Find Skills

Find skills

When to use this skill

• The user asks "find a skill for X", "is there a skill that does X"
• The user asks "how do I do X" where X is a common task with a likely existing skill
• The user wants to extend Horizon's capabilities with a new skill

Before searching externally, check the <available_skills> block in your context — the user may already have a relevant skill installed.

Step 1 — check the leaderboard

Before running any CLI command, check skills.sh to see whether a well-known skill already covers the domain. The leaderboard ranks by total installs, surfacing the most popular and battle-tested options.

Step 2 — search for skills

If the leaderboard doesn't cover the user's need, search via the Skills CLI:

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bash(command="npx --yes skills find <query>")

Examples:

If npx is unavailable the command will fail — fall back to browsing skills.sh manually and pasting the SKILL.md content.

Step 3 — verify quality before recommending

Never recommend a skill based solely on search results.

• Install count — prefer 1 000+ installs; treat anything under 100 with skepticism
• Source reputation — official organisations (vercel-labs, anthropics, microsoft) are more trustworthy than unknown authors
• GitHub stars — check the source repo; a skill from a repo with <100 stars is a yellow flag

Step 4 — present the option to the user

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I found a skill that might help: "react-best-practices" from Vercel Engineering
provides React and Next.js performance guidelines (185K installs).

Shall I install it?

Only proceed to installation after the user confirms.

Step 5 — install

Option A — write SKILL.md directly (always works)

If you have the skill content (pasted by the user, retrieved from skills.sh, or constructed from the search result):

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write(".agents/skills/<name>/SKILL.md", content)
load_skill(action="reload")

write creates the directory if it does not exist. load_skill(action="reload") refreshes the <available_skills> catalog (plus extensions and manifest) on the next turn.

Option B — install via npx (requires Node.js)

First check whether npx is available:

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bash(command="which npx")

If it is, install the skill. Select a single skill from a multi-skill repo with the @<skill> suffix (omit it to take the whole repo):

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bash(command="npx --yes skills add <owner/repo>@<skill-name> -y")

The Skills CLI stages the skill (with its references/, assets/, and scripts/ subdirs) under .agents/skills/<skill-name>/ — exactly where Horizon loads skills from — so no move is needed. Just refresh:

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load_skill(action="reload")

The staged directory name MUST match the name: field in the SKILL.md frontmatter — _load_skill_from_dir validates that and skips mismatched skills.

Step 6 — confirm activation

After load_skill(action="reload") returns (look for the new skill in loaded), tell the user:

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The "<name>" skill is now installed. It will appear in your
<available_skills> catalog on the next turn.

When no skills are found

1. Acknowledge that no existing skill was found
2. Offer to help directly using general capabilities
3. Offer to write a custom skill for them:

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bash(command="npx --yes skills init my-skill-name")

Or skip the CLI and author one manually — write a SKILL.md following the policy or workspace skills as examples.

Common skill categories