For: everyone. Worth five minutes before you create anything — picking the wrong kind is the most common early mistake, and it is annoying to undo.
A playbook is a piece of your team's AI know-how, written down once. There are exactly two kinds, and they are used in genuinely different ways — this is not a label on a shelf.
A prompt is a task
It describes something to be done, and it has gaps for the parts that change each time — written as {{customer_name}} or {{deadline}}. You fill the gaps in, it runs, and something comes out: a draft reply, a summary, an offer.
A prompt has a beginning and an end. You use it, you get a result, you are done with it.
A skill is knowledge
It describes something to be known: your tone of voice, your pricing rules, the structure every offer has to follow, how your company writes a commit message. There are no gaps to fill in, and it does not produce anything on its own.
You apply a skill and then carry on working. It stays in effect for as long as what you are doing falls within its scope, shaping whatever else happens — including a prompt you run afterwards.
The question that decides it
Does it produce something, or does it govern how something is produced? Produces → prompt. Governs → skill.
Two examples of the same subject split correctly. “Write a reply to a customer complaint about a late delivery” is a prompt — it produces a reply. “Our support tone: never apologise twice, always name a concrete next date, never blame a carrier” is a skill — it governs every reply, including ones no prompt covers.
A good sign you have it wrong: if you find yourself pasting the same three paragraphs of rules into the top of five different prompts, those paragraphs are a skill.
A skill is applied directly, never embedded
This trips people up who expect to attach a skill to a prompt. You cannot, and that is deliberate. A skill is applied at the point of use — in the extension, in sqemes Chat, or through an MCP tool — and it then applies to everything you do next, not to one prompt you chose in advance.
The gain is that the knowledge stays in one place. A rule embedded in six prompts has to be corrected six times, and the sixth one is the one nobody remembers.
If you are looking for Assistants
They are gone, and their content became skills — an assistant was a reusable block of instructions, which is what a skill is. If you have an old link or an old bookmark, /assistants now takes you to your skills. Nothing was lost in the move.
Where a working role is what you actually wanted — something that knows which playbook to reach for in which situation — that is a persona, not a skill. See What is a persona, and when do I need one?
Updated 27 September 2026 · Article version 1