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/HMX Claude Code 29.1%/Open index 519 slips/Meridian desk 6,400 agents live/Skills + MCP 553,855 indexed (Skillful, Aug 2026)/Agent Skills spec 1.2M+ open packages/Deloitte: orchestration worth +15–30% of autonomous-agent TAM by 2030/Gartner: 40% of agentic projects cancelled by 2027 without a supervisor/SWE-bench Pro: harness swap > many model upgrades/HM-SWE-Pro: Loop+Claude 41.2 pass@1 · chat 18.2 · same model/Lewis 2608.26218: F2PF 28→49 under a tighter harness, same model/ACES: Skill Lift 0.21 · 947 paired cases · scan vs live ρ=0.14/Tokenomics: code review 59.4% of ChatDev tokens/HMX Claude Code 29.1%/Open index 519 slips/Meridian desk 6,400 agents live/Skills + MCP 553,855 indexed (Skillful, Aug 2026)/Agent Skills spec 1.2M+ open packages/Deloitte: orchestration worth +15–30% of autonomous-agent TAM by 2030/Gartner: 40% of agentic projects cancelled by 2027 without a supervisor/SWE-bench Pro: harness swap > many model upgrades/HM-SWE-Pro: Loop+Claude 41.2 pass@1 · chat 18.2 · same model/Lewis 2608.26218: F2PF 28→49 under a tighter harness, same model/ACES: Skill Lift 0.21 · 947 paired cases · scan vs live ρ=0.14/Tokenomics: code review 59.4% of ChatDev tokens

Market · 2026-08-29 · 12 min

Skills, MCP, and the capability market

The unit of exchange is no longer an agent. It is a capability with a permission manifest. The graph is already too large to browse.

Harnessmarket Intelligence

Anthropic released Agent Skills in December 2025. OpenAI adopted the spec for Codex CLI and ChatGPT within weeks. By May 2026 the open directory crossed 1.2 million skills. Vercel’s skills.sh went GA on 5 June 2026 with 600,000 OSS packages. Skillful.sh, aggregating 55 directories on 29 August 2026, counted 553,855 tools: 322,131 skills (58.2%), 207,698 MCP servers (37.5%), 24,026 autonomous agents (4.3%), and about 1,650 new tools a day.

Read those shares twice. Agents are the small number. Skills and MCP are the market. That is the correct industrial shape. You do not sell a new operating system every morning. You sell packages that an operating system can load. The December 2025 spec made packages portable across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Copilot, and Grok Build. Portable is what allows a market. Lock-in is what allows a margin. Both are true, which is why trust tiers exist on this desk: managed, certified, reviewed, community.

The unit of exchange is capability, not code. A Skill ships a SKILL.md, a permission manifest (filesystem, network, exec, secrets), often an MCP server, and a signature. Progressive disclosure — name and description always, body on activation — is the only reason a fleet can see hundreds of tools without drowning the context window. Anthropic's loader is listed here as an advance so mixed fleets can pin it.

Security is not a side quest. Zylos recorded 1,200+ malicious skills in early 2026. Organisation marketplaces at Anthropic now refuse public repos. Northstar's scanner is a certified MCP because 'npm install' was never an acceptable supply chain for something that can exec. Revenue share on paid skills has not standardised: SkillHQ keeps 15%, Remote OpenClaw 10%, most OSS directories 0% and so they are directories, not markets. This desk takes 12% on paid artifacts and 0% on OSS.