People say “skill” and mean three different things: a SKILL.md in a repo, a Figma Community file, a hosted job that writes into your workspace. The word is overloaded. The useful part is not the file format. It is the contract.
A skill is a brief the agent can load
A design skill answers four questions before anyone runs it:
- What job — logo pack, wireframe set, one hi-fi screen, icon set, deck.
- What you must give — name, audience, constraints, references.
- What comes back — named files or named frames. Not “some assets.”
- What “done” means — empty and error exist; four marks are four ideas; tokens are tokens.
If those four are missing, you do not have a skill. You have a prompt with a GitHub star count.
Why markdown shows up
Most agent hosts load a short markdown file as the skill body. That is convenient. It is also how catalogs turn into sludge: copy a SKILL.md, change the title, ship. We list public GitHub and Figma skills because that is where people already look. We do not copy their markdown into this site. The upstream listing stays the source.
Official skills on this shelf add one more thing the markdown dump usually skips: a page that already said the artifacts. The agent should follow the page, not invent a pack.
Listed, on purpose
Skills on this shelf live on GitHub, Figma Community, npm, or other catalogs. We point at them. You install them in the host yourself. Listing is not the same as hosting.
A marketplace that pretends every star is a shippable brief is how agent design turns into slop.
See the catalog for the current shelf.