Coding agents and skills: the repos everyone installs

What you'll see in this lesson

1. Coding agents: your code team in the terminal

   They code, test and fix things for you from the terminal, and skills teach them methods. They're open alternatives to Claude Code or Codex.

2. Gemini CLI: Google's free agent to get started

   Google's official terminal agent, with over 100,000 stars: you sign in with your Google account, no card or API key needed.

3. OpenCode: the open agent for any model

   Open-source agent for terminal and desktop, with over 200,000 stars: use Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek or local models.

4. Anthropic Skills: teach Claude to create Word and Excel

   Anthropic's official Agent Skills, with over 180,000 stars: folders of instructions and scripts that Claude loads on the fly.

5. Matt Pocock Skills: a pro method for your agent

   The most starred skills collection, with almost 290,000 stars: the agent asks, plans, tests and reviews like an engineer.

6. Caveman: your agent talks less and you spend fewer tokens

   A skill and a proxy that make the agent answer in telegram style, with the same exact code as always. Over 110,000 stars.

7. Pi: the minimalist agent you extend yourself

   A very lightweight agent toolkit, with over 110,000 stars: its coding agent, pi, has become the base for other projects.

8. OpenHands: an AI developer that opens pull requests

   Agents that code, run commands and open pull requests from a local web app. Over 90,000 stars; it used to be called OpenDevin.

9. Summary: which agent and which skills to install

   Start free with Gemini CLI, move to OpenCode or Pi if you want to choose your model, and add skills to work with a method and spend less.