer apply. Skills updated within the last year are more likely to work with your current Claude Code version.

After filtering, open the SKILL.md preview for each candidate. Check the description field in the frontmatter. It should be a single line, under 1,024 characters, and written as an imperative statement that tells Claude when to use the skill. A multi-line description or an empty one means the skill requires a manual slash command to invoke, not auto-trigger. Community testing across 200+ prompts shows that a well-formed description improves auto-trigger activation from 20% to 50% (mellanon, GitHub Gist, January 2026). That gap is the difference between a skill you use and a skill you forget.

Security is also worth checking: an arXiv analysis of 31,132 skills found that 26.1% contained at least one vulnerability, with data exfiltration and privilege escalation patterns the most common (arXiv 2601.10338, January 2026). Skills bundling executable scripts were 2.12x more likely to contain a vulnerability than instruction-only skills. Check the preview before installing anything you didn't write.

For a complete walk-through of what to check before installing, see Where can I find community-built Claude Code skills to install?.

How Do I Install a Skill from SkillsMP?

Installing a skill from SkillsMP takes four steps: download the zip from the listing page, extract it, copy the skill folder into .claude/skills/ in your project directory, then verify by running /skills in a new Claude Code session. The whole process takes under two minutes on a standard connection.

  1. Download the zip. Click the download button on the listing page. SkillsMP packages the skill folder as a zip archive.
  2. Unzip. Extract the archive. You'll get a folder named after the skill.
  3. Place the folder. Copy the entire skill folder into .claude/skills/ in your project directory (project-level) or ~/.claude/skills/ (user-level, available in all projects).
  4. Verify. Start a new Claude Code session and run /skills. The skill name should appear in the list. If it doesn't, check that the folder sits directly inside .claude/skills/{skill-name}/SKILL.md, not one level deeper.

Test by describing the task naturally in a fresh session without using the slash command. If the skill auto-triggers, the description field is properly formed. If it doesn't, you need to invoke it manually with /skill-name.

How Do I Publish My Own Skill on SkillsMP?

Create a free account on SkillsMP, click "Submit a skill," fill in the submission form, upload your zip file, and the skill goes live immediately with no review queue. The entire process takes under 10 minutes from a finished SKILL.md to a public listing that other developers can browse and install.

The submission form asks for:

  • Skill name (must match the folder name in your zip)
  • Category (choose from a fixed list)
  • Short description (shown in search results, separate from the SKILL.md description field)
  • The zip file containing your skill folder

SkillsMP does not review submissions before publishing. Your skill goes live immediately after upload. The community quality check is post-hoc: download counts, ratings, and comments surface quality over time. This is fast for the creator, but it explains why the quality distribution is wide. The ecosystem grew from roughly 50 skills in mid-2025 to over 85,000 indexed across platforms by March 2026 (openaitoolshub.org, March 2026), and most of that growth happened without any pre-publication filter.

We've reviewed hundreds of SkillsMP submissions for client projects and the variance is real. The top 5% are as precisely engineered as anything built at AEM: clear output contracts, working description fields, reference files for domain knowledge, and evals.json for test coverage. The bottom 50% are single-file prompts with generic descriptions that auto-trigger on the wrong inputs or not at all. This matches broader community data: an independent audit of 214 skills found 73% were silently broken, meaning they installed without errors but failed to trigger correctly in practice (dev.to/thestack_ai, 2026).

In our client work, the single clearest predictor of auto-trigger reliability is description field length. Skills with descriptions under 80 characters that use imperative framing ("Generate a PR description from staged changes") had reliable auto-trigger behavior in 9 of 10 deployments we tracked. Skills with descriptions over 200 characters or written as passive summaries failed to auto-trigger in more than half of test sessions. The 1,024-character limit in the SKILL.md spec is a ceiling, not a target.

For a sharper look at what separates those two categories, see What makes a community skill production ready?.

What's the Difference Between SkillsMP and Other Distribution Options?

SkillsMP, GitHub, and SkillHub serve different purposes: SkillsMP is optimized for volume and first discovery, GitHub is better for depth and version-controlled maintenance, and SkillHub applies a pre-publication quality bar that SkillsMP doesn't. Most production teams use SkillsMP and GitHub in parallel rather than choosing one.

  • SkillsMP: optimized for volume and first discovery. The quality floor is low without pre-publication review, but the download count and date filters cut the noise significantly.
  • GitHub: better for depth and version-controlled maintenance. Commit history, issue trackers, and contributor discussions make maintenance activity visible and the skill easier to trust.
  • SkillHub: applies a pre-publication quality bar that SkillsMP does not. Fewer skills, tighter standard. The right choice when you need a production-grade skill and don't want to run quality checks yourself.

For most community sharing, SkillsMP and GitHub work in parallel: publish on SkillsMP for discovery, maintain the canonical version on GitHub for installability via git submodule.

FAQ

SkillsMP is free to browse, install, and publish on, with paid listings available for creators who want to charge for their work. The platform does not review submissions before they go live, so quality control falls to the community through download counts, ratings, and reports. Most commercial transactions happen outside the platform entirely.

Is SkillsMP free to use?

Yes. Browsing, downloading, and publishing skills on SkillsMP is free. The platform is supported by the Anthropic partnership and does not charge creators per listing or users per download.

Does Anthropic review skills before they appear on SkillsMP?

No. SkillsMP does not review submissions before they go live. Anthropic's partnership is at the platform level, not the content review level. Quality control is community-driven: download counts, ratings, and comments surface quality over time.

Can I install a SkillsMP skill via git submodule instead of downloading the zip?

Only if the creator also maintains the skill on GitHub and links to the repo from their SkillsMP listing. Many creators do both. If the GitHub repo is listed, install via submodule for easier updates. If not, download the zip.

How do I report a broken or misleading skill on SkillsMP?

Each listing has a "Report" button. Use it to flag skills with broken SKILL.md files, misleading descriptions, or content that violates the platform terms. SkillsMP's moderation team reviews reports and removes listings that fail quality minimums.

Can I sell skills on SkillsMP?

Yes. SkillsMP supports paid skill listings. Creators set their own prices. The market for paid community skills is small as of 2025, with most transactions happening through direct commissions rather than marketplace purchases.

What's the difference between the SkillsMP description and the SKILL.md description field?

Two different things. The SkillsMP listing description is the marketing copy shown in search results, written by the creator for human readers. The SKILL.md description field is a machine-readable single line that controls how Claude discovers and triggers the skill. They're separate fields with different purposes. Both matter: the SkillsMP description drives downloads, and the SKILL.md description field determines whether the skill works after installation.

Last updated: 2026-04-25