Tests find 11 of top 20 agent skills clearly helped; the most-installed one hurt output

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A DriftProof test ran the 20 most-installed agent skills from skills.sh with and without each skill loaded, using two Claude models and a Claude Haiku judge. Eleven skills measurably improved answers on both models, while the most-installed skill, find-skills, lowered scores on both. Ten of the 40 comparisons were inconclusive because answers varied too much between runs to draw a clear conclusion. The evaluation used three self-written text-only tasks per skill, excluding tool calls, media, and deployed services. The authors note that installs measure popularity rather than quality and have published their receipts and task suites for public review.

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