I spent time testing skills so you don't have to. Here's how it went.

TL;DR I built two Genspark Skills that work together, one to organize my input and one to produce the final output, and it worked a lot better than trying to get one skill to do everything.

Hi everyone! Alli from the Genspark team here. I’ve been playing around with Skills recently, and after a bit of trial and error, I finally found a workflow with it that actually works with me.

What Skills actually are

From my understanding, skills are reusable AI tools for specific jobs. You give them a task, a format, enough context to work with, and they can handle that job in a repeatable way. In that sense, it feels a bit like creating a reusable prompt. An example could be “Turn this meeting transcript into our weekly-report format.” The skill would then take your transcript and format it according to a clear template. Maybe it would summarize the information or create action items for you. It truly depends on how you customize it. What I found pretty quickly is that the more specific the job is, the better the result seems to be. For most cases, I think it makes the most sense to create a personal skill around your own workflow and needs.

How to set one up:

When you create one, it asks three questions.

1. What should the skill enable? A one-line description of the task or workflow you want to capture (e.g., "convert messy CSVs into a clean format", "draft PR descriptions from git diffs", "summarize research papers in a specific style").
2. When should it trigger? What kinds of prompts or contexts should make this skill kick in?
3. What does success look like? What's the expected output — a file? A specific format? A particular style?

I found it worked the best when I had clear answers and gave the skill strong reference material to work from. Besides answering the questions, I found it useful to attach files, text snippets, or screenshots so it had actual context.

What I built: a newsletter workflow

In my case, I wanted it to create a newsletter based on information I would give it, so I gave it the structure it should follow, the audience, brand guidelines, and a few other files I thought would help. More context = a better understanding of your goal!

The mistake I made on the first version

The skill drafted a mock-up that really impressed me. Visually, it was pretty much what I wanted. Unfortunately, I had not refined the materials enough before creating the first version, so I ended up doing a few more iterations. If I did it again, I would probably ask it to draft everything in chat first before turning it into the visual mock-up. Before saving it, I also had it run two of the three formal evaluations it suggested and fixed a couple of small things.

One thing to note: some changes I made before saving the skill didn't carry over when I actually ran it. If that happens to you, try telling it to update the "core skill" or "main skill" specifically. That worked for me, but the engineer is also aware and working to fix it!

Why I ended up building a second skill

Once I had that working, I realized the next thing I needed was a skill to clean up all of my messy information before I even gave it to the newsletter skill. So I went back to the newsletter skill, which I called Newsletter Builder, and asked, “What is the best format to give you information as a prompt? Give an example with the information from this newsletter.”

From there, I created a second skill called Organize Newsletter Info and repeated the same process. I answered the three setup questions, gave it an example of the format I wanted, and added context for what it was meant to do. I uploaded things like the newsletter example, voice guidelines, examples of different scenarios, and any other information that felt like it was relevant.

Testing it end to end

The next thing I did was test it so I could confirm everything was running smoothly. I gave it the same information I had originally used when creating the newsletter. The skill asked follow up questions about a typo, missing date for an event, and some links that needed to be corrected. Once I revised everything, I took the output and ran it through my Newsletter Builder skill. I confirmed everything looked right and I was set!

Credit costs: creation vs. practice runs

I also kept track of the credits used throughout the process. The bigger one-time cost was for creating and refining the skills themselves. The practice run numbers below are averages from multiple test runs I did afterward, since the credit usage changed depending on how long my prompts were (usually from 500-1,500 words). In my testing, Organize Newsletter Info usually took around two minutes, while Newsletter Builder took closer to three to four minutes. It’s important to remember that more back-and-forth refinement or image generation will cause the credit usage to go up.

Creating the skill:

Newsletter Builder Skill: 8,029 credits

Organize Newsletter Info Skill: 1,982 credits

Practice runs:

Newsletter Builder: ~336 credits on average

Organize Newsletter Info: ~ 180 credits on average

The biggest thing I learned

I didn’t need one skill to do everything. It was actually way more effective to have one skill organize the input while another turned it into the final output. This way, it wouldn’t get tripped up on itself and divert from the clear end goal I wanted. So, if you’ve tried Skills, I’d love to know how you’ve been using them and whether you’ve found a workflow that works really well for you. And if you’ve tried chaining skills together like this, I’d be especially curious to hear how it went, what felt helpful, and what questions you have!