Google is replacing Gems — the custom AI assistant feature it launched in August 2024, with Skills in Gemini, and the clock is ticking. Gems go read-only on November 17, 2026, and vanish completely from consumer Gemini accounts on December 17. Workspace and education accounts get a reprieve until 2027.
Google says it will auto-convert existing Gems into Skills, but with a hard limit: any attached files over 100MB get dropped during conversion, starting with the largest. That’s a real constraint for users who built Gems around large reference documents or datasets. Skills are already live in Gemini under Customize > Skills.
They’re free in standard chat, no subscription required, even though they first appeared inside paid Gemini Spark. Unlike Gems, which lived in isolated chats and forced users to jump away from their current conversation, Skills operate inline. You trigger one by typing @ and selecting it, or let Gemini auto-pick based on your prompt.
XDA Developers tested this and found Gemini reliably activated skills like a UI wireframe helper when asked for “a UI layout for a habit tracker,” even without explicit tagging. The description field appears to do most of the heavy lifting in that detection. But deep research and guided learning modes don’t support Skills yet, two of the core reasons some users open Gemini in the first place.
Sharing Skills or pulling in Google Drive files also isn’t available yet. Those features are still weeks out, even though Gems supported both from day one. Migrating Claude Code skills is straightforward. A SKILL.md file maps cleanly to Skills’ three input fields: name, description, and instructions.
Or you can upload the full skill folder, or a ZIP with SKILL.md at root. Skill names must be lowercase with hyphens (e.g., code-review), matching Claude’s convention. Edits happen in-app: click “Edit with Gemini” and describe the change in plain English, no YAML, no syntax, no re-upload needed. But compatibility isn’t guaranteed.
Many Claude Code skills rely on local file access or internet-triggered scripts, and neither works in Gemini’s chat-based environment. XDA Developers noted that before uploading, they asked Claude to rewrite their skills for research and learning use cases, keeping originals intact while generating Gemini-optimized versions. That step matters: Skills won’t magically adapt logic built for desktop execution.
Gems were meant to simplify repeated tasks, but their tab-isolated design made them easy to ignore. As XDA put it: “I honestly forgot they existed until I read the news that they’re about to disappear, guess I’m not the only one if they’re being replaced.” Skills aren’t revolutionary. They’re a format shift, one that leans on what users already know from tools like Claude Code, and one that trades some Gems functionality (Drive integration, research mode support) for tighter chat integration and easier portability.
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Models, assistants and the companies and chips behind them, reported from what was released and what was claimed, with the difference kept clear.
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