I indexed 75,000 Agent Skills so you can stop installing them blind

Description and use

skills‑atlas consolidates ~75k agent skills, removes duplicates and ghosts, normalizes paths, secures preview and install steps, and enables efficient update detection, allowing users to browse and install skills safely and efficiently.

Problem

Finding good agent skills is hard because they are scattered across multiple registries with inconsistent listings, missing descriptions, and potential installation failures.

Outcome

skills-atlas consolidates 75k skills, removes duplicates and ghosts, normalizes paths, secures preview and install steps, and enables efficient update detection, allowing users to browse and install skills safely and efficiently.

Workflow

• Collect skill metadata from claude-plugins.dev (~47k skills), skills.sh (top 20k), Smithery (categories), and GitHub (SKILL.md descriptions).
• Deduplicate skills using case‑insensitive owner/repo@name key and repair double‑encoded UTF‑8 text.
• Remove ghost skills by verifying each skill folder exists in the GitHub repository tree; drop 412 skills that could not be installed.
• Normalize skill paths by stripping leading /SKILL.md and handling root skills; apply to all catalog entries.
• Filter previewed SKILL.md content to remove ANSI, OSC, and control characters before displaying or installing.
• Maintain a lock file with skillFolderHash (GitHub tree SHA) to detect updates with a single API call per repository.
• Expose catalog via CLI (npx skills-atlas), web demo, MCP server, and Claude Code plugin for agent‑driven skill discovery and installation.

Evidence

The result is a snapshot of about 75,000 skills, rebuilt every other day by a GitHub Action and shipped inside the npm package, so the tool also works offline.

Source

The registries kept listing skills that their repository had renamed or deleted: one popular repository still had 17 entries that no longer existed.

Source

The fix was nearly free. To fill in missing descriptions, the crawler already fetches each repository's file tree from the GitHub API, one call per repository.

Source

Pressing p in the tree shows a skill's SKILL.md before you install it. That text comes from any GitHub repository, and terminals interpret escape sequences: a crafted file could clear your screen, rewrite what you see, or change your terminal's title.

Source