36What skills are

A newish thing, very convenient, and explainable in a minute.

A skill is a folder with a text file describing how to do one specific thing. Your rules, your order of operations, your examples. The AI keeps only a one-line description in its head, and when a task matches it opens the file and reads the whole thing.

Why you'd want that. Imagine explaining the same things every time: how to format commits, how you name files, which colours the project uses, what must not be touched. A skill is a way to explain that once and for good.

How it works in practice. You write a file with a name and a description like "how to deploy this project". Then you say "deploy it" and it remembers it has instructions and follows them.

The most important part of a skill is the description. A vague "helps with code" will never fire, because there's no telling when to use it. A concrete "when tests fail after npm test" fires reliably.

And yes: you can write your own skill in ten minutes by asking the AI. Literally: "make me a skill describing how we build pages around here".