For: everyone — and this is the one that matters most if you are a member. Using playbooks needs no special role. The other articles in this section are about writing them, which needs the admin or editor role; this one is about the other 95% of the time.
Finding the one you need
Open Playbooks in the sidebar. Search by name, narrow by tag, and star the ones you keep coming back to — favourites surface on the dashboard, which is the fastest route once you know what you use.
⚠️ Read the description before you run anything. It says what the playbook is for, and picking the wrong one is the usual reason a result feels off.
Using a prompt: fill in the gaps
A prompt asks you for whatever changes each time — a customer name, an order number, a tone. Fill those in and run it. Out comes a draft.
It is a starting point, not a submission. Read it, change what is wrong, and send your version. Nobody is grading you on using the output untouched, and a playbook that needs a small edit every time is still doing its job.
Using a skill: nothing happens, and that is correct
This is the part that confuses almost everybody the first time. You press Use skill and no text appears, no answer is generated, nothing visibly happens.
That is because a skill does not produce anything. It changes how everything after it behaves. The confirmation is the Using: strip that appears and names what is active — if you see it, the skill is on.
So the order is: apply the skill first, then do your work. Applying it afterwards changes nothing that already happened. You can stack several; they apply in the order you added them.
Using a persona: pick the role, then just work
If your team built a persona, start there rather than hunting for playbooks yourself. You choose the role and describe your situation in your own words; the persona pulls in whichever playbook fits. ⚠️ Personas work in sqemes Chat and over MCP, never in the browser extension.
Where you actually do this
The same playbooks, three places. Your team may have set up only one, so ask which before you go looking.
In ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini — through the browser extension. You pick a playbook next to the message box and the finished text lands in the input, ready to edit before you send.
In sqemes Chat — here in the webapp. Everything is available in one place: playbooks, personas, your workspace's files.
In Claude Code, Cursor, Codex — over MCP. You usually do not pick anything: the tool finds the right playbook itself while you work.
Setting each of those up is its own article, in In your tools.
When the result is not good
First try the obvious: were the values you filled in complete, and was it the right playbook for this situation?
If it still disappoints, the playbook is what needs fixing, not your prompting. That is the whole idea: the wording is written down once so it can be improved once, for everybody.
As a member you cannot edit it — so the useful move is to tell whoever can, with the example that went wrong. A bad output is the most valuable thing an author can receive, and a playbook nobody complains about is usually one nobody uses.
If the playbook is missing entirely rather than disappointing, see My playbook does not appear where I expected it.
Updated 27 September 2026 · Article version 1