For: admins and editors. Creating a skill works exactly like creating a prompt — same editor, same access rules, same publish step. What differs is what goes inside it, and that is what this article is about.
Pick a skill when the thing you are writing down governs how work is done rather than doing a piece of work. Your tone of voice. Your pricing rules. The structure every offer must follow. The naming conventions in your codebase. What your company will and will not say about a competitor.
The clearest signal: you keep pasting the same paragraphs into the top of several different prompts. Those paragraphs are a skill, and keeping them in six places means correcting them in six places.
A skill has no variables, because nothing about it changes per use. Write it as rules and facts a competent colleague could follow, not as an instruction to an AI — “invoices are issued on the last working day of the month”, not “you are a helpful billing assistant”.
Be concrete. A skill that says “write professionally” changes nothing, because every model already thinks it does that. A skill that says “never open with ‘I hope this email finds you well’, always name a person to contact, never promise a date we have not confirmed” changes every output it touches.
Include the exceptions. The cases where the rule does not hold are usually the most valuable sentences in the whole thing, and they are the ones that never survive in somebody's head.
A skill stays in effect while you work. That is its strength and its trap: one broad skill covering “how we communicate” will apply to a legal notice and a birthday message alike.
Say inside the skill what it covers and what it does not. Several narrow skills beat one that is always on and occasionally embarrassing.
You apply it at the point of work — in the extension, in sqemes Chat, or through an MCP tool — and then carry on. It shapes everything after that, including any prompt you run.
⚠️ You cannot attach a skill to a prompt, and people look for that. The knowledge deliberately lives in one place and is applied at use time, rather than being copied into the prompts that happen to need it.
You can apply several skills at once; they stack in the order you applied them. Where a particular combination is always the right one for a particular job, that combination is a persona.
⚠️ One limit: skills need extension version 2.6.6 or newer. An older install shows your prompts and behaves as though the skills do not exist — no error, just nothing there.
Updated 27 September 2026 · Article version 1
