How many skills does a Claude Code plugin add? I counted mine

On one real Mac, eight plugins from public marketplaces added 44 skills, 23 slash commands and 7 subagents. One plugin brought 37 of the 44 skills on its own, about 80% of the skill text Claude Code keeps in context every session. Across 124 sessions since it was installed, none of those 37 skills was invoked through the Skill tool.

By Miguel Silva · Updated 2026-10-11

What eight plugins added

These are the plugins from public marketplaces installed on the machine on 11 October 2026. Three private plugins on the same Mac are left out of every number on this page. Skills are counted as folders under the plugin's skills directory, which is what Claude Code loads.

vercel

37 skills, 5 commands, 3 subagents and an MCP server

codex

2 skills, 8 commands, 1 subagent

brag

2 skills

gsap-scrolltrigger

1 skill, 2 commands, 1 subagent

animated-component-libraries

1 skill, 2 commands, 1 subagent

motion-graphics

1 skill

plannotator

4 commands

modern-web-design

2 commands, 1 subagent

Total: 44 skills, 23 slash commands and 7 subagents. You install one plugin to get one thing done, and you can end up with dozens of entries you never picked one by one.

What it costs in every session

A skill's name and description are in context in every session, whether or not the skill ever runs. The body only loads when the skill triggers. So the permanent cost of a plugin is the sum of its skill descriptions, not the size of its files.

Across the 44 skills, names and descriptions add up to 14,052 characters, roughly 3,500 tokens using the usual four characters per token. That is an estimate, not a tokenizer count. The Vercel plugin accounts for 11,318 of those characters, about 2,830 tokens or 80% of the total.

How many of them actually ran

Claude Code writes each session to a transcript under ~/.claude/projects, and a skill run shows up there as a call to the Skill tool. 124 sessions on this machine started after the Vercel plugin was installed on 28 July 2026. None of them contains a Skill call to any of its 37 skills.

That does not prove the plugin did nothing. It also injects guidance through hooks when a session starts, and no Skill call records that. What it does show is that 37 skill descriptions sat in context for two and a half months without one of them being called by name.

grep -rhoE '"name":"Skill","input":\{"skill":"[^"]+"' ~/.claude/projects \
  | sed -E 's/.*"skill":"//; s/"$//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

Check your own plugins

• List each plugin's skills with ls ~/.claude/plugins/cache/*/*/*/skills. Older cached versions show up there too, so read the version folder named in ~/.claude/plugins/installed_plugins.json.
• Run /skill-doctor in Claude Code for its own usage and context-cost report, available from v2.1.252.
• Turn off what you don't use before you uninstall anything. Plugin skills are managed from /plugin.

Loadout puts all of this in one window: every skill a plugin brought, how many times each one fired, its always-loaded size, and a switch to turn it off without deleting it. The guide to finding skills you never use covers the cleanup step by step.

Questions

How many skills does a Claude Code plugin add?

It depends on the plugin. On the Mac measured here, eight public plugins added between 0 and 37 skills each, 44 in total. One plugin accounted for 37 of them.

Do unused plugin skills cost tokens?

Yes. Every skill's name and description is loaded into context each session, whether or not it runs. Here the 44 descriptions came to roughly 3,500 tokens per session, estimated at four characters per token.

How do I see which plugin skills I actually use?

Look for Skill tool calls in your transcripts under ~/.claude/projects, or run /skill-doctor in Claude Code. Loadout shows the count next to every skill.