Mastering AI Skills: How Custom Workflows Are Transforming Productivity
Discover how AI skills in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini automate recurring workflows. Expert Alex Khoroshin shares insights on building, sharing, and securing custom AI capabilities.
If you use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini regularly, you likely have tasks you ask them to perform over and over: drafting emails in a specific style, summarizing meetings, analyzing documents, or preparing reports. Every time, you find yourself explaining to the artificial intelligence exactly what you want, how the result should look, what is important, and what to avoid. Sometimes it succeeds on the first try, and sometimes it takes several rounds of corrections. This is where skills come in.
Skills offer a way to grant the tool you are using customized capabilities through packages of instructions, knowledge, and tools that it can activate whenever needed. Instead of starting from scratch in every conversation, you can teach the tool a specific workflow and use it repeatedly. Anthropic, the developer of Claude, pioneered the skills revolution, introducing them in October 2025 across its chatbot and developer tool Claude Code. Following them, OpenAI and Google adopted the technology, initially in developer tools and later in chatbots. How do you create a skill, do you need to know how to code, and how can you leverage these capabilities to save time and simplify daily tasks?
To answer these questions, we spoke with Alex Khoroshin, a software engineer and the owner of the software house Yootech. Khoroshin voluntarily founded and maintains Skills IL, a library of skills tailored to the needs of Israeli users. The library includes over 200 skills assisting with various tasks—ranging from filling out National Insurance Institute forms to comparing insurance policies and handling income tax matters, as well as developer skills. With his guidance, we prepared a guide for beginners looking to build a skill from scratch, as well as experienced users seeking to refine their skills.
What Is a Skill?
A skill is a package of instructions, and sometimes knowledge, examples, files, or code, that teaches an AI model to perform a specific task in a defined way. Khoroshin uses the analogy of a "knowledge pill": "You give it to the AI, and suddenly it becomes an expert in that field." A skill is packaged as a file called SKILL.md, which is uniform across all tools that use skills.
According to Khoroshin, there are two types of skills: process skills and knowledge skills. A process skill teaches the model how to execute an action or a sequence of actions, such as generating a weekly summary from user-provided data. A knowledge skill provides the model with professional or dedicated information not necessarily available to it natively, such as rules, tables, or procedures in a specific field. The distinction is not absolute, as a single skill can combine both knowledge and process.
Why Are Skills Better Than Regular Prompts?
First, a skill allows you to take a recurring action and package it as a permanent file of procedures that the tool will know when to invoke. Instead of writing a long prompt every time, a few words signal to the AI that it is time to run the skill. Second, a skill enables an entire workflow: not just defining the tone, but also the sequence of steps, how to verify the result, and what to do if something goes wrong. Furthermore, you can combine multiple skills together, such as one skill analyzing a document and another generating a presentation from it. Finally, skills boast a uniform format, allowing greater portability between different AI tools compared to platform-locked projects.
How to Create a Skill
The simplest way to create a skill is through a conversation with the chat. The chat itself has a skill for creating skills, which activates when requested. Perform the required action once in a regular chat, and once you reach the desired result, ask the model to package it as a skill. You will receive a ZIP file and the option to save it with a click. You can view and edit your skills through the sidebar: in ChatGPT click Plugins, in Claude click Customize, and in Gemini click customization. From there, you can upload a ready-made ZIP file or create a skill from scratch.
Golden Rules for a Successful Skill
To ensure your skill activates when intended, clearly define its description: what it does, under what circumstances it should be used, and the trigger words. Avoid cluttering instructions with things the model already knows. Keep it focused, add examples illustrating the desired output, ensure underlying information remains relevant, and do not try to make a single skill do everything.
Security Considerations
A skill is not necessarily just a collection of innocent instructions—it may include files and code that the chatbot can execute. If the AI agent has access to local files or external services, a malicious skill could exploit this. Therefore, Khoroshin recommends preferring skills from trusted sources and inspecting the SKILL.md file and accompanying files before installation to verify permissions and avoid unexpected behaviors.
