Anthropic released a new feature called Skills and I have been messing around with them. When I first read about skills it was not clear how they help. They sounded like what I have using Projects for in ChatGPT - a workspace with it's own context (memory). What I found is that they are different, but it is possible to use a Skill from Claude in ChatGPT.
My partner and I were playing a lot of Pokemon Go recently. So it seemed logical to create a skill using Claude to help answer some of the strategy questions we were discussing with one another.
I created three data files that 1/ rules of the game, 2/ the requirements and rewards for each level, and 3/ some gameplay strategy data. I asked Claude to generate a Skill that helped players identify actions they can take to optimize their gameplay to meet various goals. I also included some examples of good optimizations and bad ones to help. Even given what I though was a thorough prompt, Claude came back with several questions to help define the scope of the Skill. Once we were satisfied it was "good enough", it produced a few files, the primary of which was a .skill file.
I played around with the Skill and it did a reasonable job. They key to getting the Skill to run was to 1/ ensure that it was uploaded and enabled in the Skill manager, and 2/ when prompting in Claude using keywords that ensured it knew to use the skill. The keywords are something that I went back and forth with Claude on when building the skill. In the end, it felt similar to using and MCP where there was an inference / mapping that Claude has internally to know what to call / use.
I think of Skills as having a predefined list of prompts that automatically called when needed.
Out of curiosity, I took all the files that Claude output for the Skill and uploaded them into a ChatGPT project. The question I was trying to answer is whether the Project would retain the context of all the prompting / data and behave similar to the Skill. Since the .skill file is just a zip, I uploaded each of the file individually. And it did work, albeit not as well as it did in Claude. My guess is that there were two contributors to the less outcomes; the first being that they are different models and the Skill benefited from the model that created it. Second that the ChatGPT Project did worse over time as the context of the Project grew with each subsequent chat (I am assuming you know how Projects work).
My takeaway. I like Skills,especially the help I get from Claude in creating them. I wish I could have more than 10 active at any time. That said, I will likely use a combination of both Claude Skills and ChatGPT (maybe projects). Why? I don't run into any daily limits with ChatGPT. I have the Pro version of Claude and I regularly run into limits and have to way until the next day for it to reset. It's frustrating that something like this and not the quality / usefulness of Skills is the reason for this bi-model usage.
