topskills

Cursor guide

Best agent Skills for Cursor

The best Skills for Cursor are frontend-design for UI direction, superpowers for multi-step engineering work, and the vendor-published Skills for whatever you integrate against — Stripe, Supabase, Resend, and Prisma all publish their own. 78 of the 191 Skills we catalogue are verified working in Cursor, which makes it the broadest non-Anthropic target; the gap is mostly Skills that depend on Claude-specific tooling.

Updated August 26, 2026 · first published August 19, 2026

Install first

frontend-design

The highest-scoring Skill we catalogue, and verified on Cursor. It is also the best answer to Cursor's characteristic failure mode: fast, fluent completions that produce competent but generic interfaces.

Best when: Building UI where the visual result matters and there is no existing design system to inherit from.

Install model

How Skills install on Cursor

npx skills add github.com/anthropics/skills --skill frontend-design --target cursor
  1. 1Copy the Cursor install command from the Skill page on this site — most use the shared skills CLI with --target cursor.
  2. 2Run it in the project root so the Skill lands in the repo rather than a global directory.
  3. 3Reload Cursor so it picks up the new Skill folder.
  4. 4Trigger it with a task matching its description, and check the output changed — a Skill that does not change behaviour did not load.

Cursor reads SKILL.md through its plugin layer rather than as a first-party primitive, which is why compatibility here is verified per Skill rather than assumed. Skills and Cursor Rules stack rather than compete: Rules are always-on and repo-specific, Skills load on trigger and carry broader method. Where both speak to the same concern, keep the Rule — it is the more specific instruction.

Ranked

The shortlist

Ordered by what to install first for the common case, not by raw score. Every entry here carries verified Cursor compatibility — open the skill page for the composite score, licence, and full install commands.

SkillSourceScoreBest when
frontend-designOfficial92Building UI where the visual result matters and there is no existing design system to inherit from.
superpowersCommunity63A feature that will span days and files, not a single edit.
simplifyOfficial50Before every PR, on code you already think is correct.
trail-of-bitsVerified49Code that handles auth, untrusted input, secrets, or money.
supabase-skillVerified55Building on Supabase — especially row-level security and migrations, where generic advice is actively misleading.
webapp-testingOfficial50UI changes where the question is whether the flow still works, not whether the code compiles.

See every skill verified on this agent, ranked by composite score, on the Cursor page.

Why these

Pick by pick

  1. 1
    frontend-design

    The highest-scoring Skill we catalogue, and verified on Cursor. It is also the best answer to Cursor's characteristic failure mode: fast, fluent completions that produce competent but generic interfaces.

  2. 2
    superpowers

    The strongest counterweight to ad-hoc prompting, which Cursor makes very easy. It imposes a plan-then-build pipeline with TDD at each stage, so multi-file work keeps its structure across sessions.

  3. 3
    simplify

    A quality-only review pass — reuse, simplification, efficiency — that runs on a staged diff. Verified on Cursor, and the cheapest way to stop accreted AI-generated code from becoming the codebase.

  4. 4
    trail-of-bits

    Security review Skills from a firm that does this for a living, Apache-2.0 licensed. A quality review and a security review are different lenses that miss different things; this is the second lens.

  5. 5
    supabase-skill

    Published by Supabase, so it encodes their own migration, RLS, and client-usage conventions rather than generic Postgres advice. The pattern generalises: in Cursor, prefer the vendor's Skill for whatever you integrate against.

  6. 6
    webapp-testing

    Drives a real browser against a running app, so the agent verifies behaviour instead of asserting it. Verified on Cursor, and the fastest way to close the loop between a generated change and evidence it works.

Limits

What this agent cannot do

Cursor is not a native SKILL.md host — it reads Skills through its plugin layer, so each entry on this site lists Cursor only after it was actually tested there. 57 of our 191 Skills are absent from the Cursor list, and the pattern is consistent: Skills that assume Claude-specific tooling, Claude.ai upload flows, or Claude API skill_id references. A Skill that names Claude Code tools in its instructions tends to degrade quietly rather than fail loudly, which is exactly why we do not mark compatibility we have not verified.

FAQ

Common questions

Do Claude Code Skills work in Cursor without changes?

Often, but not always, and the failure is quiet rather than loud. The two required frontmatter fields are the same, so the file parses; what breaks is instruction content that assumes Claude-specific tools or a shell the agent does not have. Our compatibility list reflects Skills actually tested in Cursor.

Skills or Cursor Rules — which should I use?

Both, for different jobs. Rules are always-on, repo-specific, and cheap: use them for conventions that must apply to every edit. Skills load on trigger and can bundle scripts and reference files: use them for methods you invoke deliberately, like a review pass or a document workflow.

Where do Skills live in a Cursor project?

In the project directory the install command targets, which keeps them committed with the repo so the whole team inherits them. Reload Cursor after adding one — like Claude Code, it reads Skill metadata at startup rather than continuously.

Can Skills in Cursor run shell commands?

Where Cursor itself can, yes — which means action-taking Skills (deploys, migrations, paid API calls) carry the same risk here as anywhere. Check the capability level on the Skill page and keep credentials out of anything the agent can invoke unattended.

Other agents

Same question, different agent

New to Skills? What is a Claude skill · How to install · How to audit a skill first