The good ones aren't apps we open — they install into this setup and Claude
calls them. npx skills add …, pip install … plus an MCP
entry, or a symlink into ~/.claude/skills/. After that you just ask
for the edit in plain English, in the same chat you brief from.
Never the repo's demo file — a real swipe-gallery clip or a real bottle shot. Everything looks good on its own demo. If it hasn't produced something by the 45-minute bell, that is the result: it costs too much to set up.
MIT / Apache — use it, change it, ship it. GPL / AGPL — fine for a tool we run here, a problem inside anything customer-facing. No licence file means all rights reserved: we can read it and copy the idea, never the code.
A repo that ships daily will break a machine on its own schedule. Whatever wins gets locked to one version, and the machine's README says which. That's the difference between using someone's repo and inheriting their bugs.
It's a provenance read — licence, ownership, age, contributor count, release discipline, whether it's still alive. It is not a security audit. Nobody has read the source. Treat anything below Reasonable as code you wouldn't run outside a throwaway folder.
A sweep of 505 repos and counting, across 21 search axes tied to the machines we already run — plus anything scraped off X. Stars are shown but score nothing: they measure attention, not fit.