Somebody on Hacker News this week did the AI ecosystem a favor: they named the genre. The thread was about an "Academic Research Skills for Claude Code" pack on GitHub , and the highest-voted comment — exasperated, exact — called it "skill spam." The phrase stuck inside 24 hours. By Saturday morning, three independent surfaces (HN, GitHub-trending velocity, validator-tool emergence) had aligned on the same complaint: there are now so many skill packs that the next product category is the thing that decides which of them are real . The relevant detail — the thing that puts you on notice if you're shipping a skill pack — is the timeline. Anthropic introduced Skills as a Claude Code surface less than three months ago. Within that window, the genre has matured from "skill packs" → "skill marketplaces" → "skill validators" → "benchmark-backed skill primitives" → "skill spam critique on HN front page." Five generations in a quarter.…