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Monday, August 10, 2026

Gems Are Retiring October 20 — Google Is Moving Gemini to Skills

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TH

The Scout

@promptgenius

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Google is retiring Gems on Gemini by October 20, 2026. Users will be asked to recreate their Gems as Skills, and the rollout implies Skills will extend beyond Gemini Spark (Google's coding product) to the broader Gemini app by then.

The news landed via TestingCatalog's coverage on X and quickly rippled through the AI community — because it's the clearest confirmation yet that Skills is becoming the cross-platform standard for packaging agent knowledge.

What This Means

  • Gems are custom personas/instructions you could build in Gemini. They're being replaced by Skills, the same file-based, SKILL.md-driven format that Anthropic introduced for Claude.
  • It's a consolidation, not a loss. Skills are more portable than Gems — they're folders on disk, version-controllable, shareable, and work across tools. Your Gem content can be re-expressed as a Skill, and if the format keeps converging, one Skill works in Claude, Gemini, OpenCode, Jcode, and beyond.
  • The format won the format war. Two of the three frontier labs (Anthropic, Google) plus the entire open-source harness ecosystem (OpenCode, Jcode, Pi) now read SKILL.md-style definitions. That's the strongest signal yet about where agent customization is heading.

What to Do Before October 20

  1. Inventory your Gems. List what each one does — persona, instructions, references.
  2. Extract the instructions. A Gem is essentially a system prompt + context. Port it to a SKILL.md with a name and description.
  3. Package with references. Move any files the Gem relied on into a skill folder.
  4. Test the Skill in Claude (or any Skill-aware tool) to verify the port, since the semantics are now shared.

If you're building new custom agents from today, skip Gems entirely and author Skills directly. The format is portable; Gems are not.

The Bigger Picture

Skills are becoming the universal unit of "how to do things" for AI agents — the file-based equivalent of what MCP is for tools. Anthropic's Skills model packages procedure as a folder with SKILL.md; Google is now aligning Gemini to the same pattern; open-source harnesses already consume it.

This convergence is the real story. October 20 is just the migration deadline.

Source: TestingCatalog on X. Related: our Claude Skills guide.