There's a lot of hype around Agent Skills right now. Vercel shipped skills.sh, a package manager for Agent Skills, and Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are all building skills management right into their products. It's moving fast, and reminds me of the early NPM days.
Thinking ahead, it's easy to imagine Agent Skills marketplaces. You create a skill, upload it, slap a $5 or $10 price on it. Think Lightroom presets or Canva templates for AI. And sure, I think there's a market there. Some folks will make decent money packaging what they know into markdown files that other people drop into their agents.
But here's what I keep thinking about: selling skills is like selling the recipe, and you want to be in the cake business.
Think about what you're actually doing when you write a skill file. You're taking the thing that makes you a great engineer or copywriter or analyst — years of taste, judgment, pattern recognition. And you're compressing it into a markdown file that someone else gets to run.
That's useful for them, no question. But it commoditizes you.
What people really want is great writing, clean books, or a finished report. They want the outcome, not the instructions.
The real business is the cake business
I wrote recently about leverage and function agents as a framework for thinking about agents, and this maps directly onto it. A skill marketplace is a leverage play. You're handing someone a tool that makes them more productive.
But the vertical agent? That's the function play. It takes those same skills, combines them with proprietary data, RL loops and compute, to do the actual job.
I'm talking about the bookkeeper that reconciles your accounts and closes the books every night. The copywriter agent that drafts, revises, and writes content without anyone in the loop. The financial analyst that preps your investment memos at 3am because it never sleeps.
That's where the money is. When you sell Agent Skills, you're getting paid at the instruction layer, a fraction of what the outcome is worth. The vertical agent captures the value of the whole thing.
Don't sell the recipe. Sell the cake. 🧁
/k