@tjrobertson52

Knowing how to do something on a computer is becoming less valuable everyday, but knowing how to articulate how to do something on a computer is becoming more valuable. Google's release of Skills Inside of Chrome yesterday is a perfect example of this.

But before we talk about that, we need to talk about what skills are and why they're quickly becoming your most valuable business asset. In its most basic form, a skill is just text explaining how to do a specific task. There's nothing technical about it.

Anyone can write this. If you've ever written a prompt before, you've already done 90% of the work.

The idea of skills came from anthropic, the creators of Claude. And still today, if you're looking to create some skills, which I highly recommend, you should be using Claude to do. However, all the major models, ChatGPT, Gemini, now also incorporate skills.

So if skills are just text with a set of instruction, what's so magical about them? Sure, I guess. Now you don't have to write out those instructions every time you run the prompt.

You can save the skill once and then reuse it with a click of a button. And at first, that seemed like it was gonna be the primary advantage of skills. Saves you a little bit of time.

But in practice, what we're realizing is skills was the missing piece. Skills are letting us do things with AI that we didn't think would be possible for a year or two.

It turns out if you can clearly articulate every step and decision you make throughout a process, you'll find out that AI is a lot more capable than you might have thought. Most of the skills that we create find one very narrow task. The smaller the scope, the better.

But even for a narrow task, the instructions, or what's called the skill dot m D file, might be 300 lines of text. And then some skills will also contain what are called reference files. These are additional markdown files that might contain examples or guidelines.

Don't worry too much about the structure, though. Just tell Claude to create a skill, and it'll handle the structure.

But that's just the starting point. Then every time you use that skill, you're gonna provide feedback. And have Claude incorporate that feedback into the skill.

Do this 10 or 20 times, and you'll be surprised how capable it becomes.

But then the real magic comes from what are called orchestrator skills. Once you have a couple dozen narrowly defined skills, you can have orchestrator skills string them together into a more complex task. At least right now.

This seems to be the future of knowledge work, which is why we're seeing these skills get incorporated into every product, including skills for Chrome. With this release, you can now import skills into Chrome, and Gemini can run that skill in a browser with a click of a button.

Now, unfortunately, the version of Gemini that runs in Chrome isn't especially capable right now. I do think Google is well positioned to win this whole thing in the end, but right now they're just very focused on cost efficiency. And so what that means is Gemini is just kind of lazy.

That doesn't mean this release won't enable some cool things. I'm sure it will. Google's already put out their own library of skills that you can use out of the box.

I imagine any task you've been doing in a browser will become easier with a skill like this. Or one you create yourself.

But the only reason this story is interesting to me personally is it confirms that this is the direction we're headed in. If you are waiting for a sign before investing a lot of your time into creating skills, this is it. AI progress is rarely easy to predict, but it looks like skills, at least when they're built well, are gonna be valuable for at least the next two years.