Skills and kits
Two nouns and two verbs: what a skill is, what a kit is, and how Follow and Add work.
Skillet has a small vocabulary: two nouns, skill and kit, and two verbs, Follow and Add. Learn those four and the rest of the product follows.
Skills: the unit
A skill is a short instruction file, a SKILL.md, that tells an AI how to do one thing your way. It has three parts: a name, a one-line description of when to use it, and the instructions.
Good skills:
- a PR review checklist your team actually follows
- your refund policy, written once so every reply matches it
- your brand voice, so drafts come back sounding like you
- the steps for a launch, from changelog to social post
A skill is portable. The same file works in Claude, Cursor, Codex, and ChatGPT: you write it once, not once per tool.
Kits: the set
A kit is a named set of skills. Two things describe any kit:
- Who owns it: your personal kit (your own skills, there by default) or a team kit (shared, so everyone runs the same current version).
- Who can see it: private or public. Private is the default; nothing is public until you publish it.
| Visibility | Who can see and add it | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Private (default) | Just you, or your team's members | Your own skills, private team runbooks |
| Public | Anyone, from the owner's profile | Skills and kits you want to share |
Skills carry the same private/public setting: each stays private until you publish it. A skill can live in more than one kit, and adding it to a team kit doesn't remove it from yours.
Two verbs: Follow and Add
Almost everything you do in Skillet is one of these two actions.
- Follow a person to watch them. Their new skills show up in your feed. Following changes nothing in your AI tools; it's how you keep an eye on people whose taste you trust.
- Add a skill or kit to run it. Skillet syncs it into your AI tools and keeps it current. Add a single skill, or add someone's whole kit to get everything in it, now and whatever they publish next.
| Follow | Add | |
|---|---|---|
| What it does | Watch a person | Run a skill or kit |
| Changes your AI tools? | No | Yes, syncs it in |
| Stays current? | Not applicable | Yes, as they update it |
| Use it when | You want to see what someone shares | You want to actually use it |
Tip Follow to watch. Add to run. That's the whole model.
How it connects
- You follow people whose work is worth running.
- Their best skills show up in your feed.
- You add the ones you want, a single skill or a whole kit.
- Skillet syncs them into Claude, Cursor, Codex, and every machine you use.
- When the author updates a skill, Skillet shows you the changes. Nothing changes until you approve it.
Where your skills live
Your skills live on your own machine, in ~/.skillet, owned by you. Skillet keeps that clean copy and writes each skill into the format every tool expects (see Runtimes). For tools without a local install (ChatGPT, Claude.ai), you download the skill bundle and upload it, or connect over MCP, instead of an automatic sync.
Note Added skills are private to you by default. Nothing becomes public until you publish it on a profile or share it in a team kit. Private skills never enter the public follow graph.