Google Drops Gems for Skills, a Format Born at Anthropic

Google is removing Gems cards from the Gemini chat and switching to the Skills format. A skill is a saved instruction for a specific task. You turn it on with a slash command followed by the skill's name, and Gemini can also build a skill on its own from past conversations and run it when it sees a similar request. Anthropic came up with the format and released it as an open standard. OpenAI is moving the same way, away from Custom GPTs. Google will shut down personal Gems in November 2026.

Google and OpenAI converging on one format, a slash command plus a skill name instead of starting a chat from scratch, tells me this isn't a feature of one product anymore. It's becoming how the interface for agents works in general. I use Claude Code through Skills every day myself, and what matters to me isn't the name. It's that I don't have to re-explain a saved instruction each time. It's still unclear whether a finished skill will carry over directly between Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. An open standard is just a file format, not ready-made compatibility.