In AI, distribution is king. Skills are seizing the crown.
Skills are programs written in English. They tell an agent how to accomplish a task : which APIs to call, what format to use, how to handle edge cases. A skill transforms an agent from a conversationalist into an operator.
Remember Trinity in The Matrix? “Can you fly that thing?” Neo asks. “Not yet,” she says. Seconds later, Tank uploads a B-212 helicopter pilot program directly into her mind. She steps into the cockpit & flies.
That’s what skills feel like. You don’t learn an interface. You acquire a capability. Skills encode institutional knowledge in executable form. Training becomes unnecessary because the capability transfers instantly.
A lot of people are looking to fly helicopters. The top MCP server aggregator has 81,000 stars. Anthropic’s official skills repository has 67,000. Cursor rules : 38,000. OpenClaw’s awesome-skills list, which curates 3,000 community-built skills : 12,500.
For consumers, software discovery disappears. A user asks their agent to track expenses or categorize last month’s spending. The agent finds the skill. The user never knows the tool exists, aside from a subscription.
For enterprises, IT provisions applications by role. A sales rep gets Salesforce. A marketer gets HubSpot. An analyst gets Tableau. Each persona receives a bundle of icons : all requiring training, all adding cognitive load.
In the skills era, enterprises provision capabilities instead of applications.
FP&A teams receive skills that optimize budget variance analysis, pulling data from NetSuite & formatting reports in the CFO’s preferred structure. No training on pivot tables. No documentation on report templates.
Every platform shift compresses the distance between user & value. The web required a URL & a browser. Mobile required a download & a homescreen slot. Skills require a sentence.
But this distribution layer carries risk. A recent analysis of 4,784 AI agent repositories found malware embedded in skill packages : credential harvesting, backdoors disguised as monitoring. We’ll all need trusted operators like Tank to verify our skills.
“Tank, I need a pilot program for an investment memo.”