Google Is Killing Gems and Calling Them Skills. The Word Won.
Google is retiring Gems. On November 17, every custom Gem in the Gemini app gets automatically converted into a skill, TechCrunch reported on September 28, and skills can be used across different AI tasks rather than living as separate chatbots in the sidebar.
The interface change says who Google is building for. Gems had their own navigation spot and behaved like mini-assistants you opened. Skills are called by typing a forward slash inside a task thread, the same pattern developers already use in Claude Code, Codex and a dozen other harnesses. That favors people who already think in commands over casual users who liked clicking on a named helper.
The bigger story is vocabulary. A year ago skill was a niche term for a folder of instructions and scripts an agent loads on demand. Since then Anthropic, OpenAI's Codex, Microsoft, Cloudflare and a long tail of open-source harnesses have converged on it. Google renaming its consumer customization feature to match is the moment the word crosses from developer tooling into a mainstream app used by hundreds of millions of people. Google has not said whether Gemini skills follow the open SKILL.md format, and that is the question that decides whether a skill you write once runs everywhere.
One caution from this week's research: a paper on skill cascading attacks shows that harmful behavior can be split across several skills that each look harmless alone. The more skills become a portable consumer format, the more that cross-skill blind spot matters.
Link: techcrunch.com/2026/09/28/google-is-killing-off-geminis-gems-in-favor-of-skills
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The interface change says who Google is building for. Gems had their own navigation spot and behaved like mini-assistants you opened. Skills are called by typing a forward slash inside a task thread, the same pattern developers already use in Claude Code, Codex and a dozen other harnesses. That favors people who already think in commands over casual users who liked clicking on a named helper.
The bigger story is vocabulary. A year ago skill was a niche term for a folder of instructions and scripts an agent loads on demand. Since then Anthropic, OpenAI's Codex, Microsoft, Cloudflare and a long tail of open-source harnesses have converged on it. Google renaming its consumer customization feature to match is the moment the word crosses from developer tooling into a mainstream app used by hundreds of millions of people. Google has not said whether Gemini skills follow the open SKILL.md format, and that is the question that decides whether a skill you write once runs everywhere.
One caution from this week's research: a paper on skill cascading attacks shows that harmful behavior can be split across several skills that each look harmless alone. The more skills become a portable consumer format, the more that cross-skill blind spot matters.
Link: techcrunch.com/2026/09/28/google-is-killing-off-geminis-gems-in-favor-of-skills
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