Best skills for Windsurf
Windsurf is an agentic IDE built around Cascade — an AI agent that reads your codebase and acts across files on its own. Skills are how you make that agent reliably good at a specific job. A skill is a reusable SKILL.md instruction set; in Windsurf you wire it in as a rule or workflow, so Cascade applies the same vetted steps every time it hits that kind of task — automating a browser, reviewing a spec, designing a UI component or running a test pass.
This page ranks the best Windsurf skills available right now. Ranking is recomputed continuously from three signals: an automated quality score of the skill's content, its GitHub star count, and a security review that keeps skills asking for risky permissions out of the top. Safe, well-documented, widely-starred skills rise to the front. The three signals are blended, so a heavily-starred skill with a thin SKILL.md still ranks below a well-documented, security-checked one.
The picks lean heavily toward development — refactoring, code review and automation — with productivity, content and data & AI skills alongside. Each skill page below explains what the skill does, its difficulty level, and how to add it to Windsurf so Cascade can use it.
These skills are not locked to Windsurf: most of the same SKILL.md files run on Claude Code, Cursor or Copilot once dropped in that tool's skills folder — check the platform badges on each card. The ranking is refreshed as new skills are scraped, scored and verified, so revisit it: today's leader may be overtaken next week.
24 skills selected
Qoder Agent (Print Mode)
Development
Delegate coding tasks to the Qoder CLI in non-interactive Print mode. Use this for building new features, code reviews, refactoring, or iterative coding that requires file exploration. It supports subagents, worktrees, and MCP servers, but is not intended for simple one-line fixes or reading code.
Character Design Sheet
Content
Creates consistent character designs across AI-generated images using reference sheets, turnaround views, expression sheets, and color palettes. Leverages the inference.sh CLI to generate character concepts and maintain visual identity through techniques like FLUX LoRA training and detailed description anchoring. Useful for character design, game art, illustration, animation, comics, and visual novels.
Project Technical Writing
Documentation
Guides technical writing to match the project's established voice and style. Use when creating or editing READMEs, ADRs, Swift doc comments, or reviewing documentation for consistency. Enforces a pragmatic, direct, developer-to-developer tone while avoiding AI-isms and hedging.
List Open Pull Requests with Priorities
Development
Displays open pull requests sorted by priority and review status. Useful for quickly seeing pending, approved, or change-requested PRs.
Dynamic Needs System
Development
Dynamic needs system that fluctuates over time and drives character behavior. Standard needs include hunger, energy, fun, social, comfort, and bladder, each with decay rates and satisfying actions. Low needs create urgency and can interrupt other activities, with inner voice comments reflecting the character's mental state.
CE Plugin Audit & Compliance
Development
Audits CE plugin implementations against registry trust rules, metadata validity, and ADR contract compliance. Checks required plugin_meta fields, capability tags, interval calibrator protocol, and core API boundary imports. Helps when certifying third-party plugins or validating conformance before integration.
Stripe Payment Management via CLI
Development
Manage Stripe payments from the terminal: check balance, create payment links, manage customers, invoices, refunds, and subscriptions. Helps developers interact with Stripe without leaving the command line.
SDD Commit & PR Guidelines
Development
This skill guides the creation of structured commit messages following Conventional Commits and provides a pull request template. It helps maintain consistent project history and clear documentation of changes. Use it when committing code or creating PRs to ensure all changes are properly described.
Capability Check
Productivity
Checks whether a specific action (sending a message, accessing calendar, etc.) is possible by testing permissions, required services, and configuration. Helps diagnose why a feature is not working.
Cinematic Frontend Design
Development
Provides UI patterns and design tokens for Bookkeep's cinematic dark theme with jewel-tone accents and glassmorphism. Use when building components or pages that must match the established visual language, including cards, badges, headers, and form inputs.
Systematic Debugging
Development
Systematically diagnoses and resolves software bugs, test failures, data quality issues, and performance problems using various debugging techniques and tools. Helps when encountering errors, crashes, flaky tests, or unexpected behavior in code, tests, data pipelines, or ML models. Covers strategies like isolation, binary search, git bisect, and specialized debugging for flaky tests and data pipelines.
