OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI

Re:OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in Chat... by marwamc on Friday December 12, 2025 @11:13PM (#46251920)

My understanding is this: A skill is made up of SKILL.md which is what tells claude how and when to use this skill. I'm a bit of a control freak so I'll usually explicitly direct claude to "load the wireframe-skill" and then do X.

Now SKILL.md can have references to more finegrained behaviors or capabilities of our skill. My skills generally tend to have a reference/{workflows,tools,standards,testing-guide,routing,api-integration}.md. These references are what then gets "progressively loaded" into the context.

Say I asked claude to use the wireframe-skill to create profileView mockup. While creating the wireframe, claude will need to figure out what API endpoints are available/relevant for the profileView and the response types etc. It's at this point that claude reads the references/api-integration.md file from the wireframe skill.

After a while I found I didn't like the progressive loading so I usually direct claude to load all references in the skill before proceeding - this usually takes up maybe 20k to 30k tokens, but the accuracy and precision (imagined or otherwise ha!) is worth it for my use cases.

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Re:OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in Chat... by kxrm on Saturday December 13, 2025 @12:22AM (#46252239)

> I'm a bit of a control freak so I'll usually explicitly direct claude to "load the wireframe-skill" and then do X.

You shouldn't do this, it's generally considered bad practice.

You should be optimizing your skill description. Often times if I am working with Claude Code and it doesn't load I skill, I ask it why it missed the skill. It will guide me to improving the skill description so that it is picked up properly next time.

This iteration on skill description has allowed skills to stay out of context until they are needed rather predictably for me so far.

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Re:OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in Chat... by adastra22 on Saturday December 13, 2025 @03:01AM (#46252936)

There are different ways to use the tool. If you chat with the model, you want it to naturally pick the right tool to use based on vibes and context so you don’t have to repeat yourself. If you are plugging a call it Claude code within a larger, structured workflow, you want the tool selection to be deterministic.

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Re:OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in Chat... by rane on Saturday December 13, 2025 @07:30AM (#46254092)

It's not enough. Sometimes skills just randomly won't be invoked.

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Re:OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in Chat... by chrisweekly on Saturday December 13, 2025 @08:19AM (#46254324)

My understanding is that use of "description" frontmatter is essential, bc Claude Code can read just the description without loading the entire file into context.

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