8 Must-Install Skills for Top-Tier AI Productivity

Stop agonizing over whether to use Codex or Claude Code.

I’ve discovered that what truly determines your AI productivity ceiling isn’t the agent — it’s which Skills you have installed.

I’ve tried dozens of Skills. In this article, I’ll share the 8 core, top-tier Skills I’ve settled on after filtering through them all.

I’ve grouped them into three categories:

1. Foundational Skills — They help you encapsulate repetitive workflows into your own custom Skills and automatically search for new ones.

2. Product Development Skills — They give you a top-tier product development team for more efficient AI coding, and let you create beautiful pages even if you don’t know design.

3. Content Creation Skills — If you spend a lot of time on image generation, organizing materials, formatting, and publishing when creating content, these two Skills are perfect for you.

Whether you use Claude Code or Codex, these 8 Skills are ready to use right after installation.

1. Foundational Skills

Think of these as Skills specifically designed to extend your agent’s capabilities. They don’t handle a specific task — they help you use your agent more efficiently.

1. Skill Creator

This is an official Anthropic Skill for creating Skills.

You can use it to encapsulate your daily repetitive workflows into reusable Skills. Even if you know nothing about Skill authoring conventions, you can still build a complete Skill.

I used this Skill to create one that automatically generates PPTs. I summarized my common PPT style into a style prompt and wrapped it into a Skill. Now I just tell Claude Code to use this Skill to make a PPT on topic X, paste in the content, and it’s done.

How to use Skill Creator:

After installation, tell it what kind of Skill you want to create. It won’t start building immediately — instead, it will ask you a few questions to clarify the details. Once you answer, it will create the Skill following the proper conventions.

2. Find Skills

Helps you quickly find the Skill you need — think of it as a search engine for Skills.

Usage is simple: just give your agent a task. It will break down your request into keywords and search across the web by category, star count, and update time to find Skills that match your needs. It prioritizes verified recommendations.

For example, say “Find me an image-assignment Skill.” It will return a few options. You pick one, and it installs it for you.

2. Product Development Skills

These 4 Skills are mainly designed to make your AI coding workflow more stable.

Writing code with AI looks easy, but you’ll run into plenty of bugs in practice. These two Skills are here to solve that.

3. Superpowers

This Skill has earned over 210,000 stars on GitHub. It bundles a complete set of development-related Skills.

It standardizes your development workflow: give it a vague idea, and it will turn it into a concrete execution plan and deliver results.

Its workflow:

1. Requirement clarification — You give a rough direction; it asks a few questions to pin down the details.
2. Solution confirmation — After clarifying requirements, it shows you the design plan. Only when you approve does it move forward.
3. Implementation plan — It breaks the entire development task into small steps.
4. Coding — You can choose normal mode or sub-agent mode. Sub-agent mode runs multiple agents in parallel for faster development.

After each task, it performs a code review. Once everything is done, it does a full review and even auto-commits to your git repository.

4. gstack

Created by YC President Gary Tan. (YC is the startup accelerator behind Airbnb, Dropbox, etc.)

The core idea is to turn AI into your engineering team. It comes with 23 built-in engineering expert roles, including CEO, Product Manager, Designer, and Release Engineer.

To call on a role, use a slash command. Before writing code, you can use /office-hours to interrogate your requirements. Then use /plan -ceo-review to have both CEO and engineering perspectives review the plan. After coding, use /qa to run tests — it will use a browser to test your product like a real person.

Summary of differences: Superpowers is more about “how to do it” — suitable when you roughly know what you want. gstack is better at “should we do it” and “what to do” — helping you think through the direction before you start building.

5. Frontend Design

Another official Anthropic Skill.

Many AI-generated pages have that obvious “AI feel” — blue-purple gradients, cookie-cutter rounded cards. You can spot them instantly.

This Skill removes that AI feel: it optimizes colors, fonts, and spacing in one click, delivering professional-grade designs that follow design conventions.

6. ui-ux-pro-max

This Skill is a complete design resource library. It includes 50 design styles, 97 color schemes, and 9 tech stacks.

No matter what style of page you want, there’s likely a ready-to-use template. Just pick and apply.

3. Content Creation

7. baoyu-skills

A skill pack created by @dotey, containing nearly 20 Skills that help you produce high-quality visual designs — cover images, infographics, PPTs, long-form article formatting, and more.

The one I use most often is the article image Skill.

I don’t have to manually find where illustrations are needed. I just call this Skill, send it my article, and ask it to generate illustrations. It reads the article, identifies paragraphs suitable for images, generates them, and places them directly in the right spots.

8. NotebookLM Skill

The core of this Skill is bridging your agent with NotebookLM.

NotebookLM’s document processing capabilities are arguably best-in-class. With this Skill installed, you can directly query and analyze all your documents stored in NotebookLM — including web pages and videos — from within your agent (e.g., Claude Code).

This also significantly reduces AI hallucinations — it’s like giving your agent an ultra-powerful long-term memory module.

These are the 8 essential Skills I shared today, covering foundational setup, product development, and content creation.

That’s all for today. If you found this useful, feel free to like and follow. I’m Axi — see you next time!

🫶 If this helped you, feel free to follow my X account 👉@axichuhai**, where I’ll keep sharing AI insights, hardcore tutorials, and more.**

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