OpenAI quietly adopted Anthropic's “skills” mechanism in ChatGPT and Codex; ChatGPT's skills include creating and modifying spreadsheets, docx files, and PDFs
One of the things that most excited me about Anthropic's new Skills mechanism back in October is how easy it looked for other platforms to implement.
Simon Willison's Weblog Simon Willison
Related Coverage
- OpenAI Adds ‘Skills’ Framework to ChatGPT and Codex CLI, Mirroring Anthropic's Agent Standard WinBuzzer · Markus Kasanmascheff
- OpenAI quietly adopts Anthropic's modular skills framework to boost agent capabilities The Decoder · Matthias Bastian
- Skills (experimental) … Codex can automatically discover reusable “skills” you keep on disk. GitHub
- OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI Hacker News
Discussion
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@morqon
Morgan
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what the year of enterprise looks like
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@natebjones
Nate
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chalk another one up for the anthropic team injecting an AI primitive into the broader ecosystem
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@simonw
Simon Willison
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ChatGPT has skills for creating and manipulating spreadsheets, docx files and PDFs tucked away in a new /home/oai/skills folder in their Code Interpreter environment - you can ask it for a zip file to see the code, here's what it gave me back: https://tools.simonwillison.net/ ...…
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@simonw
Simon Willison
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Whoa. ChatGPT has a /home/oai/skills folder now! [image]
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@nummanthinks
Numman Ali
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@simonw Yes they've already added experimental support for skills in the Codex CLI, which likely powers the ChatGPT sandbox to a degree https://github.com/...
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@simonw
Simon Willison
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Meanwhile Codex CLI added experimental support for skills a couple of weeks ago, documented here: https://github.com/... I used that to run a new Datasette plugin skill and create a cowsay Datasette plugin from a single prompt: https://simonwillison.net/...
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@simonw
Simon Willison
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I used ChatGPT's new PDF skill to have it create a report on this year's Kākāpō breeding season - it took 11 minutes because it kept rendering, noticing and then fixing issues like the ā-ā-ō letters not appearing correctly. Here's the final PDF it made: https://tools.simonwilliso…
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@_simonsmith
Simon Smith
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Verified this with GPT-5.2 Thinking! It even overcame my typo. GPT-5.2 uses skills, which Anthropic introduced. This suggests skills may be come a standard like MCPs, which is fantastic. [image]
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@simonw
Simon Willison
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OpenAI aren't talking about it yet, but it turns out they've adopted Anthropic's brilliant “skills” mechanism in a big way Skills are now live in both ChatGPT and their Codex CLI tool, I wrote up some detailed notes on how they work so far here: https://simonwillison.net/...
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@simonw
Simon Willison
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I got curious and decided to dig around in the Codex CLI source code to see if I could find the prompts that drive their skills implementation - here they are, I extracted them from the Rust code and formatted as Markdown in a gist for better readability https://gist.github.com/.…
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@joedevon
Joe Devon
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@simonw Since everything is prompts all the way down I'd often just point a rule/skill/plugin/etc built in a different tool and it tends to work really well. lol. That said, Claude Code is best at using any kind of tool
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@mweinbach
Max Weinbach
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These are the skills OpenAI included with GPT 5.2 in ChatGPT Hopefully they add more in the future! [image]