I Asked My Agent to Install 38 Skills for Me

In December 2025, I had more than 200 prompts saved in Notion, sorted by type of task. Using them meant finding the right one, copying it, switching window, pasting, adjusting and running. I was doing this dozens of times a day.

That is not productivity. I had become a copy-paste machine.

The npm moment

In January 2026, skills became installable like packages. A skill written once could be added to an agent with a single command, from a shared repository, and the same format worked across many coding agents.

I could have installed what I needed one at a time. I had a better idea.

Letting the agent set itself up

I opened my editor and asked the agent to do it: find the skills that matched the work I do, install them, and check that they loaded. It ended up with 38 skills covering React, design review, SEO, copywriting and more.

The interesting part was not the number. It was the shift in habit. For years I had configured my tools by hand. Here the tool did its own onboarding, and I only had to describe the kind of work I do.

What I would add now

Installing many skills is easy. Knowing which ones are useful takes longer. After a while, I removed those that never triggered and rewrote the descriptions of the others.

Lessons

1. If you are copying the same text every day, it should be a capability.
2. Ask the agent to install and check its own tools.
3. Prune regularly. A capability nobody uses is noise.