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AIWR Tutorial · Updated October 2026
What a skill is, and how to install one.
No coding, no terminal, no subscription to anything new. If you can download a file and find a settings menu, you can install a skill — and it will change how your AI reads your pages for good.
Coming from our custom GPTs or Gems?
OpenAI is retiring custom GPTs (scheduled for December 11, 2026), and Google is replacing Gemini Gems with skills, starting with personal accounts in November 2026 (Opal goes away then, too). Our Location Scout, Character-Smith, Writers' Group, and Storyboarder are now skills, GrammarCoach is now Grammar Coach, and Compost Mode lives on as Find What's Alive. Install them once using the steps below and they work in Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini alike.
The Basics
A skill is a set of instructions your AI keeps.
When you paste a long instruction into a chat — read this as an editor, quote the actual lines, don't rewrite my prose — it works for that conversation and then it's gone. Next week you paste it again, slightly differently, and get a slightly different result.
A skill is that instruction, saved. You install it once. From then on it sits quietly in the background, and the AI pulls it up on its own when the work matches. Ask for help with a messy draft and the draft-reading skill activates without you asking for it by name.
Each skill has two parts doing two different jobs. A short description says what it does and when to use it — that's the part the AI reads constantly to decide whether this skill is relevant. Then the instructions — the actual method, sometimes several pages of it — load only once the skill is triggered. That's why you can install a dozen skills without slowing anything down.
Skills are not a writing tool that generates prose. Ours are the opposite: they constrain the AI, telling it to quote your material rather than replace it, to name a problem rather than fix it, and to leave the decisions with you.
The File
An .md file is just text with light formatting.
.md stands for Markdown. It is a plain text file — the same thing as a .txt — with a few punctuation conventions that stand in for formatting. A # at the start of a line makes a heading. Asterisks make a bulleted list. That's most of it.
There is nothing hidden in it and nothing that can run on your computer. Double-click it and it opens in TextEdit, Notepad, or whatever editor you already use. If it opens in a browser instead, drag it into your text editor.
Every skill is built around one file named SKILL.md. It opens with a small block fenced by three dashes — the frontmatter — carrying the name and the description. Everything after that block is the instructions, written in ordinary English:
---
name: read-the-draft
description: "Diagnose a complete or partial draft before revision
begins. Use for fiction, memoir, essays, narrative nonfiction,
scripts, or other creative work when a writer wants an
evidence-based reading of structure, scene function, voice,
pacing, orientation, patterns, promises, or the gap between
intended and actual effect..."
---
# Read the Draft
Read the draft as evidence. Determine what is actually happening
on the page before prescribing changes...That is the whole format. You can open any of ours, read every word, and edit anything you disagree with — change the time budget, add a genre you write in, cut a section. It is your file.
The Download
What's inside the zip.
Each download is a zip file containing one folder. Claude and ChatGPT expect exactly this shape, a folder with SKILL.md inside it rather than a loose SKILL.md, so download the zip and upload it as it is. There is no need to unzip it first.
read-the-draft.zip
└── read-the-draft/
├── SKILL.md ← the instructions
├── agents/
│ └── openai.yaml ← display name + starter prompt (ChatGPT)
└── assets/
└── icon.svg ← the tile art (ChatGPT)The openai.yaml file and the icon are small extras that ChatGPT reads: a display name, a suggested starter prompt, and the artwork on the skill's tile. Claude and Gemini ignore both and work from SKILL.md alone, which is why Gemini users can upload just the SKILL.md file. Each skill on the skills page has a “SKILL.md for Gemini” link for exactly that. Nothing in any of these files connects to the internet or runs code.
Installing
Into Claude
Skills work on every claude.ai plan, including Free, as long as code execution is turned on. They are per-user: each person on a team installs their own, though Team and Enterprise members can also share skills with colleagues.
Download the skill
From the skills page, pick one and download the zip. Leave it zipped.
Turn on code execution
On a personal plan, open Settings → Capabilities and switch on Code execution and file creation. On Team and Enterprise, an owner enables it for the organization. Our skills run no code, but Claude requires the setting for any skill.
Upload the zip
Go to Customize → Skills, select the + button, then Create skill and Upload a skill. Choose the zip you downloaded. Claude reads the SKILL.md and lists the skill by name.
Check that it's enabled
New skills appear in the same list with a toggle. Make sure yours is on. That's the whole install — nothing to restart.
Using Claude Code instead?
Skip the upload. Unzip the folder into ~/.claude/skills/ for yourself, or .claude/skills/ inside a project to share it with collaborators. Claude Code finds it on the filesystem.
Worth knowing: if you sign in to Claude Code with the same account, skills you uploaded to claude.ai sync into it automatically. Syncing only runs that way, so a skill you add in Claude Code won't appear on claude.ai.
Anthropic's current documentation: Using Skills in Claude and the Agent Skills overview.
Installing
Into ChatGPT
ChatGPT follows the same open Agent Skills standard, so the identical download works here too. Skills are available on the Business, Enterprise, Healthcare, and Edu plans, and have reached personal Plus accounts — OpenAI's help center still lists only the business plans, so the rollout is running ahead of the documentation. On Enterprise and Edu workspaces an administrator controls whether members can use and upload them.
Download the skill
The same zip you would use for Claude. Leave it zipped.
