Your Notion skills just learned to travel

Hey,

Skills just went multiplayer. Build one in Notion, drop it into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, or Grok, and it still works there too.

The Developer Portal finally got organized instead of living across five settings tabs. And Reddit spent the week roasting itself for decorating dashboards instead of shipping.

The Developer Portal's been live six days, still worth a look if you haven't opened it.

Let's get into it.

- Nick

In Today's Email 👀

• The starter skill set worth installing first, not just "build skills"

• The Developer Portal finally has a real home

• Skills now travel to Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, and Grok, and back

• Plus: Reddit's decorating problem, and why nobody's actually using their own workspace

3 Tips / Updates

1/ THE STARTER SKILLS WORTH INSTALLING

Skills are supposed to be the fundamental building block of useful AI, which is great advice that tells you nothing about what to actually build first. A practical starter set is emerging that works regardless of job or industry, and most of it comes down to two problems: figuring out what to do next, and getting AI to stop guessing at what you meant before it executes anything.

The second problem is the more useful one to solve. A skill that interrogates you with questions before doing the work, instead of quietly making assumptions, turns out to save far more time than it costs. The same principle carries into meeting follow ups, where one skill checks new commitments against your existing task list so nothing gets duplicated, and a second writes each task with enough context that you, or your AI, can actually pick it up cold three days later without a rewind to the original transcript.

Inbox and open loop skills follow the same shape but need a leash. Point one at your whole inbox or a month of Slack history and it'll happily burn through your usage limits in one sitting. Bound it, a specific email category, the last 48 hours, and it holds up far better.

2/ YOUR NOTION DEVELOPER SETUP JUST GOT A REAL HOME

If you've ever built anything with Workers or the API, you know the annoying part was never the code, it was hunting down IDs and losing track of which token went where. Notion just gave that whole mess an actual home.

There's a new Developer section in settings now, one place for your Workers, connections, and personal access tokens, plus an overview of what's deployed and the logs behind every run instead of guessing why something failed.

The smaller but genuinely useful part is the new developer bar. Grab the ID for any page, database, block, workspace, or user in one click, or copy the whole API object if that's what you actually need. Small thing, but it's the kind of friction that used to eat ten minutes every time you sat down to build something.

Turn it on under Settings → Developer → Enable developer features.

3/ YOUR SKILLS AREN'T STUCK IN NOTION ANYMORE

Skills just started working in both directions. You could already keep a skill in Notion and pull a copy down into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, or Grok, you get a SKILL.md plus whatever files were approved with it. Now the reverse works too: drop an existing Claude or Codex skill file straight into Notion AI, and it converts it into a Notion skill on the spot.

That closes a loop a lot of people have clearly been waiting on. The question that came up more than once was security, whether a skill pulled down locally is protected the same way it is inside Notion, worth checking before leaning on this for anything sensitive. But for teams already juggling skills across tools, Notion can now actually sit in the middle instead of being one more silo to keep synced by hand.

From The Community

Someone put into words this week what a lot of people have clearly been feeling. They don't really use Notion, they decorate it. New fonts, new icons, a fresh dashboard, a database with just the right properties, and by the time it's done it looks amazing and nothing has actually gotten done.

Comparison that stuck: decorating the first page of a school notebook, then going right back to messy handwriting for the rest of it.

Some people just owned it, decorating is the hobby, productivity is the excuse, no different from painting or gardening on the side. Others figured it's less about the person and more about the tool, if all you actually need is somewhere to jot notes, something this flexible can turn into its own distraction instead of a shortcut.

One fix that came up was almost embarrassingly simple though, no redesigning a dashboard until you've used it for two weeks straight. Apparently most "improvements" were just procrastination wearing a nicer font.

Quick Links & Tools

Notion for Nonprofits → 50% off the Business Plan for verified nonprofits, plus up to 4 hours of free pro bono consulting and a stack of nonprofit-specific templates (fundraising, board management, volunteer tracking, job board). If you run or advise a nonprofit, this is free money on the table.

How people run multi-project setups → Real dashboards from real workspaces. Global Tasks/Projects/Meetings databases linked by relation vs. one database per project, rollups that surface the next due date per project, and the line that stuck: separating data from views is the real unlock once you've got more than a handful of active projects running.

The cleanest explanation of what Notion actually replaces → Apple Notes is for capturing fast. Notion is for connecting information across projects. That's the whole distinction, and it's worth having ready next time someone asks why you bother with the extra setup.