Published Nov 1, 2026, 4:00 PM EST

Nolen began their writing career in 2019, with three years dedicated to editing the Creative section at MakeUseOf . Their expertise lies at the crossroads of technology and creativity, covering areas like photography, video editing, and graphic design.

Outside of work, you'll often find Nolen diving into a good book, writing their own stories, or playing video games.

Custom instructions in your AI tools are really just a double-edged sword. Yes, they help you fine-tune the model in a way, or guide it in the right direction, but the part nobody writes about is when you switch to a different AI provider or simply juggle a bunch of tools at the same time. Then you're either right back where you started and need to create instructions from scratch, or get used to juggling between different stacks of skills with different AI tools.

Google's now retiring Gems , Gemini's version of custom assistants, and the replacement is called Skills.…