One of the biggest challenges with using AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini is that you don’t know the inner workings. They have a vague idea of what the result will be based on your instructions, but no idea how the AI chatbot came up with it. And when you move from single-step to multi-step tasks, the situation becomes more difficult. This is where skills come into play.
What’s the big change?
Think of skills as a set of instructions that can be executed or applied with a single word. Claude-Maker Anthropic recently launched Agent Skills, an open standards tool that instructs an AI agent to perform a specific task using natural language descriptions.
Interestingly, OpenAI has added support for agent skills in the ChatGPT codex. And according to AIRPM engineer and code expert Tibor Blaho, agent skills will soon be available in ChatGPT. He also added that OpenAI could also provide “an option to convert a custom GPT into a skill.” That would be a big step forward.
Skills are not a new concept. Custom GPTs for ChatGPT serve a similar purpose, as do gems for Gemini. Even AI browsers like Dia allow skill creation, while Perplexity’s Comet browser includes the same ideas like shortcuts.
But why skills?
No technical or programming knowledge is required to create skills. You can use natural language prompts to create them and also give them a name. For my work I created one called “Research”. And this was all the instructions I used:
“When a phrase or term is mentioned, look it up in journals and scientific publications, find the most frequently cited articles, and summarize the key findings in bullet points.” You can take a look at how Skills Builder works in the Slide Browser.
So next time I want to research a topic, I can call the skill by name and follow up on the query instead of having to write a detailed prompt every time. If I have a skill, I can simply proceed with a short command like “/research Manhattan Project” and get my answer exactly how I want it.
But there is another big advantage of the Agent Skills platform leading to ChatGPT. It’s an open standard, meaning these capabilities will work just as well on other AI chatbots like Claude, Copilot, and Gemini as they do on ChatGPT.
