Can You Fly That Thing? | Tomasz Tunguz

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Can You Fly That Thing?

February 9, 2026

AI SaaS Strategy

In AI, distribution is king. Skills are seizing the crown.

Skills are programs written in English. They tell an agent how to accomplish a task : which APIs to call, what format to use, how to handle edge cases. A skill transforms an agent from a conversationalist into an operator.

Remember Trinity in The Matrix? “Can you fly that thing?” Neo asks. “Not yet,” she says. Seconds later, Tank uploads a B-212 helicopter pilot program directly into her mind. She steps into the cockpit & flies.

That’s what skills feel like. You don’t learn an interface. You acquire a capability. Skills encode institutional knowledge in executable form. Training becomes unnecessary because the capability transfers instantly.

A lot of people are looking to fly helicopters. The top MCP server aggregator has 81,000 stars. Anthropic’s official skills repository has 67,000. Cursor rules : 38,000. OpenClaw’s awesome-skills list, which curates 3,000 community-built skills : 12,500.

GitHub Stars by AI Skills Ecosystem

For consumers, software discovery disappears. A user asks their agent to track expenses or categorize last month’s spending. The agent finds the skill. The user never knows the tool exists, aside from a subscription.

For enterprises, IT provisions applications by role. A sales rep gets Salesforce. A marketer gets HubSpot. An analyst gets Tableau. Each persona receives a bundle of icons : all requiring training, all adding cognitive load.

In the skills era, enterprises provision capabilities instead of applications.

FP&A teams receive skills that optimize budget variance analysis, pulling data from NetSuite & formatting reports in the CFO’s preferred structure. No training on pivot tables. No documentation on report templates.

Every platform shift compresses the distance between user & value. The web required a URL & a browser. Mobile required a download & a homescreen slot. Skills require a sentence.

But this distribution layer carries risk. A recent analysis of 4,784 AI agent repositories found malware embedded in skill packages : credential harvesting, backdoors disguised as monitoring. We’ll all need trusted operators like Tank to verify our skills.

“Tank, I need a pilot program for an investment memo.”