Go Error Diagnosis and Fixing
Development
This skill diagnoses and fixes Go errors by analyzing error messages, identifying the cause, applying fixes, and verifying with build/test/lint commands. It helps when encountering compilation, runtime, or lint errors during Go development.
Datalog Query
Data & AI
Queries janus-datalog databases using the `datalog` CLI for debugging and data exploration. Enables inspecting datoms, entity attributes, or CRDT storage state via EDN queries. Helps understand unknown database schemas and visualize transaction history.
Advanced SEO Optimizer
Development
Analyzes your codebase and implements comprehensive SEO optimizations: meta tags, structured data, sitemaps, and Core Web Vitals improvements. Ideal for Next.js, Astro, React, or static HTML projects needing better search engine visibility.
Modern UI/UX Guide - Minimal Clean Design
Development
Provides UI/UX guidance and reviews focused on modern minimal design. Use it for actionable recommendations on layout, hierarchy, iconography, and CRAP principles, and to analyze existing interfaces with prioritized fixes.
Nansen Prediction Market Screener
Data & AI
Browse trending events and top markets on Polymarket sorted by volume, liquidity, or trader count. Search for specific markets by keyword or filter by status (open/closed). Helps you quickly discover what's hot in prediction markets.
Browser Automation with playwright-cli
Testing
Automate browser interactions using playwright-cli commands. Supports navigation, clicking, form filling, screenshots, data extraction, and multi-tab management. Ideal for web testing, scraping, and automating repetitive web tasks.
QASAI - Image Compression CLI
Development
CLI tool for compressing images with lossless/lossy options, multiple engines (mozjpeg, pngquant, etc.), and format support (JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF). Useful for batch processing, format conversion, and resizing, particularly for web optimization.
No Johns Setup Troubleshooter
Development
Diagnoses and fixes common setup issues for No Johns, an AI training framework for Melee. Runs systematic checks on Python 3.12, required packages (libmelee, pyenet), configuration files (Dolphin path, ISO, connect code), Dolphin installation, and arena connectivity. Useful when users encounter errors during initial setup or after updates.
Add Background Music to Videos
Content
Adds background music to videos using royalty-free sources like Pixabay Music. Provides FFmpeg commands for mixing audio, adjusting volume levels, and adding fade-in/out effects. Useful when you need to enhance a video with background music while keeping voiceover clear.
Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
Development
Provides expert guidance on implementing Domain-Driven Design (DDD) patterns including bounded contexts, aggregates, value objects, and domain events. Helps model complex business domains, establish a ubiquitous language, and design strategic context maps to align software architecture with business logic.
Update GitHub Pull Request
Development
Updates an existing GitHub pull request after adding commits, revising the title and body according to a template if available. Helpful after pushing new changes to a branch that already has an open PR.
OpenSpec Workflow Management (OpsX)
Development
OpenSpec Workflow (OpsX) manages the lifecycle of specification-driven development changes using commands like onboard, new, fast-forward, apply, and archive. It structures changes from proposal through planning, implementation, and archival into standardized artifacts within a .openspec directory. This skill is useful for teams following the OpenSpec methodology to maintain consistency and traceability across development changes.
PRD Generator
Development
Generates a structured Product Requirements Document (PRD) from a feature description. It helps by asking clarifying questions and producing a clear, actionable document with user stories, acceptance criteria, and success metrics. Use this when planning a new feature or starting a project.
How to choose
- How are these skills selected?
- Each skill is curated and verified by the Skills Guides editorial team. We run a security and quality review on every entry, so only verified skills appear in this selection.
- What do the security ratings mean?
- We label skills Safe, Caution or Risky based on our security analysis — checking for prompt-injection risks, requested permissions and other red flags. The rating gives you an at-a-glance sense of how much trust a skill warrants.
- How do I install a skill?
- Open any skill page and follow its install instructions for your tool — Claude Code, Cursor or Copilot. Each skill lists the exact steps so you can get it running in a couple of minutes.