Installing Your First Skill

Chapter 1 made the case for skills. This lesson is where you stop reading and install one. The whole job takes about five minutes, and by the end your assistant will open its next conversation with your rules and formats already in place.

Pick by pain, not by browsing

The Vexlo toolbox has 55 free skills, and browsing all 55 is a reliable way to install none of them. Pick the one aimed at whatever hurts most this month.

• If money is the thing keeping you up, start with the plain-English finance analyst. It reviews monthly numbers, watches cash flow, and drafts invoice chasers.
• If you're drowning in support email, start with the support reply drafter. It triages incoming messages and drafts replies in your voice, with a human reviewing before anything sends.
• If proposals are eating your evenings, start with the proposal writer. It turns call notes into scoped, priced proposals the same day the client asked.

One is enough. Install the others next week, once the first has earned its keep.

Get the file

Open the skill's page and read it top to bottom. It's plain English, not code, and reading it first matters: you're about to hand these instructions to your assistant, so you should know what they say. Then click the Install skill button, or grab the folder from GitHub if you're going the native Claude route below. Either way you have the full skill file, the five-section document you met in Chapter 1: Role, Setup, Capabilities, Rules, and Output format.

The four places it can live

Where the skill lives depends on which assistant you use. There are four options, best first.

Claude Skills. Claude reads skill files natively, on every plan including Free (as of September 2026). Download the skill's folder from the Vexlo GitHub repo, where each one sits under skills/ with a SKILL.md inside, and zip it. In Claude, switch on code execution under Settings > Capabilities, then open Customize > Skills, click the plus button, choose Create skill, and Upload a skill. From then on Claude loads it by itself whenever a request matches, in any chat. The Claude skills guide walks the same steps with more detail.

Claude Projects. Create a new Project named after the skill, something like Finance Analyst, and paste the whole skill file into the project's instructions. Every chat inside that project starts with the skill loaded. Projects work on the free plan too, up to five of them. Pick this route when you want a separate space per job, with its own files and chat history. Our Claude course has a full lesson on how to use Claude Projects.

ChatGPT. ChatGPT now has its own Skills section that reads the same file format, rolling out plan by plan, so check whether your account shows it. If it doesn't, create a ChatGPT Project and paste the skill file into its instructions. Skip custom GPTs: OpenAI plans to retire them on December 11, 2026.

The top of a chat. The fallback that works everywhere: paste the whole skill file as your first message, then carry on with your request. Gemini, Copilot, anything else, doesn't matter. Keep the file somewhere handy, a note, a doc, a folder called Skills, and paste it fresh each session. The exact menus for ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot, which all read the file natively now, are in the last lesson of this chapter.

Read this before you pick

A few honest notes, so nothing surprises you later.

• Plans change fast. Claude opened skills and Projects to the free plan, and ChatGPT's Skills are still rolling out. If a menu above doesn't match your screen, check your assistant's help pages before you assume you did it wrong.
• Paste-per-chat costs you a paste each session. Thirty seconds, but each session. That's the price of the works-everywhere route.
• The same skill behaves a little differently in different assistants. Same instructions, different model reading them. Expect small shifts in tone and formatting, and don't treat them as a broken install.
• A skill is instructions, not software. Even the native Claude install is a text file the assistant reads, and nothing runs in the background. The assistant follows the file as far as the file is in front of it, and no further.

Try it now

Pick your skill, put it in whichever home fits your plan, then send one line:

If the reply plays back the capabilities from the file, the install worked. Hold off on answering the setup questions, though. That interview is where the skill learns your business, and it deserves its own lesson. It's next.