Trending Claude Code skills: which GitHub skill repos gained the most stars, measured on 1,209 repos

Summary

If you want to try one new Claude Code skill this week, pick from the design skills. Five of the 25 repos that gained the most stars are skills that make the agent design better interfaces, and together they gained 28,781 stars in 8 days.

The reason to look at gains, not totals, is simple: totals reward age. We compared the GitHub star counts of 1,209 skill repos in our skills directory on October 29 and November 6, 2026:

• The stars are concentrated. The repos gained 277,089 stars, but the median repo gained 9. The top 10 took 38%.
• Design leads. impeccable gained 9,250, hallmark 7,569, taste-skill 5,618, ui-ux-pro-max 3,647 and Emil Kowalski’s skills 2,697.
• Two fast risers outside design. Cloudflare’s security-audit-skill gained 11,433, up 21.6%. The day-trading set day-trader-skill went from 3,304 to 5,823, up 76%.

Three names people now search for line up with this data. Karpathy skills means andrej-karpathy-skills, one guidelines file with 230,372 stars that grew 1.7%. The Emil Kowalski design skill is a set of 10 animation and design engineering skills, up 5.2%. Claude trading skills points at day-trader-skill, the second fastest grower of all repos above 3,000 stars.

Our picks

1. For UI work, try one design skill, not five. They overlap: most push the agent toward a clear visual direction and away from template looks. hallmark and impeccable are single skills; Emil Kowalski’s set splits motion into separate skills such as animate and review-animations, so you can load only the one you need.
2. For security review, start with Cloudflare’s. It is one skill that reviews code at trust boundaries and asks for evidence and a minimal fix for each finding. It grew 21.6% in 8 days, the fastest of any repo above 50,000 stars.
3. Read the trading skills by what they can do with your money. day-trader-skill has 11 skills. Only trader-broker sends orders, to Alpaca, after you approve each one, and it uses paper trading by default. The other ten fetch data, size positions or simulate. Our trading skills page sorts all 56 trading skills we list this way.
4. Treat Karpathy’s skill as a baseline, not news. It is one file that tells the agent to state assumptions, keep changes small and define how success is checked. It gained 3,851 stars, a lot in number, but 1.7% of its size. If you already ask for those three things in your CLAUDE.md, you have most of it.
5. Open the SKILL.md before you install. Stars measure attention. A skill runs with your agent’s permissions, so read what it does and which tools it calls.

Which job would you hand to a skill first: designing a page, reviewing code for security, or watching a stock? Start with the one skill for that job.

How we tested

1. The repos. Every GitHub repo in AgentCraft’s skills catalog that has a star count from both syncs: 1,209 repos. The catalog holds repos with 100 or more stars whose skills passed our review. 107 repos joined in a later sync and are not counted.
2. Star gains. Each sync reads every repo’s star count from GitHub. We subtracted the count of October 29 from the count of November 6. Both counts are in the data for every repo.
3. Growth. Percent growth is the gain divided by the October 29 count, reported only for repos with at least 1,000 stars then, so a repo going from 100 to 300 does not top the list.
4. A 30-day check. GitHub’s API no longer lists who starred a repo and when, so a 30-day gain cannot be read from GitHub. GH Archive still records star events, but in our window it captured a median of 1.4% of the stars GitHub counted. We used its counts from October 8 to November 6 only to check the ranking.
5. Categories. Each repo gets the most common category of its skills in our catalog.

Results

Most stars gained, October 29 to November 6

Repo	What it does	Stars gained	Growth
morluto/rea	Reverse engineering toolkit with skills for analysis, changelogs and CI audits	30,117	7.4%
cloudflare/security-audit-skill	Security review at trust boundaries	11,433	21.6%
mattpocock/skills	22 engineering workflow skills: grilling a plan, tickets, TDD, handoff	10,209	3.3%
pbakaus/impeccable	Frontend design and critique	9,250	9.7%
thedotmack/claude-mem	Searchable memory of past sessions, plus build and cost report skills	9,146	8.7%
stablyai/orca	Runs and supervises agent workers, worktrees and desktop apps through the orca CLI	7,648	6.9%
Nutlope/hallmark	Pages that look designed, not generated	7,569	17.9%
google/elephant-goldfish-model	Brainstorm to RFC to design doc	7,093	116.0%
Donchitos/Claude-Code-Game-Studios	18 game development skills	6,747	22.9%
DietrichGebert/ponytail	Smallest complete change per task, plus a terse reply style	5,649	3.1%

Fastest growth, repos with 1,000 or more stars on October 29

Repo	Stars, Oct 29 to Nov 6	Growth
scenario-labs/skills	1,198 to 3,452	188.1%
google/elephant-goldfish-model	6,114 to 13,207	116.0%
Jakeschincariol/day-trader-skill	3,304 to 5,823	76.2%
DenisSergeevitch/ex-ussr-kinship-research	1,276 to 2,079	62.9%
cth9191/animate	1,083 to 1,619	49.5%

The searched names

Search	Repo	Stars, Nov 6	Gained	Growth
karpathy skills	multica-ai/andrej-karpathy-skills	230,372	3,851	1.7%
emil kowalski design skill	emilkowalski/skills	54,197	2,697	5.2%
claude trading skills	Jakeschincariol/day-trader-skill	5,823	2,519	76.2%
claude trading skills	tradermonty/claude-trading-skills	3,672	219	6.3%

By category. Content skills (design, media, writing) gained 77,827 stars, development 61,791 and agent workflow 60,368. Together that is 72% of the total.

Does the 8-day list hold over a month? Mostly. 11 of the top 15 by 8-day gain are also in the top 15 by GH Archive’s 30-day sample. The sample also shows timing: morluto/rea got 4,395 of its 6,404 sampled stars in the first ten days of the window, while hallmark got 140 of its 246 in the last ten. rea is cooling; hallmark is still climbing.

What to ignore

• Total stars. A repo with 300,000 stars can gain less in a week than one with 6,000. Totals tell you what was popular, gains tell you what is popular now.
• GH Archive’s numbers on their own. It captured between 0.9% and 2.1% of real stars for most large repos in our window. Good for ranking, wrong as a star count.
• Repos below 1,000 stars in the percent table. A jump from 400 to 3,100 is real, but one post can do it. floorplan did exactly that, so it appears in the data, not in the table.

Limitations

• Eight days. Our catalog started recording star counts on October 29, and GitHub no longer exposes when each star was given, so the exact window is 8 days. The 30-day check is a sample.
• Our catalog, not all of GitHub. Repos must have 100 or more stars and pass our skill review to be counted. Skills inside larger projects that we did not list are missing.
• Stars are attention. We did not test these skills for this post. Popularity says nothing about whether a skill works well in your project.
• Unstars. A star count is net: stars removed in the window cancel stars added.

Reproduce it

The script is claude-code-skills-rising-2026-11.py. It reads the two catalog snapshots and, with --gharchive, runs the GH Archive check on BigQuery (about 0.7 GB scanned). Its output, claude-code-skills-rising-2026-11.json, has one row per repo with both star counts, the gain, the growth and the GH Archive sample, plus every summary in this post. Compare any row with the repo’s star count on GitHub today.

Sources

1. AgentCraft: Claude Code skills directory · blog
2. AgentCraft: Claude Code skills for trading and markets · blog
3. GH Archive · official
4. Claude Code docs: Agent Skills · official