Open the Skills tab
In the sidebar, select Plugins. In the Plugin Directory, select the Skills tab. You'll see what's installed, what you've created, and anything shared with you.
Create → Upload from your computer
Choose Create, then Upload from your computer, and select the zip.
Wait for the scan
ChatGPT scans every uploaded skill before it becomes available. Most clear immediately. Some are marked Needs Review, which means reading a little more information before you can use it; anything flagged as a risk is marked Blocked. The scan is not a substitute for reading a skill yourself.
Desktop and web are separate
As in Claude, personal skills don't sync across surfaces: a skill added on the desktop app has to be added again on web and mobile. Same file, one more upload.
OpenAI's current documentation: Skills in ChatGPT. Menus in both products move around as these features mature — if what you see doesn't match the steps above, the vendor's own help page will be current.
Installing
Into Gemini
Gemini now reads the same SKILL.md format, as part of replacing Gems with skills. You need a personal Google Account (work and school accounts get skills in 2027), you must be over 18, and Keep Activity must be turned on. Uploading works on the web at gemini.google.com and in the Mac app, not yet in the phone apps.
Download the SKILL.md
On the skills page, use the SKILL.md for Gemini link. Gemini takes the single file. Use it rather than the .zip, which is packaged the way Claude and ChatGPT expect.
Open the Skills page
In Gemini on the web or the Mac app, open Settings in the sidebar, then Skills.
Upload and create
Select Upload at the top, choose the SKILL.md file, review the name and description Gemini shows you, and select Create.
Use it
Gemini picks up a relevant skill on its own, or you can type / in a chat and choose it from the list.
Downloading more than one?
Every skill's file is called SKILL.md, so your browser may save the second one as SKILL (1).md. Upload each file as soon as you download it, or rename it back to SKILL.md before uploading. Gemini reads the skill's name from inside the file, not from the filename.
Google's current documentation: Create and manage skills for Gemini Apps and About the transition from Gems to skills. Gemini's skills are brand new, so expect the menus to shift.
After Installing
You mostly don't have to think about it.
Paste your pages, say what you want, and the right skill activates on its own — that's what the description is for. Most of the time the only visible difference is that the response is better.
When you want a specific one, name it. Any of these will do it, with your pages pasted underneath:
Use Find What's Alive to find what is worth keeping in these rough notes.
Use Read the Draft to diagnose this draft before I begin revising it.
Use Keep the Voice to build a voice guide from my best writing and audit this revision.
Use Read It Two Ways to give this passage two independent readings and map the differences.
Use Give Useful Feedback to help me respond constructively to this writer's draft.
Use Sort the Feedback to organize these comments into a revision plan I can evaluate.
Use Character-Smith to help me develop a character for my story.
Use Location Scout to build a location dossier for my story's setting.
Use Storyboarder to storyboard this scene from my script.
Use Dialogue Ear to diagnose the dialogue in this scene.
Use Grammar Coach to go through the grammar in this passage with me.
Use Writers' Group to workshop this excerpt.
Use Close Reading Companion to help me read this passage like a writer.
Use Query Letter Coach to give me an agent's-eye read of my query letter.
Use AI Disclosure Helper to check my AI use against this submission policy.
One habit worth forming: give it the actual pages, not a summary of them. Every one of these skills works by quoting your material back to you, and it cannot quote what it hasn't seen.
Troubleshooting
If it goes wrong
The upload was rejected
Almost always the zip got rebuilt somewhere along the way. Claude and ChatGPT want a zip whose root contains the skill folder. If you unzipped it and re-zipped the loose files, SKILL.md ends up at the top level and the upload fails. Download a fresh copy and upload it untouched. In ChatGPT, note that Needs Review is not a rejection — it means reading a bit more before the skill turns on.
There's no Skills option at all
On Claude, turn on code execution first; the Skills list lives under Customize. On Gemini, check that you're signed in with a personal Google Account rather than a work or school one, and that you're on the web or Mac app. On ChatGPT, look under Plugins rather than the top level of the sidebar — the Skills tab lives inside the Plugin Directory. If it isn't there at all, skills may not have reached your plan yet. On Enterprise and Edu, an admin separately controls whether members can use skills and whether they can upload their own, so if the tab is there but uploading isn't, that's the permission to ask about.
It installed but never seems to fire
Check the toggle is on, then ask for it by name using one of the lines above. If it activates when named but not on its own, your request probably didn't look like a match — the AI decides based on the description, so being concrete about the task helps.
It rewrote my draft anyway
Say so, plainly: don't rewrite anything — go back and follow the skill. These skills are written to diagnose rather than revise, and a nudge usually puts it back on the method.
Going Further
Write your own.
The fastest way in is to modify one of ours. Open the SKILL.md, change what you'd change, rename the folder and the name field, zip the folder, upload it. That's a new skill.
Two rules worth knowing. The name must be lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens. And spend your effort on the description: it is the only part the AI reads when deciding whether to reach for the skill, so it must say both what the skill does and when it applies. A vague description means a skill that never fires.
Beyond that, write it the way you'd brief a sharp assistant on their first week — what to do, what to hand back, and what not to touch.
A note on trust
Installing a skill gives an AI new instructions, and a skill from a source you don't know can tell it to do things you wouldn't want. Read before you install — ours are plain text with no scripts, and you can read every line on this site before downloading anything.