Claude Code Skills: The Complete Official List

Anthropic publishes nineteen Agent Skills. That is the whole official set, and it is smaller than most lists you will find, because most lists pad the number with community repositories and count them as if they shipped with the product. This is the official nineteen, grouped, with the word count of each instruction file and a link to the raw file so you can read one before you install it.

The community collections are real and some of them are good. They are further down, kept separate, because the install route is different and so is who supports them when something breaks.

The 19 official skills

The size column is the length of the instruction file itself. It is a rough proxy for how much the skill actually knows: claude-api at 14,071 words is a reference document, internal-comms at 211 is a short set of formats. Neither number is a quality score, but a 200 word skill and a 14,000 word skill are not the same kind of thing.

What an Agent Skill actually is

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md inside it. The file opens with a few lines of YAML and then becomes ordinary Markdown. Claude reads the description to decide when the skill applies, then follows the body.

---
name: pdf
description: Use this skill whenever the user wants to do anything with PDF
  files. This includes reading or extracting text/tables from PDFs, combining
  or merging multiple PDFs into one, splitting PDFs apart...
---

# PDF processing
...

That is the entire format. Anthropic publishes the specification at spec/agent-skills-spec.md in the same repository.

Two consequences are worth drawing out. There is no code to run, so you can read exactly what a skill will do before you give it to an agent, which is not true of most tooling. And because the description is what triggers it, a badly written description is the usual reason a skill you installed never fires.

How to install them

The official skills install as plugins from a marketplace, not by copying files around. In Claude Code, add the marketplace once:

/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills

Then install the bundle you want:

/plugin install document-skills@anthropic-agent-skills
/plugin install example-skills@anthropic-agent-skills

Those two cover sixteen of the nineteen. The remaining three ship as their own single-skill plugins:

/plugin install claude-api@anthropic-agent-skills
/plugin install academy-guide@anthropic-agent-skills
/plugin install discernment-nudge@anthropic-agent-skills

After installing, you use a skill by mentioning the job rather than the name. “Use the PDF skill to extract the form fields from this file” works, and so does asking for the outcome and letting the description do the matching.

Outside Claude Code

The same skills are not exclusive to the terminal. Anthropic states that these example skills are already available on paid Claude.ai plans, and that you can use the prebuilt skills or upload your own through the Claude API. So a skill you read here is portable: the file format is the same in all three places.

Which to install first

Installing all nineteen on day one is the fastest way to learn nothing about any of them. A working order that front-loads the ones that pay off immediately:

1. document-skills, if you touch spreadsheets, decks, Word files or PDFs at all. This is the bundle that most obviously replaces manual work, and pdf and xlsx are the two most people use first.
2. skill-creator, early rather than late. Once you have used two or three skills you will want one that does your job, and this is the skill that writes skills.
3. claude-api, if you build anything on the API. At 14,071 words it is the largest in the set and it exists so the model stops guessing at model ids, pricing and parameters from memory.
4. The design group, when you have a real artifact to make. These are the hardest to evaluate from a description and the easiest to judge from one output.

A caution that applies to all of them: a skill changes how the model behaves on every request where its description matches. Install a few, notice what changed, then add more. Nineteen at once and you cannot tell which one did what.

The community collections

Three repositories account for most of what people mean when they say there are hundreds of Claude Code skills. These are not published by Anthropic and are not supported by Anthropic, which does not make them bad, only different in who answers when something goes wrong.

For a repository that is not a marketplace, the install is a clone into your skills directory:

cd ~/.claude/skills
git clone https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills.git

Or take a single file, which is the version to use if you care what you are running:

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/pricing
curl -o ~/.claude/skills/pricing/SKILL.md \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills/main/skills/pricing/SKILL.md

If you want the set for one job

The official nineteen are general purpose, and the community collections are large enough that finding the handful relevant to your work is its own task. We have already done that filtering for four roles, each with the skills that map to jobs those people actually do weekly and a download link for every one:

• Amazon seller skills, for pricing, listings, ads and competitor tracking
• Ecommerce skills, for storefront, conversion and merchandising work
• Affiliate marketing skills, for partner programmes and attribution
• Influencer marketing skills, for creator sourcing, outreach and campaign measurement

If what you want is the agent rather than the instructions, our guide to influencer marketing AI agents covers what is worth automating and what is not.

What these are not

Three things get promised on your behalf when people write about skills, and none of them are true.

A skill is not an integration. It carries instructions, not credentials or network access. If a job needs to reach your ad account or your database, that is an MCP server, and mcp-builder exists because the two are different layers. The packaging that can carry both, plus slash commands, hooks and subagents, is a plugin: our guide to Claude Code plugins covers the official directory of 315 and how it differs from this list.

A skill is not a guarantee. It raises the floor on a task by giving the model a method instead of improvising one. It does not make the output correct, and on anything consequential you still check the work.

More skills is not better. Each one competes for the model’s attention, and a vague description fires when you did not want it. The useful collection is small and matched to what you actually do.

Frequently asked questions

The official set is small enough to read in an afternoon, and that is the point of the format. Pick the three that match what you did last week, read the files, and install those. The rest will still be there.