Skills Are Software

I shipped a 130-line skill this week called drewtech-x-article.

It turns an existing drew.tech post or newsletter issue into an unpublished X Article draft in my Chrome browser. The work is the boring kind: copy and paste the post, convert images from SVG to PNG, generate or select a cover image, upload the media, and turn X links into native embeds. And maybe add a quick plug for the newsletter at the bottom.

I built it over a few hours chatting with Codex remotely from my phone (desktop app runs on my Mac mini). Codex used Computer Use and the Chrome extension tool to drive the same apps I use by hand. It tried, I reviewed the output and told it what was wrong. Lots of small edge cases to work through, but we now have some pretty useful and durable software. But is it software? It's just a text file.

Skills are software. Or at least they replace software.

I want to keep writing on drew.tech, but X distribution is too big to ignore, and as a reader I prefer native Articles to external links. I don't blame X for skipping an Article API; an open one would flood the platform with (even more) slop. So the canonical post stays on drew.tech, and the skill does the tedious work of porting it over.

Vercel's skills.sh is the better outside proof point. It treats skills like packages: installable, searchable, ranked, and queryable through an API that Vercel says covers more than 600,000 skills. That is what software ecosystems look like.

Here is the whole thing:

Software you couldn't justify before

Porting a post to X by hand might take me 10 minutes. It's too little to justify writing a true Playwright script for, plus my gut says Playwright might get my X account banned.

But a skill makes this annoying task of the past simple and composable with the rest of my workflows. Up next, I'm going to write an automation that checks once per day for new content and runs this skill when it finds new stuff.

While AI is making it trivial to write code, it's also helping us move up one layer of abstraction. Each time in the past, each jump of abstraction would have programmers of the prior technological wave saying "that's not software". Assembly to C. C to C++. C++ to writing for the JVM. Java to Python/JavaScript and on and on and on.

Skills are software.