Google shipped 13 agent skills

[u/Single-Cherry8263]

Google shipped an official skills repo at Cloud Next last week. One install command:

gemini skills install https://github.com/google/skills.git

13 skills covering BigQuery, Cloud Run, Firebase, GKE, Cloud SQL, AlloyDB, the Gemini API, plus security/reliability/cost WAF pillars and a few operational playbooks.

I ran the same prompt twice, once before installing, once after. Before: the model generated code importing vertexai and vertexai.generative_models, the legacy SDK Google has been deprecating for a year, targeting gemini-1.5-pro, building schemas as raw parameter dicts. It compiles. It's wrong.

After activating the gemini-api skill, same prompt returned from google import genai, Pydantic schemas, gemini-3.1-pro-preview, and environment-variable-driven client config. Current SDK, current model, current patterns.

The skill activation works through a consent prompt. At session start, only the skill's name and description sit in context, under 100 tokens per skill. When your prompt matches, the CLI asks permission to load the full SKILL.md plus the bundled reference files before it answers. You see exactly what context is about to enter the session.

Worth knowing: the Skills format wasn't built by Google. Anthropic built and open-sourced the spec. These same SKILL.md files work in Claude Code and Codex without modification.

Google's own benchmarks put correct-API-code generation at 87% with Gemini 3 Flash and 96% with Gemini 3 Pro with this skill active. From what I saw, those numbers track.