Skills crossed 60K stars and became the package manager for AI work. Taste is the thing people are buying.

ComposioHQ's awesome-claude-skills sits around 60,000 stars and now curates 1,000+ production-ready Skills, reusable SKILL.md instruction packages with YAML frontmatter, that run beyond Claude across Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and Antigravity. Skills hardened into a portable, cross-agent packaging standard while I wasn't paying attention. That's the npm moment for agent instructions.

What you build on top of that standard is where it gets interesting. santifer/career-ops is a full job-search operating system, 14 skill modes, a Go dashboard, PDF generation, batch processing, built entirely as a Claude Code skill bundle rather than a standalone app. It's at ~52,358 stars since launching April 4, roughly 781 stars a day. The whole product is skills orchestrating a CLI agent underneath. No app store, no install, just a skill bundle.

And then the two repos that make my design brain happy. taste-skill gained roughly +7,787 stars this week to ~40,341, a shell skill that "gives your AI good taste" and stops it generating boring, generic slop. impeccable added +3,334 to ~37,080, billed as "the design language that makes your AI harness better at design." Two of the fastest weekly gainers on GitHub Trending, and both exist for one reason: coding agents produce functional, ugly output, and people are paying in stars to fix it.

This is the whole thesis in repo form. The scarce input isn't generation. It's judgment. My design background is why my engineering ships, because I can look at agent output and know it's correct but wrong, and these skills are an attempt to encode that judgment so the harness applies it before I have to. I'm skeptical you can fully bottle taste in a SKILL.md. You can't teach restraint with a checklist. But the fact that 77K combined stars are betting on it tells you exactly where builders feel the pain. Install taste-skill, read what it actually encodes, and steal the patterns that match your eye. Don't outsource the judgment. Augment it.