The Skill Economy
10 articles in series
Ten essays on the business of packaged AI skills — why SKILL.md became the portable primitive across 20+ agents, what 70/30 revenue splits reveal about the market, trust and discovery as the real bottlenecks, and what the App Store already taught skill marketplaces.
What the App Store Taught Us That Skill Marketplaces Keep Relearning
Review processes, ranking algorithms, and trust infrastructure — the App Store solved these once. Skill marketplaces are solving them again, with real differences.
The Security Audit Every Skill Marketplace Needs to Run
A practical checklist for marketplace operators, built directly from why 82% of MCP servers failed on path traversal and 67% on code injection.
Building a Skill Once, Shipping It to 20 Different Agents
Cross-agent portability is the skill economy's biggest leverage argument — and its friction points are more specific than the pitch usually admits.
What Makes a Skill Get Reused vs Installed Once and Forgotten
Most skills get installed, run once, and quietly abandoned. The ones that stick share specific, identifiable traits that have nothing to do with cleverness.
Discovery Is Harder Than Creation in a Skill Marketplace
Writing a good SKILL.md file takes an afternoon. Getting the right developer to find it before they build their own version takes much longer.
Trust and Verification: The Bottleneck of Every Skill Marketplace
82% of audited MCP servers are vulnerable to path traversal, 67% to code injection. That's the security backdrop every skill marketplace has to reckon with.
Pricing a Skill: What 70/30 Splits Tell You About the Market
Curated skill marketplaces are converging on a 70/30 creator-platform split. That specific number reveals more about the market than either side admits.
What Skills, Subagents, Hooks, and MCP Are Each Actually For
Four primitives, one confusing acronym soup. A clarifying breakdown of when to reach for a skill versus a subagent, a hook, or an MCP server.
Why SKILL.md Became the Portable Primitive Across 20+ Agents
A plain markdown file plus optional scripts beat every fancier format for one reason: it's the lowest-friction thing a model and a human can both read.
The Skill Economy Is Replacing Prompt Engineering
Prompt engineering was a job title for eighteen months. Packaged, reusable, sellable skills are turning out to be the durable unit of AI leverage instead.