# Ch 12: Live build: branded infographic skill
Creator: Nate Herk (@nateherk)
Transcript of Nate Herk's 2h33m 'Build your own AI operating system' course, split into its chapters. All content and credit: Nate Herk (@nateherk), https://x.com/nateherk/status/2101656269056610682. Transcribed locally with faster-whisper; names may be misheard.

[1:27:00] Now, after that, you're gonna click on this top-left button, and it's gonna pull up this little thing that says, you have not yet opened a folder. What you need to do is open up a project to work in. So you can either open up one that you're already working on, or you could go ahead and create a new folder and then open that one up. For the sake of the demo, I just opened up a new blank folder called a bunch of skills and I'm gonna show you exactly what to do. So the first step is to go to my free Skool community, link in the description, go to the Agent Skills Classroom and download the Skill Builder folder. Once you've got those files ready to go, first thing we wanna do is just set up this workspace real quick. Initialize this project with a simple .claud slash skills structure. Cool, so as you can see, that got set up. We have a .claud, we have a skills folder. And what I'm going to do is in this skill folder, I'm going to create a new folder called skill dash builder and hit enter. And then I'm going to take those two files from my Skool community, the reference and the markdown. And I'm going to put that right in here. So now we have this skill builder set up with the reference file and the actual skill markdown. I'm asking it if it can see that new skill that I just added. It says, yes, I can see it. And I'm basically just going to say, cool, let's run that skill to build a new one together. So now you can see what it did is it basically is reading the skill right now. This is the instructions that we saw right in here. As you guys know, since that's how skills work, it starts to read this. So here we go. I built this skill to actually ask you questions so that it's way easier for you to communicate what you want. So the first thing is, what problem are you trying to solve? What we want to do is content creation. Because in this skill, what I want to do is building branded infographics. What kind of content does the skill create?

[1:28:30] What's the specific use case or workflow? And I'm actually just going to choose other for this, and I'm going to say educational infographics. Now it's asking how we should trigger this skill. So does it want to be natural language or do we want to just use slash commands? And I'm just going to say both is fine. And now we're moving on to the step by step process, which is really important because at this point we haven't told it what tech stack we actually want to use or anything else about our business. So walk me through what should happen from trigger to output. And it has some good guesses, but what I'm going to do is do other and explain this the way that I want it built. I will tell you what I want an infographic about. You will create a concept. You will make a request to key.ai to use nano banana to generate the outline or sorry, to generate the image. And you will also look at the brand guidelines that I give you so that everything that is created follows my brand colors and typography and stuff like that. The output format that I actually want is a PNG, not any of this stuff. Does this need to be conversational or fire and forget? I'm just going to go fire and forget. All right. So how does the key AI nano banana integration work? Is it an API call? Yep. Yep, we're just gonna go with an API call. And in these options, you could literally say, I don't know, let's try different things, help me figure out what's best. It's asking where those brand assets live, so I'll put them in a folder. And where should the generated PNG infographic be saved? Yeah, sure, let's start a new folder called Projects and we'll throw all of them there. So it's gonna keep our project organized as well. So now it's asking about brand guidelines. I created this folder and I put in our kind of color scheme as well as the actual AIS logo. I have put in both our AIS brand guidelines

[1:30:00] and the AIS logo. I wanna make sure that in the top left corner of every single infographic that's created, the AIS logo appears exactly as I've given you. But I think you guys get the point here, I'm gonna answer a few more questions and then I'll just show you when we have a result. And now that we've done that, what you can see is it is going to create the skill, it's going to create the logo overlay, it's gonna create a supporting reference markdown file for all of the API details that it's gonna need, so that's great. It's gonna register the skill in claw.md and it's going to log its decisions. All right, so it fully built the skill, it created all those files for us, we just have to give it a key API key so it can actually run this. Okay, so I threw in my API key and then I said test it out with an infographic about Cloud skills, that's it. No other context, it invoked the skill right here and we will see what happens. Okay, this is really interesting. So what it's doing is it is generating the image and then it's just going to overlay the logo. So it's gonna be a lot more consistent than giving the AI image generator, Nano Banana, my logo. So I didn't even tell it to do that. Let's see how it looks. Okay, well, I don't love this. We're just gonna go back and ask it to change some things. The logo on the top left doesn't look great. I gave you a logo with a transparent background, so it should just be overlaid on top and we should be able to see the background behind it. The actual infographic itself is all right, but I actually want these to always be one by one aspect ratio. Okay, so I made some suggestions and it's gonna try again and it's gonna update its skill, so we'll see if that's better. All right, so second time we run the skill, let's see if it's any better. All right, there we go, we've got the logo up top,

[1:31:30] we've got Claude Code Skills, Custom AI Workflow, Command prompt trigger, front matter, config, triggers, AI agent delegation, document output. So just keep in mind, all we said was build an infographic about cloud skills. And this was run number two. Every single time that we do this cycle, remember we talked about the feedback, we would basically watch it again, give more feedback and then keep going. And after we run this probably five or six more times, this would be really, really good. And then every time I ask for an infographic, it's going to be consistent. And just to show you guys what was actually built, if we open up the infographic builder skill, We have the actual skill itself. So we have the front matter right here, the name, the description. We've got what the skill does. We've got context. So here's where it links to the actual brand guidelines and logos. We've got the step-by-step workflow right here. And we can see right here for full API reference and parameters. Just see the markdown file so that you don't have to actually go search the web and search through a bunch of tokens. You can just read this markdown file. All right. So we've talked about a lot of stuff about skills today and we just built one live. So what I want to talk about now is really how do you bridge the gap from like a 90% good skill to making it pretty much 100%. So testing, iterating, and debugging. There's different symptoms and there's different fixes. So let's just kind of go down this list one by one. The first symptom might be, it does the wrong steps or in the wrong order. Well, you would just tell it to edit the skill.md instructions. You could get missing tone, style, or context. In that case, you're going to add reference files. And of course, those have to be pointed to correctly in the skill.md. You could get the same mistake happening over and over, then you're gonna add a rule.

[1:33:00] If it struggles with a tool or an MCP or it keeps searching for the same things, then create some sort of reference doc for it. If it works good, but it could get better, then that just means you have to brute force it, you have to just run it over and over and over and keep nitpicking at what it does wrong. Or maybe not wrong, but what it could improve on. If the skill isn't triggering, then check the YAML and make sure it is specific enough. If the skill triggers too often, then maybe try disabling model invocation. And that is something that you can see in the Claude docs, which basically gives you control over if the skill can only be invoked by natural language or only be invoked by the slash command directly or both. So like I said, if you want to look at some more advanced stuff, then definitely head over here to the actual doc, but at this point, we've covered almost everything about these skills. One thing that I would call your attention to is the actual front matter reference, because we saw the name and the description, which is what's required every time, but there's lots of other things that you can add in there. Here's the disabled model invocation. Like we just saw, but you can also give it allowed tools. You can also give it an argument hint. You can give it a specific model to use. You can give a specific context. you can give it hooks, you can give it a specific agent. And so all of this lets you get really, really granular on the exact skill and how you want it to be used. But don't get overwhelmed, you really only get to that point once you've ran the skill a ton of times. Now another thing that I need to hit on real quick is where do skills actually live? Because what we've seen so far is just building them right in our .cloud slash skills folder. But when you're doing this, they only exist in that specific project. So whether that's my hurt two or my, you know, the one we just spun up, if I went to a different folder, that skill would no longer be able to be accessed by our Claude Code.