Save Your Best Instructions: Projects, GPTs and Skills · Lesson 1 of 7
What a saved instruction is, and what each tool calls it
15 minutes. One idea, one map of names, one small exercise.
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Here is a habit almost every small office has. Someone wrote a good prompt once. Maybe it was "write this like us: friendly, short, no exclamation points, sign it from the team." It worked. So now it lives in a sticky note, an email to yourself, or a text file on one person's desktop. Every time you need it, you find it, copy it, paste it, and then type the actual request underneath.
That works until it doesn't. The file is on the laptop of the person who's out today. A coworker is using the version from March, before you changed your prices. Someone forgets to paste it at all, and a customer gets a reply that sounds like a brochure.
A saved instruction fixes that. You write the background once, save it inside your AI tool, and from then on every request starts from it. You type "reply to this email" and the tool already knows how you sound, what you charge, and what you never promise.
Every tool's version holds some mix of the same three things:
- Instructions. The text you used to paste. Who the AI is acting as, what the job is, what the answer should look like, what to avoid.
- Reference files. Documents it can read: a price sheet, a sample quote, your service list.
- A name and a short description, so your team can find it and, in some tools, so the AI knows when to use it on its own.
That's all. There's no magic in it. A saved instruction is a good prompt that stopped living on a sticky note.
The four big tools all have this. They just keep renaming it, and two of them are in the middle of a change right now.
Claude
- Projects. A workspace with its own instructions, files and chat history. Every chat you start inside the project starts from those instructions. Available on every plan, including free (free accounts are limited to five projects).
- Skills. A packaged set of instructions (and optional files) that Claude picks up when a request matches, in any chat. You can build one by describing it to Claude in a chat. Skills need the code execution setting turned on, and on Team and Enterprise plans an owner controls whether skills can be shared.
ChatGPT
- Projects. Same idea as Claude's: a folder of chats with its own instructions and files. Available on all plans. Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts can share projects with teammates.
- Custom GPTs are being retired. OpenAI's plan is that custom GPTs stop running on December 11, 2026, and they're being replaced by plugins, which can hold one or more skills. When you migrate a GPT, its instructions become a skill and its knowledge files come along. Its sharing settings and its chosen model do not.
- Skills in ChatGPT are available on the business plans (Business, Enterprise, Healthcare and Edu), where your workspace settings allow them.
Microsoft 365 Copilot
- Agents. Built in Agent Builder (look for New agent in Copilot). You describe what you want, and it drafts the name, instructions and starter prompts for you. People with only the free Copilot Chat can build agents that use instructions and the web. Pointing an agent at your SharePoint files needs a Copilot license or pay-as-you-go billing turned on by your admin.
- Notebooks. A collection of your files, meetings and emails with its own Copilot instructions. Useful when the instruction belongs with a particular set of documents.
Google Gemini
- Gems are being replaced by Skills. Skills began rolling out in Workspace apps on October 5, 2026 and in the Gemini app on October 13. Gems keep working for now, but business and enterprise accounts lose them no sooner than March 1, 2027. Lesson 6 covers the move.
If that list feels like a lot, here's the short version: Projects are a place you go to work. Skills (and Copilot agents) are a helper you call from anywhere. Both start from instructions you wrote once.
For this course, use the simplest one your tool offers:
- If you mostly do one kind of work in a long-running thread (all your quotes, all your marketing), a Project is easiest.
- If the instruction should be available everywhere, in any chat, reach for a Skill or a Copilot agent.
- If you're on ChatGPT and were about to build a custom GPT, don't. Use a Project now, or a skill if your plan has them.
The choice matters less than you'd think, because of the most important idea in this course.
The text of your instruction should live in your own document, in your own shared drive, not only inside the AI tool. The tool holds a copy. You hold the original.
Here's why that matters this fall in particular:
- Google is retiring Gems. Anyone whose only copy of an instruction is inside a Gem has to go dig it out.
- OpenAI is retiring custom GPTs. Same problem.
- On October 8, 2026, GPT-6 became the default model in ChatGPT for every plan ([brief](https://appliedaiinsider.com/briefings/2026-10-08)). A saved instruction that worked last week may give different answers this week. You can only compare if you know exactly what the instruction said.
With a master copy, each of these is a copy-and-paste job. Without one, it's an archaeology project.
- It is not a guarantee. It makes the first draft better. Someone still reads it before it goes to a customer.
- It is not a safe place for secrets. Anyone who can use it can usually see what's in it. No passwords, card numbers or customer records.
- It is not set-and-forget. Prices change, people leave, the model changes underneath it. That's why every one gets an owner and a review date.
- Open a blank note.
- Write down which AI tool (or tools) your business uses, and the plan if you know it. If you don't know the plan, write "check."
- Ask yourself, and ask one coworker: "Where do you keep the prompts you reuse?" Write down every answer. Sticky notes, email drafts, a Word file, "I retype it," a Gem, a custom GPT, a Project.
- If anyone has a Gem or a custom GPT, write its name and who made it. Those have a deadline.
Check it worked
You have a note that names your tool, your plan (or "check"), and every place reusable prompts live in your business today, with any Gems and custom GPTs listed by name. Keep it. Lesson 2 builds on it.
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Next: which of those instructions are actually worth saving.
→ Find the instructions worth saving