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:

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

Examples:

| User says | Search |

|---|---|

| "make my React app faster" | npx --yes skills find react performance |

| "help with PR reviews" | npx --yes skills find pr review |

| "create a changelog" | npx --yes skills find changelog |

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

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):

write_file(".agents/skills/<name>/SKILL.md", content)
reload()

write_file creates the directory if it does not exist. 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:

terminal(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):

terminal(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:

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 reload() returns (look for the new skill in skills_loaded), tell the user:

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

When no skills are found

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

terminal(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

| Category | Search terms |

|---|---|

| Web development | react, nextjs, typescript, css, tailwind |

| Testing | testing, jest, playwright, e2e |

| DevOps | deploy, docker, kubernetes, ci-cd |

| Documentation | docs, readme, changelog, api-docs |

| Code quality | review, lint, refactor, best-practices |

| Design | ui, ux, design-system, accessibility |