The 4 Skills That Actually Survived My Weekend

🤔 Curiosity: Why do 90% of skills die after install?

Every day, hundreds of new AI‑agent skills land on GitHub. There are 100k+ open‑source skills now. I’ve installed the shiny ones too—only to realize most never get used again.

So I spent a weekend auditing my own workflow. Which skills do I actually open every day? I found four.

These aren’t just “nice‑to‑have” tools. They change the process of how agents work, how text reads, and how UI gets designed.

---

📚 Retrieve: The four that survived

1) Superpowers — agents stop coding before they plan

Repo: https://github.com/obra/superpowers

Why it survives:

• Forces the agent to ask what we’re building before writing code
• Enforces a 7‑step workflow (brainstorm → plan → TDD → review → worktrees)
• Splits work into 2–5 minute chunks with sub‑agents + double review

My takeaway: This is the rare skill that makes long‑running agent work stable. Claude Code stops drifting because the process is embedded.

---

2) Humanizer — 24 AI‑writing tells, detected and fixed

Repo: https://github.com/blader/humanizer

Built from Wikipedia’s “Signs of AI writing,” it flags:

• AI‑vocabulary (“testament”, “landscape”, “showcasing”)
• Em‑dash overload, emoji spam, rule‑of‑three clichés
• Inflated claims, vague attributions, overly polished conclusions

My takeaway: It turns “statistically common” phrasing into human‑sounding prose. But if you write in Korean, you’ll still need local tuning.

---

3) UI/UX Pro Max — design intelligence, not templates

Repo: https://github.com/nextlevelbuilder/ui-ux-pro-max-skill

Why it survives:

• 67 UI styles, 96 palettes, 57 font pairings
• Industry‑specific reasoning rules (100+ categories)
• Produces anti‑pattern lists (e.g., “avoid AI purple/pink gradients”)

My takeaway: The anti‑pattern detection is what makes AI UI feel real instead of “template‑y.”

---

4) Vercel Skills CLI — managing the explosion

Repo: https://github.com/vercel-labs/skills

Why it survives:

• npx skills find for discovery
• npx skills add for instant install
• npx skills update for fleet‑wide upkeep

When you’re managing dozens of skills, this becomes the workflow.

Discover more at https://skills.sh/

---

💡 Innovation: A survival rule for skills

A skill survives if it changes the system, not just the output.

graph TB
  A[New Skill] --> B{Does it change process?}
  B -->|Yes| C[Adopt Daily]
  B -->|No| D[Install → Forget]

Quick “survival test” (I now run this on every new skill)

Test	If it fails	Why it dies
Changes my workflow	Only adds output	Feels optional
Saves daily time	Saved minutes < friction	Never re‑opened
Scales with more tasks	Only works on one niche case	Not worth upkeep
Plays well with other skills	Conflicts or overlaps	Gets removed

---

🧪 Installation (common)

npx skills add obra/superpowers
npx skills add blader/humanizer
npx skills add nextlevelbuilder/ui-ux-pro-max-skill
npx skills add vercel-labs/skills

---

The meta‑lesson

I saw a photo from OpenClaw’s founder Peter: four monitors, multiple terminals, agents running in parallel. That’s not flexing—it’s the new solo‑unicorn operating mode. One agent codes, one designs, another writes docs. You orchestrate.

In that world, skill curation is leverage. A weekend spent setting up the right skill stack can erase hundreds of hours of repetitive work later.

---

Key Takeaways

Insight	Implication	Next Steps
100k+ skills doesn’t matter	Only a few change your process	Ruthless curation
Workflow skills beat output skills	They shape how agents behave	Prioritize system‑level tools
Management tooling is essential	Skills scale only if they’re maintained	Use npx skills CLI

New Questions

• Can we create a unit test suite for skills to measure usefulness?
• What if skills could rank themselves by actual usage?
• How far can one person push multi‑agent workflows before needing a team?

---

References

• Superpowers: https://github.com/obra/superpowers
• Humanizer: https://github.com/blader/humanizer
• UI/UX Pro Max: https://github.com/nextlevelbuilder/ui-ux-pro-max-skill
• Vercel Skills CLI: https://github.com/vercel-labs/skills
• Skills directory: https://skills.sh/