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Building a skill sounds like a lot of writing. Today, I leave that to my AI. Four ways to let your AI create a skill, including by demonstrating it.

When I started with skills, I wrote them out completely myself. Every step, every exception, in a Markdown file. I do not really do that anymore. You just ask ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot to write a skill, and it knows how to do that. A folder with a lowercase name, a SKILL.md file inside it, the right description at the top. Your AI handles that itself.

What you still do yourself, is tell your AI what the skill needs to do. And there are different ways to do that. This week I put them side by side in a training, because many people think there is only one.

Before I build a skill or an agent, I look at the shape of my work. A chain, a branch, a nest or a diamond, and what that changes.

When I ask people to describe a workflow, I almost always get a list. First I do this, then that, and then that. That is just how we think. This week I saw it again in a training, when we started building skills. Everyone wrote their steps neatly below each other.

That is actually a good start. But a lot of work does not run in a straight line. And when you see the shape of your work, you also know better what to ask your AI. So in that training I showed a few shapes, with examples from my own work.

Chains and branches

Six steps with ready-to-use prompts to build an agent that goes through your emails every morning and tells you what needs your attention today. Ready in half an hour.

An agent that goes through your emails every morning is, in my opinion, the best first agent you can build. It is small. And you will use it the very next day. This step-by-step plan takes you from an empty chat to an agent you have tested yourself. I wrote it for Copilot, but the prompts also work in Claude or ChatGPT. Count on half an hour.

The first step, in a normal chat

I actually ignore the agent builder. I just start in a chat. And then I let my AI ask questions first. The vague parts in your assignment are exactly what it needs to figure out. Fill in the part between brackets.

The big AI companies are bringing you in cheaply right now. I prefer to spread my work across multiple tools, and I explain why and how you can do that yourself.

In a training about Copilot this week, we talked about licences. Microsoft is changing a few things again, and new features are being added. I also gave my own opinion then, because there is a question behind it that many companies are not asking today. What happens if you put all your work with one AI provider?

I do not tie myself to that. And that has little to do with Microsoft alone. It applies to all the big players.

Who is paying today

All those AI companies are investing a huge amount, and most are making a loss today. What you pay with your little subscription does not come close to covering what your usage costs them. The investors are paying for that now, because they believe we will all pay much more later. A participant said it very dryly: 'They lock you in for free.' And that is actually true. First you put all your work processes on their AI. And when you can no longer do without it, the price goes up.

A skill is a folder, and it can contain more than just text. This is how I let my agent look at an interesting skill first and make its own version of it.

In a workshop about vibe coding this week, someone asked what a skill actually is. I thought I had already explained it. But I give so many training sessions that I was not sure myself anymore. So I just explained it again. A skill is a step-by-step description of how an agent should do a task. You can see it as a fixed way of working, in plain human language.

And then the next question usually follows immediately. There are thousands of skills online, and someone asked if you cannot just download them. I stay away from that myself. And I would like to explain why.

An agent that has to build a design often turns it into something else. I let him describe the design first, and only build it afterwards.

Last weekend I rebuilt my website, with AI. I absolutely did not want it to look like all those typical AI websites. So I went through all the steps that I also show in my training courses. First brainstorming, then designing, and only then building.

Along the way I got a new idea. People also needed to be able to register on my website, for example to make an appointment. And then I started thinking further about what else they could do there, once they are registered anyway. That is how a complete learning space was added. And for that I first took a step back, to the design.