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Six things happen to a skill. Each has exactly one word. This page is the only place they are defined, so that they cannot drift apart again.

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The three verbs

Install

Link a skill into your workspace. No copy. Your agents get the author’s updates as they publish them, the way an extension marketplace works.

Fork

Take an editable copy. It becomes your skill, in your org, and it stops tracking the author. Same meaning as on GitHub.

Export

Write the files to disk. For runtimes that load SKILL.md themselves — Claude Code, Cursor. Takes no copy and needs no fork.
Each verb has an inverse, and only Install’s is a distinct action: Uninstall removes the link. It clears the skill from every agent at once, and it is safe to repeat — removing a skill you no longer have succeeds and reports that nothing changed. A fork is your own skill, so you delete it like any other; an export is just files, so you delete the files. Install and Fork answer what do I have. Export answers where do the bytes live. They are separate questions, so you can export a skill you installed without forking it:
Uninstall is in the app and on the API today. The SDK call ships in a later release — until then, remove a link with:
decimalai skills install and router.install() still exist and still do fork-then-write. They are deprecated in favour of the three above, and they have not changed behaviour — only the recommendation.
The Claude Code plugin’s /decimalai:install is an Export by the table above: it writes SKILL.md and its attachments to .claude/skills/, takes no copy, creates no link, and leaves no record on the platform. It is spelled install because that is the word a plugin user types — nothing about your workspace changes when you run it.

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The two numbers

Installs is counted in agents, not teams, because a team that rolled a skill out to ten agents did ten times the adoption of a team that put it on one. An agent only exists once a trace has landed for it, so the number cannot be inflated by clicking. Under the surface, a run passes through four stages and only the last one is what “Uses” means: The first three are diagnostic: offered against activated is how you tell a skill nobody picks from a skill nobody is shown. They never appear as a headline number, because four counts labelled slightly differently is how the vocabulary came apart in the first place.

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One more, for the SDK

instrument turns on tracing for a framework — decimalai.langchain, decimalai.openai_agents, and so on. It has nothing to do with skills; it is here only because it used to be spelled install() too.

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Words we deliberately do not use

  • “Used by N teams” — the wrong unit. See Installs above.
  • “Subscribe” — an older name for Install. The database table is still called skill_subscription; nothing user-facing says it.
  • “Activations” — the internal name for the last stage above. Say Uses.
  • install_count — counts fork events, never decremented. It is not the adoption number and is not rendered as one.