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 ranked
React Hook Form Best Practices
Development
Master React Hook Form: avoid anti-patterns, manage subscriptions, and handle reset, dirty state, and controlled inputs correctly.
Emotion to Mantine Migration
Development
Migrate Emotion styled-components to Mantine components with style props and CSS modules. Use when converting .styled.tsx files or removing @emotion imports.
Firecrawl Build Search
Development
Integrate Firecrawl /search into product code and agent workflows for web discovery before extraction. Use when features start with a query instead of a URL.
Set up pre-commit hooks with Husky, lint-staged, Prettier
Development
Set up Husky, lint-staged, and Prettier to add a pre-commit hook that formats files, type-checks, and runs tests.
Playwright E2E Testing Patterns
Testing
Playwright E2E testing patterns covering Page Object Model, configuration, CI/CD integration, artifact management, and flaky test strategies.
Home Assistant Integration Knowledge
Development
Complete reference for building, testing and reviewing Home Assistant integrations, covering best practices, entity platforms, and quality scale rules.
Grafana Panel & Viz Testing Strategy
Testing
Write unit and E2E tests for Grafana visualization panels and viz utilities following repo conventions. Covers builders, canvas draw-call snapshots, and anti-flake rules.
Database Migration
Development
Master database schema and data migrations across ORMs (Sequelize, TypeORM, Prisma), including rollback strategies and zero-downtime deployments.
Latency-Critical Systems
Development
Guidance for designing and optimizing latency-critical systems, including metric tracking, hot path mapping, optimization order, verification, and guardrails.
Market Research
Productivity
Conduct market research, competitive analysis, investor due diligence, and industry intelligence with source attribution and decision-oriented summaries.
Chakra UI Builder
Development
Build accessible, responsive UI components and layouts with Chakra UI v3, set up Chakra in projects, and design scalable themes with tokens and recipes.
Create Admin Routing
Development
Create the Symfony routing YAML file declaring all admin routes for a domain.
Dart/Flutter Patterns
Development
Production-ready Dart and Flutter patterns covering null safety, state management (BLoC, Riverpod, Provider), navigation, networking, and clean architecture for writing or reviewing code.
Find Ready-to-Merge PRs
Development
Finds open Home Assistant pull requests that are ready to merge immediately, checking CI, merge-gate, approvals, conflicts, and review threads.
Microservices Architecture Patterns
Development
Master microservices architecture patterns including service boundaries, inter-service communication, data management, and resilience patterns for building distributed systems.
Identify Assumptions (New Product)
Productivity
Identify risky assumptions for a new product idea across 8 risk categories including Go-to-Market, Strategy, and Team. Use when evaluating startup risks or assessing a new product concept.
Supabase Studio Error Handling
Development
Error handling pattern for Supabase Studio: classification, UI rendering, and troubleshooting with reusable components.
Creating pull requests
Development
Conventions for PR bodies: reference Linear tickets, GitHub issues, never mention client names.
ACE-Step Documentation
Documentation
Provides documentation and troubleshooting for the ACE-Step music generation system. Covers installation, GPU configuration, model download, Gradio web UI usage, API integration, and common issues such as VRAM problems and CUDA errors. Useful for developers and users setting up or debugging ACE-Step.
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.
Laravel Verification Loop
DevOps
Complete verification workflow for Laravel projects: environment checks, linting, static analysis, test coverage, security audit, and deployment readiness.
AWS CDK Reusable Patterns
DevOps
Expert guidance on building reusable AWS CDK constructs, L3 patterns, and production-grade infrastructure stacks with TypeScript, Python, or Java.
Threat Modeling Expert
Security
Expert in threat modeling, security architecture review, and risk assessment. Masters STRIDE, PASTA, attack trees, and security requirement extraction.
Async Python Patterns
Development
Comprehensive guidance for implementing asynchronous Python applications using asyncio, concurrent programming patterns, and async/await for high-performance, non-blocking systems.
How to choose
- How are these skills selected?
- An algorithm picks them among the published skills that match this page's criteria, such as category, tags or compatible tools. It ranks them by the quality score a language model gave them. On ranking pages, it also weighs GitHub stars and the security rating. Nobody reviews them one by one.
- What do the security ratings mean?
- A language model reads the SKILL.md file, without running it, and gives it a rating. Safe means it sees no meaningful execution risk. Caution means the skill uses powerful tools such as bash, docker or the network for a legitimate purpose. Risky means it asks for destructive actions, for secrets to be sent out, or for obfuscated code to run; a skill rated Risky is never published. The rating does not replace your own reading of the file.
- 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.