Write your own skill

4 min · Skills, routines and the Creator market

A skill is a job you do often, saved once so it runs in a second. The gallery's ready-made skills are a good start, but your own are where skills pay off: your format, your checklist, your tone.

Three kinds

Open Settings → Skills and press New skill. Then pick its Kind:

Prompt: fills in the AI chat with your prompt, and you send it. Most skills are this kind, and it is the only kind you can share.
Action: runs a Minda tool with no AI, such as extracting a page's data.
Script: runs your own JavaScript on web pages.

The parts of a prompt skill

Name and Description: what it does, in your words.
Trigger: the word you type after a slash. A trigger of brief is typed /brief.
The prompt: up to 20,000 characters.
Send the page with it: turns on This page in the AI chat, so the AI reads the page on screen instead of you pasting it.
Research mode: the AI plans, searches, reads many sources and writes a report with numbered sources.

Variables make it reusable

Use the variable chips under the prompt to add the parts that change each time:

{{selection}}: the text selected on the page
{{input}}: what you type after the trigger, as in /summarize prices
{{url}} and {{title}}: the page's address and title
{{lang}}: your language

Text between {{#input}} and {{/input}} is kept only when you typed something after the trigger. Text between {{^input}} and {{/input}} is kept only when you did not. A small example:

Summarize {{#input}}what this page says about {{input}}{{/input}}{{^input}}this page{{/input}} in five bullets.
End with one question I should ask next.

Give it the trigger sum and turn on Send the page with it. Now /sum alone summarizes the page, and /sum shipping costs sticks to shipping costs. A trigger uses letters, digits, - and _.

Run it

Type / in the AI chat box or the address bar and pick your skill, or type its trigger.
Right-click a page and choose Skills.
A skill that uses {{selection}} is offered when you have text selected.
In a chat you often don't have to ask: the AI picks the skill a task needs from the skills you turned on.

Scripts, with care

A script skill runs JavaScript on a page, apart from the page's own scripts. Under Pages, list match patterns such as https://*.example.com/*, one per line. Leave it empty to offer the script on every page. Running it by itself on matching pages needs at least one pattern, and scripts never run in private windows.

Keep and move them

Under Share and restore, Export all skills saves them to a .mindaskill file and Import skills reads one. A skill that comes from a file, a backup or another computer stays off under To review, with its prompt or code shown, until you read it and turn it on. Skills you make or edit on this computer are trusted, and signed in, they sync to your other computers. You can keep up to 200.