Nearly half the MCP servers you can install publish nothing you can read

THE SIGNAL / 01

79 of the 193 MCP servers in our directory publish no repository and no website. Not a failed check — nothing to check.

That is 41%. It is not a statement about our catalogue so much as about the ecosystem it samples: an MCP server is a name, a transport, and a config block someone wrote down. Nothing in the format requires the code to be anywhere you can see it.

This matters more than it does for a normal dependency. An MCP server is not a library you call — it is a process your agent talks to, holding the credentials you gave it, with tools it describes to the model in its own words. A tool description is a prompt. If you cannot read the source, you cannot know what the model is being told to do, and you are trusting a config block to describe software you have never seen.

So before you install one, three questions, in this order:

1. Is there a repository, and does it contain a server? Not a README that describes one. The gap between “there is a GitHub link” and “there is code” is where most of the 79 fell out.

2. Who publishes it? A vendor shipping an adapter for their own product has something to lose. Look for the server inside the vendor’s own organisation — not a fork, not a mirror, not a third party wrapping their API. 103 of ours meet that bar; it is the single best signal available.

3. What does the config actually ask for? An env block naming a broad-scope token is the whole security model, stated out loud. Read it before you paste it, especially when the snippet arrived from an agent.

We have been working through this on our own pages: 77 servers now carry a configuration copied verbatim from the server’s own README, and the rest say so rather than showing you a block we have not checked. The 79 with no source carry a mark on their card, and they come out of the directory on October 14 if nothing has been published by then.

The wider point is a question worth asking of any directory, ours included: what is actually behind this entry?

• Browse MCP servers →

NEW & VETTED / 02

Three additions this week, all of them plugins.

• Humanizerstrips the tells out of AI-generated prose: the tricolons, the hedges, the “it’s not X, it’s Y” cadence. MIT, and small enough to read in a sitting, which is the right size for a skill that edits your voice.
• Planning With Fileskeeps a long task’s plan in markdown on disk instead of in the context window, re-injects it each turn, and survives /clear, compaction, and a crashed session. Closes behind a completion gate rather than the agent declaring itself done.
• Last 30 Daysresearches a topic across Reddit, X, YouTube and HN, then synthesises a summary with its sources attached, which is the part that makes it checkable.

All three install as plugins, which means two commands, not one: a marketplace you add once, then the plugin by name. The @suffix names the marketplace, and it is not reliably the author’s GitHub handle — the exact command is on each skill’s page.

THE PICK / 03

Agent Skills — Addy Osmani

97,000+ STARS · 16 CONTRIBUTORS · UPDATED SEPTEMBER 20, 2026 BY ADDY OSMANI

Twenty-five skills in one plugin, covering the engineering lifecycle rather than a single task: spec-driven and test-driven development, incremental implementation, code review, debugging and error recovery, observability, security hardening, performance, deprecation and migration, shipping.

Most collections that size are a category list. What makes this one worth the pick is the four skills that are not about any framework at all — doubt-driven, source-driven, and constraint-driven development, plus interview-me. They are about how the agent should reason, and when it should stop and ask.

Doubt-driven development opens with the line that earns the rank:

“A confident answer is not a correct one.”

Its argument is that long sessions quietly turn assumptions into facts, so non-trivial decisions need a fresh-context reviewer biased to disprove rather than approve — while course correction is still cheap. It defines “non-trivial” concretely: branching logic, a module boundary, anything asserting a property the compiler cannot verify, anything whose blast radius is irreversible.

Source-driven development is the one that connects to last week’s issue. Its instruction is to never implement framework-specific code from memory: verify against official documentation, cite it, and let the user see the sources. “Training data goes stale, APIs get deprecated, best practices evolve.” That is precisely the mechanism behind the MCP install commands that do not exist — a pattern that was true in early 2025, learned, and repeated ever since.

The caveat: this is a plugin, so it installs in two steps, and twenty-five skills is a lot of surface area. Read the four epistemic ones first. They are the reason to install it.

$ /plugin marketplace add addyosmani/agent-skills
$ /plugin install agent-skills@addy-agent-skills

• View skill & platform support →

DIDN’T PASS / 04

Two popular repos we looked at and did not list, and one publisher that went quiet.

• No declared licence.Two well-known skill repos — one at 105,000 stars, one at 23,000 — return no licence at all. That is not a technicality. Without one, the default is exclusive copyright: you have no granted right to use, modify or redistribute the code, whatever the star count implies. We are not going to tell you to install something whose terms we cannot state. It is a ten-second check on any repo page, and worth making a habit.
• WordPress’s agent skills were archived in February.Automattic archived agent-skills, the repo behind the two WordPress skills we list. There is a successor, but it is not a rename: it ships different skills under a different plugin. If you installed either of ours, they still work and nobody is maintaining them. We are leaving them listed with this warning rather than pulling them out from under you mid-week.
• Eight upstreams have not shipped in four months or more, the quietest at eleven months.Quiet is not dead, and for a small stable skill it may not matter at all. It is only worth knowing which of the things you rely on are in that state — the last commit date is on every skill’s page.

WORKFLOW / 05

Disciplined Development — brainstorm, design, failing tests, then the minimum code to pass them. Beginner.

Built from obra/superpowers, and it belongs next to 03 because it is the same argument made operationally: the agent does not get to go straight to implementation. Bugs get a four-phase root cause analysis instead of a patch that makes the symptom disappear. Nothing ships without verification.

The reason to run it is not ceremony. It is that an agent left to implement directly will produce something plausible quickly, and plausible-quickly is the failure mode every skill in this issue is circling.

• Disciplined Development →

WHAT CHANGED / 06

42 skills you may have installed were updated this week.

“Updated” means the skill’s own directory got a commit since September 14 — not a judgement about what the commit did. Eight of the 42 are obra/superpowers, the repo behind this week’s workflow, which touched all of its listed skills in a single release on September 19. Top of the rest by stars:

• UI/UX Pro MaxSeptember 21
• Agent SkillsSeptember 20
• ImpeccableSeptember 15
• Last 30 DaysSeptember 19
• Scientific SkillsSeptember 21
• Emil Kowalski’s Design SkillsSeptember 15
• Planning With FilesSeptember 19
• Hugging Face CLISeptember 17

…and 26 more. The date is on every skill’s page, under Last commit.