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 20 free skills, and browsing all 20 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. You now have the full skill file, the five-section document you met in Chapter 1: Role, Setup, Capabilities, Rules, and Output format.

The three places it can live

Where the skill lives depends on which assistant you pay for. There are three options.

Claude Projects. In Claude, create a new Project and name it after the skill, something like Finance Analyst. Open the project's instructions and paste the whole skill file there. Each chat you start inside that project loads the skill on its own, no re-pasting. This is the cleanest setup: one project per skill, so you can run several skills side by side without them tripping over each other.

ChatGPT. Two routes here. A Custom GPT gives the skill its own home: create one, paste the skill file into its instructions, and it sits in your sidebar like a named coworker. Or paste the file into your account-wide custom instructions, which works but applies to every chat you have, so it suits someone running a single skill rather than a stable of them.

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. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, doesn't matter. Keep the file somewhere handy, a note, a doc, a folder called Skills, and paste it fresh each session.

Read this before you pick

A few honest notes, so nothing surprises you later.

• Persistent homes usually sit behind a paid tier. Claude Projects and Custom GPTs are paid-plan features, so check your plan before assuming.
• 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. Nothing installs in the technical sense 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.