OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI
26 comments
·December 12, 2025simonw
I had a bunch of fun writing about this one, mainly because it was a great excuse to highlight the excellent news about Kākāpō breeding season this year.
(I'm not just about pelicans.)
KK7NIL
TIL about a large moss green flightless parrot :)
jb_rad
Will Kākāpō be riding bicycles soon?
OrsonSmelles
They already ride British nature photographers—what do they need bikes for?
lacker
I'm not sure if I have the right mental model for a "skill". It's basically a context-management tool? Like a skill is a brief description of something, and if the model decides it wants the skill based on that description, then it pulls in the rest of whatever amorphous stuff the skill has, scripts, documents, what have you. Is this the right way to think about it?
simonw
It's a folder with a markdown file in it plus optional additional reference files and executable scripts.
The clever part is that the markdown file has a section in it like this: https://github.com/datasette/skill/blob/a63d8a2ddac9db8225ee...
---
name: datasette-plugins
description: "Writing Datasette plugins using Python and the pluggy plugin system. Use when Claude needs to: (1) Create a new Datasette plugin, (2) Implement plugin hooks like prepare_connection, register_routes, render_cell, etc., (3) Add custom SQL functions, (4) Create custom output renderers, (5) Add authentication or permissions logic, (6) Extend Datasette's UI with menus, actions, or templates, (7) Package a plugin for distribution on PyPI"
---
leetrout
Have you used AWS bedrock? I assume these get pretty affordable with prompt caching...
behnamoh
why did this simple idea take so long to become available? I remember even in llama 2 days I was doing this stuff, and that model didn't even function call.
jmalicki
Yes. I find these very useful for enforcing e.g. skills like debugging, committing code, make prs, responding to pr feedback from ai review agents, etc. without constantly polluting the context window.
So when it's time to commit, make sure you run these checks, write a good commit message, etc.
Debugging is especially useful since AI agents can often go off the rails and go into loops rewriting code - so it's in a skill I can push for "read the log messages. Inserting some more useful debug assertions to isolate the failure. Write some more unit tests that are more specific." Etc.
canadiantim
I think it’s also important to think of skills in the context of tasks, so when you want an agent to perform a specialized task, then this is the context, the resources and scripts it needs to perform the task.
mbesto
From a purely technical view, skills are just an automated way to introduce user and system prompt stuffing into the context right? Not to belittle this, but rather that seems like a way of reducing the need for AI wrapper apps since most AI wrappers just do systematic user and system prompt stuffing + potentially RAG + potentially MCP.
simonw
Yeah, there are a whole lot of AI wrapper applications that could be a folder with a markdown file in at this point!
8cvor6j844qw_d6
Does this mean I can point to a code snippet and a link to the related documentation and the coding agent refer to it instead of writing "outdated" code?
Some frameworks/languages move really fast unfortunately.
simonw
Yes, definitely. I've had a lot of success already showing LLMs short examples of coding libraries they don't know about from their core training data.
jumploops
I think the future is likely one that mixes the kitchen-sink style MCP resources with custom skills.
Services can provide an MCP-like layer that provides semantic definitions of everything you can do with said service (API + docs).
Skills can then be built that combine some subset of the 3rd party interfaces, some bespoke code, etc. and then surface these more context-focused skills to the LLM/agent.
Couldn’t we just use APIs?
Yes, but not every API is documented in the same way. An “MCP-like” registry might be the right abstraction for 3rd parties to expose their services in a semantic-first way.
dkdcio
CLIs are really good when you can use them. self-documenting, agents already have shell tools, they tend to solve fine-grained auth, etc.
feels like the right layer of abstraction for remote APIs
bzmrgonz
It is interesting that they are relying on visual reading for document ingestion instead of OCT. Recently I read an article which says Handwriting recognition has matured, and I'm beginning to think this is the approach they are takingwirh HAndwiting recognition.
ohghiZai
Is there a way to implement skills with Gemini?
simonw
Looks like they added it to the Gemini CLI public roadmap last week: https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/11506#eve...
esperent
I've been testing out Gemini Enterprise for use by staff in various positions at my business.
It's got the best implementation of a "skills-like" agent tool I've seen. Basically a visual tree builder, currently only one level deep. So I've set up the "<my company name> agent" and then it has subagents/skills for thing like marketing/supply chain research/sysadmin/translation etc., each with a separate description, prompt, and knowledge base.
Unfortunately, everything else about Gemini Enterprise screams "early alpha, why the hell are you selling this as an actual finished product?".
For example, after I put half a day into setting up an agent and subagents, then went to share this with the other people helping me to test it, I found that... I can't. Literally no way to share agents in a tool that is supposedly for teams to use. I found one of the devs saying that sharing agents would be released in "about two weeks". That was two months ago.
Mini rant over... But my point is that skills are just "agents + auto-selecting sub-agents via a short description" and we'll see this pattern everywhere soon. Claude Skills have some additional sandboxing but that's mostly only interesting for coders.
canadiantim
Can or should skills be used for managing the documentation of dependencies in a project and the expertise in them?
I’ve been playing with doing this but kind of doesn’t feel the most natural fit.
hurturue
Github Copilot too
simonw
VS Code Copilot just announced experimental skill support in their November release: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_107#_reuse-your-cla...
koakuma-chan
Does Cursor support skills?
smcleod
No I don't believe so. Cursor is usually pretty behind other agentic coding tools in my experience.
It’s impressive how every iteration tries to get further from pretending actual AGI would be anywhere close when we are basically writing library functions with the worst DSL known to man, markdown-with-english.