# Ch 6: What a skill is
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.

[0:25:30] and then say, hey, Claude Code, write me a LinkedIn post. It would read your skill document and then it would go do everything. So it gives you more predictable outputs, higher quality. So thinking of it like a recipe is a really good analogy because also let's say you build this skill or recipe and it comes out not the way you want it. And then you realize, okay, next time we do this, I need to add like one more egg so that the brownies are cakey or whatever. Then you just update the skill, say, hey, instead of one egg, do two eggs. And the next time you say, hey, run the skill, it's better. So the skills will ever be evolving if you want them to, and it's going to help out a lot. So if we open up this folder, you can see that I already have given you three skills in here. We have one called audit, we have one called level up, and we have one called onboard. So in just a sec, we're gonna run the onboarding skill to get you fully onboarded into this AI OS. But let's take a look at what the skills actually are. So inside of the level up folder, we have a skill.md. And this skill.md, as you can see, is a very simple markdown file that explains what the skill does. We have a name, we have a description, we have what the skill does, and we have what the skill does not. And then we say like, okay, here's what you do every time the user actually runs the skill. Phase one is the interview. Phase two is the method interview. Phase three is blah, blah, blah. It's basically just an SOP. And what's really cool about that is let's say you have an SOP for onboarding a client. You could give Claude Code that SOP and give it the right connections to onboard a client and say, hey, can you turn this SOP into a skill?

[0:27:00] And then boom, you've essentially got an automation for onboarding a client. But anyways, I don't want to get ahead of myself or start to confuse you guys. Let's just actually keep going down real quick what else we've got in this project. So we've got an archives folder, which is where Cloud will put old documents or things that you don't need. We've got a context folder, which is where Claude will put different context files about your business, about you personally, about maybe the way that you like to communicate everything that it needs to know about you and your business, it can start to organize inside of this context folder. We've got decisions. It's going to keep a log of important things that you guys have decided to do together. And then we've got references. And this one right here has a markdown file about the three M's of AI. Now this is a really good place to start and I built this template. So it's kind of hackable over time. what's gonna happen is you're gonna build more and more files. There's gonna be more folders, there's gonna be different things. You might have projects, you might have quarterly folders. That can evolve and that is completely fine. The important thing is that Claude understands what the folders mean and what type of stuff goes in them. And that kind of stuff gets defined in a file called the Claude.md. The Claude.md is basically the master prompt for this project. So right here it says, okay, blank's name operating system. You are Nate's personal AIS. Your job is to be their thought partner, help them think, decide and ship faster on this priority. And there's a lot of placeholders here that are gonna get filled out as you start to grow this project. Now you can see there's a section here called your skills, which is important because it has to understand when to invoke what skill. And then we also have where things live.