Part 3: Skills, Projects, and Prompts. Oh my?

I got to thinking, how many of my prompts should be Skills and which ones are just better as prompts?

Made with Gemini

I avoided Claude Skills for months. They seemed way too complicated, and I didn’t have access to Claude Code, so I pushed them off to the “when I have a Claude Pro subscription” pile. I saw workflows that sounded amazing—but also seemed a little hard to set up. No, they probably weren’t. And it’s not like I don’t know my way around a command line (since 1988 baby!). I just couldn’t wrap my head around then.

Yet.

It wasn’t until Antigravity got Skills support, and I realized you could just have Antigravity or Gemini CLI turn a prompt into a Skill for you, that I actually started digging in and making Skills. Granted, I didn’t do a damn much with them at first, but I had them!

But my “oooh, Skills“ light bulb didn’t come on until I started using Claude more heavily in the past few weeks. I still might forget (often) that I have a Skill for some task I’m about to do, but I’ve built and downloaded a few good ones to use.

Is this like when I had to buy CDs to replace my cassettes all over again?

In part one of this series, I laid out how—and why—you’d turn a prompt into a Skill. In part two, I showed you how my “omg, this actually works” moment with Millie in Antigravity. This is the “okay, but should I just convert everything into a Skill now?” post.

Short answer: no. But also, kind of yes. Let me explain.

We’ve already talked about how Skills are just prompts. Fancy prompts that you can call from any chat or project, but still prompts nonetheless. Which means, a crap prompt makes a crap Skill. In the past few months, we’ve gone from “top 10 prompts to supercharge your emails” to “the 10 Skills that run my whole content operation with two key strokes” without actually solving the underlying problem—crap generic prompts.

Generic prompts give generic results. Generic Skills can give you generic results even faster. Never forget, the difference between a useful prompt and a useful Skill is the same thing: a solid prompt that gets cranked to 11.

Don’t forget that while Skills are great, Skills only work in Claude right now—not Gemini, not ChatGPT. I’m sure Skills will come to the web-based versions of ChatGPT and Gemini soon (since Codex, Gemini CLI, and Antigravity all support them), but they aren’t here yet. Prompts and prompting still matter, maybe even more now, and they aren’t going away anytime soon.

Not everything can be a Skill. Not everything should be either

This is where I had my oh, right, obviously moment.

While I was working on part one, I was thinking about what prompts and Gems I might want to turn into Skills.

I have to admit when I was writing the first post I might have been going down a rabbit hole of “oh what prompt should I turn into a Skill now.”

I was working through my Gems—thinking about which ones to convert—and I kept getting to a fundamental question: should this even be a Skill? Where did I draw the line? What are the key things that make or break the decision?

My header image maker has to stay in Gemini because a) Claude can’t do images and b) if I use it outside of Gemini in Chrome it’s going to wrack up serious bucks in API calls. Millie (and her virtual persona colleagues), was fine because I could take the text file that was their “persona DNA” and paste it into the prompt for Skill-i-fying.

Then I hit Gems like my Ghostwriter and Bob the career counselor. My Gemini Ghostwriter (whose DNA is in this very post, for the record) and Bob, my career coach. These aren’t simple persona prompts. They need stuff. Bob needs my current resume, my Strengths Finder results, my durable skills database. The Ghostwriter needs my voice documents, my post history, my style notes. Files that get updated. Files that don’t play nice as Markdown. Research reports. Images.

They are also conversational prompts. You interact with them. Same with my Content Audit, Brand Voice Generator, Content Calendar, even the prompt that creates the virtual persona prompts, they don’t work as a Skill because they they need a back-and-forth dialogue. All of those, fine not the images one, could easily be a Project in Claude (or Gem or custom GPT).

Here’s how I started to think about Projects and Skills (let’s not confuse things with Artifacts, okay? kthxbai): Skills are individual tools, a Project is a toolbox (or in my analogy a drill case).