Skills for your chatbot
Every button that copies a prompt puts the whole instructions on the clipboard, and you paste them into a chatbot each time. Some chatbots can keep instructions instead, as a skill: a folder of files that the chatbot holds, reads only when a message calls for it, and uses again and again. Parseh makes its prompts as skills too, so that in such a chatbot a short request is enough.
A skill is only text, like a prompt. Downloading one, or copying a request, runs no model and sends nothing: you carry the file to your chatbot and the request to a chat yourself, and Parseh never starts anything for you.
1. What there is#
- parseh-gloss.
- Glosses chunks in Parseh’s JSON: a stretch of a book or of a video (fill what is blank, fill the fields named, or gloss it afresh), and a whole video from its captions.
- parseh-markdown.
- Writes a document in the studio’s dialect, or exercises for one, with only the features you ticked.
- parseh-book.
- The method of a book made by an agent in the book’s own folder (Adding a book).
Each is made when you ask for it, from the same parts the prompts are made of, with the languages this computer has — one you added included — and kept nowhere. So a skill and a prompt never say different things: for the same request they hand the chatbot the same words.
2. Downloading one#
Open Settings → Skills for your chatbot (/settings/skills/). Each skill has a card with what it does, its size, the version of Parseh that made it and a short hash, and download (.zip). Any device that has been let in may read the page and download (From a phone or another computer). There is no install button: installing is always your own step, in the chatbot.
The page remembers on this device which skill you downloaded last. When Parseh would make another one now — you updated Parseh, changed a language, or made, changed or removed a LaTeX theme, whose name and packages the skill carries — it says your skill may be older than this Parseh — download it again.
3. Installing it, tool by tool#
What follows is what each tool’s own help says, and the page in Settings links that help. Where something is not known, it says so.
| In | What to do |
|---|---|
| claude.ai and the Claude desktop app | Customize → Skills, +, Create skill, Upload a skill, and the zip. Code execution must be on (Settings → Capabilities → Code execution and file creation), and the skill’s switch must be on afterwards. On a Team or Enterprise plan an Owner decides whether skills are allowed. Some people still see the older wording, Settings → Capabilities. Uploading the same name again may ask you to replace it. |
| Claude Code | Unzip it and put the folder in .claude/skills/ in your home folder (every project) or in a project’s folder (that project). A skill you uploaded to claude.ai reaches a signed-in Claude Code, version 2.1.273 or newer, by itself. |
| Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, VS Code | Unzip it and put the folder in .agents/skills/, in your home folder or in a project. Claude Code does not read that folder; Copilot, VS Code and Cursor also read .claude/skills/. |
| The Gemini app | Settings → Skills → Upload, on the web or in the Mac app. The mobile app can use a skill once it is uploaded. |
| ChatGPT | Only on the workspace plans (Business, Enterprise, Healthcare, Edu): Plugins → Skills → Create → Upload from your computer. Nothing in OpenAI’s pages names an upload on the Free, Plus or Pro plans. |
| A phone | Install on the web or the desktop app: a skill belongs to your account, not to one device. Using one on a phone is documented only for Claude’s Cowork sessions; for a plain chat it is not documented, so nothing more is promised. |
| A chatbot with no skills | Use copy the prompt: the same instructions in one paste. A project or a Gem keeps files but loads them whole, so the files of a skill are not free there. |
Some tools (Microsoft 365 Copilot’s Cowork and Agent Builder) want SKILL.md at the root of the zip rather than inside a folder: unzip it and zip the folder’s contents.
4. Using it#
Wherever Parseh hands out a prompt for a skill — the video’s and the book’s gloss with an LLM, the add page’s prompt for a video, the studio’s LLM prompt page and the exercises dialog — the row has copy the request for the skill beside copy the prompt. The one you used last comes first, and neither is ever hidden. Under them: in a chat where the parseh-gloss skill is installed, paste this — 310 characters instead of 16,400. Paste the request in a chat where the skill is installed, and the chatbot answers as it would to the prompt: the same answer, which lands through the same doors.
The transcript tidy and Ask LLM have no skill: their prompts are short already.
What a request looks like#
Parseh request · parseh-gloss · a0.4.2 · k7f3 · a stretch of a video · fa → en · re-glossOne line, its fields parted by ·: the skill, the version of Parseh, the hash, what it is for, the language and the language of the meanings, the mode, and any choice made for the prompt — the scheme of the transliteration (translit: ipa) and the short vowels (marks: on). For the studio it also names the boxes you ticked (features: vocab, gloss, translit), the level and the length. The text to work on follows: the chunks, the captions, your question or the page.
The line ends with a sentence for a chat that has no such skill: it tells the chatbot to say so and stop, and copy the prompt is the way. If the hash in the line is not the skill’s own, the chatbot says in one line that the request is for a newer skill than the one installed.
A prompt of yours that is added to Parseh’s (Your own prompts) goes after the first line, and its name is in it. One in place of Parseh’s cannot travel in a request, because the skill carries Parseh’s instructions: the row says so beside the button.
5. What was not tried#
Parseh could not install a skill in each vendor’s product from here: the steps above are what the vendors’ own pages say, read on 2026-09-29, and what a chatbot does with a skill is its own. If a step no longer matches what you see, the tool’s help page linked in Settings is the authority, and copy the prompt always works.