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Most-installed AI agent skills tested, many found to degrade performance

By PulseAugur Editorial · [2 sources] ·

A recent test evaluated the impact of 20 popular agent skills on AI model performance, using Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Opus 5.5, with Claude Haiku 5.5 as the judge. The study found that while some skills significantly improved task completion, others, including the most installed skill 'find-skills', actually degraded performance. The methodology involved running tasks with and without each skill, scoring the results to determine effectiveness, though some skills showed too much variability to definitively assess. AI

IMPACT This research highlights the need for rigorous evaluation of AI agent skills, as popularity does not guarantee effectiveness and some skills may hinder performance.

RANK_REASON The item details a methodology for testing AI agent skills and reports on the findings, which constitutes research into AI capabilities.

Read on dev.to — LLM tag →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 2 sources. How we write summaries →

Most-installed AI agent skills tested, many found to degrade performance

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100 / 100
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Research
The item details a methodology for testing AI agent skills and reports on the findings, which constitutes research into AI capabilities.
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2 independent sources
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product, other
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High
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Breaking (< 6h)
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COVERAGE [2]

  1. dev.to — LLM tag TIER_1 English(EN) · Driftproofhq ·

    We tested the 20 most-installed agent skills with and without the skill. The most-installed one came out worse.

    <p>skills.sh ranks agent skills by installs. Installs tell you a skill is popular. They don't tell you whether it changes what the agent actually writes.</p> <p>So we took the top 20 skills from the skills.sh snapshot of 17 Oct and ran each one twice on the same tasks: once with …

  2. Mastodon — fosstodon.org TIER_1 English(EN) · [email protected] ·

    We tested the 20 most-installed agent skills with and without the skill. The most-installed one came out worse. # ai # claude # llm # testing # software # codin

    We tested the 20 most-installed agent skills with and without the skill. The most-installed one came out worse. # ai # claude # llm # testing # software # coding # development # engineering # inclusive # community We tested the 20 most-installed agent skills with and without the …

    LINKS dev.to/…/we-tested-the-20-most-installed-…

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