Your AI skills are leaving your hands. Here's how to own them.

YouTube/Substack/Podcast · ~17 min · YouTube · Read · Podcast

• Three-tier distinction between prompt, memory, and skill: prompts and memory travel between AI tools; skills remain trapped in proprietary platform formats — Claude skills don’t transfer to Codex and vice versa.
• “Ownership vs. rental”: skills embedded in platform-native workflows become career capital you must rebuild from scratch every time you switch tools; skills documented as portable procedures (SKILL.md, MCP configs) remain yours.
• The One-Question Test for a genuinely owned workflow: “Is it visible, movable, inspectable, testable, and available wherever I work?” Platform-embedded chat history fails all five criteria; an MCP-exportable procedure passes.
• Practical takeaway: document operating procedures outside your AI platform — in SKILL.md files or MCP-compatible config formats — rather than relying on chat memory or platform-specific skill libraries.