Ch 11: Capabilities: building skills (embedded Claude Skills video)

Collection: Nate Herk: AIOS course · Creator: Nate Herk (@nateherk)

Original: raw source · demo-lab/research/nate-herk-course/transcript.txt @ 1:06:00 · 5,237 words · 15 sections

Content by Nate Herk (@nateherk). Chapter starts at 1:06:00. Auto-transcribed; names may be misheard.

Summary

• So building skills, building custom skills for your specific SOPs, your specific workflows, your specific tasks, remember how we talked about this thing earlier, every single task that you have can be broken up into chunks and all of these chunks and this overall larger thing can all be turned into a skill.
• So in order to get a better understanding of skills, I'm going to go ahead and play a video where I break down a bunch of the ones that I use, how they work, and how you think about building them and improving them over time.
• Sometimes like a company tone of voice, or maybe your LinkedIn, you know, tone a voice, a target avatar, current priorities, a logo, maybe there are other things that you want to put into a skill besides just like the step by step instructions that will make it better.
• So in your dot cloud slash skills slash skill name, you can have the skill.md, You can have your scripts right there, and you can have your references right there.
• You just have to go to Extensions on this left-hand side, type in Claude Code, and then install this, and then log in with your paid Anthropic subscription.

Entities mentioned

Claude Code · YouTube · LinkedIn · Skool · Python · YAML · AIOS · SOP · WAT · Skill Builder · ClickUp · MCP · VS Code · Anthropic · Visual Studio Code

Topics

Topic: connect · routines · Topic: youtube video · google · gave · Topic: project · step · Topic: scheduled tasks · routines · run · Topic: operating system · think · business · Topic: second brain · wiki · youtube

Key points by section

[1:06:00]

• And so everything that I do on some sort of cadence, every time that I need to pull in my YouTube analytics, every time that I need to check in with the team, every time that I need to build a slide deck, all of those things I've built skills for in my AIOS.
• If I need to create images, if I need to create a LinkedIn post, All of these things are skills that I've built over time because I've challenged myself to do everything, to do as much as possible inside of my Claude Code.
• So building skills, building custom skills for your specific SOPs, your specific workflows, your specific tasks, remember how we talked about this thing earlier, every single task that you have can be broken up into chunks and all of these chunks and this overall larger thing can all be turned into a skill.
• So what I want you to do right now is I want you to grab a piece of paper and I want you to think about, It's a Monday morning.
• Topic: Topic: connect · routines

[1:07:30]

• So in order to get a better understanding of skills, I'm going to go ahead and play a video where I break down a bunch of the ones that I use, how they work, and how you think about building them and improving them over time.
• It just comes down to one simple word and that is leverage. with cloud skills or any agent skills for that matter, you have way more leverage than if you were doing this by yourself.
• So in this video, I'm gonna be breaking down what skills are, how they work, and how you can build really, really good ones, even if you've never heard of the concept or built a single skill ever before.
• So let's hop into a live demo real quick and get going.
• Topic: Topic: scheduled tasks · routines · run

[1:09:00]

• I'm opening up another one to create me an Excal draw diagram of the difference between local AI models and closed source models.
• And let's just do one more that's gonna scrape the comments from my recent YouTube videos and give me an analysis on what I need to improve.
• And because I built all of these skills, all of these agents have all of the context about my business, what's going on with our projects, my YouTube channel, it has literally everything it needs.
• The second agent came back with a pulse check, two days until the end of the month, here's where everything stands.
• Topic: Topic: youtube video · google · gave

[1:10:30]

• So for the comment analysis that came back and we can see all of the comments, all the views and things that I need to address either in future videos or in the comments.
• Okay, so now that you guys have seen an actual demo, and hopefully you're a little bit excited to learn about Cloud Skills if you haven't used them yet, what actually are they?
• You write them once, you save them as a skill, you can trigger them anytime, and you're gonna get way more consistent results because it's going through that same process every time.
• And what I'm gonna do, by the way, for all you guys is in my free Skool community, the link for this is down in the description.
• Topic: Topic: operating system · think · business

[1:12:00]

• where I'm just gonna be dropping a ton of these skills that you guys can go grab for completely free.
• Now I'm not saying this is going to be a viable business model for a long, long time, so you shouldn't bank on it, but it is something to be aware of, just like when people were selling and in workflow templates, things like that.
• We're actually making it a priority to make sure all of our employees are using Claude Code, because now I have all these different skills that I can just run with a simple slash command or a simple natural language prompt and get in one day a week's worth of output.
• Because once again, one person can figure out the best way to do something and turn it into a skill that the entire team can use, but they don't just generate texts.
• Topic: Topic: connect · routines

[1:13:30]

• The same way where you would train a human employee by letting them read through an SOP to understand the process, and then they'd be able to do it.
• And the coolest part about it is the more you use the skill, the better and better it gets.
• The most common example is probably going to be in your .claud slash skills slash skill name. and then you've got like a skill MD or a markdown file.
• Now up here, we'll have a name and a description, which tells Claude code, what the skill is called and what the skill does.
• Topic: Topic: connect · routines

[1:15:00]

• Sometimes like a company tone of voice, or maybe your LinkedIn, you know, tone a voice, a target avatar, current priorities, a logo, maybe there are other things that you want to put into a skill besides just like the step by step instructions that will make it better.
• So in your dot cloud slash skills slash skill name, you can have the skill.md, You can have your scripts right there, and you can have your references right there.
• So here we have .cloud slash skills slash infographic in the skill MD, and we still have our scripts and our references in the same project, but it's just not nested directly under that skill.
• And so what happens in here is basically use when someone asks for content ideas, video ideas, what to make next, or to run idea mining.
• Topic: Topic: project · step

[1:16:30]

• And so in here, I gave it some context, right?
• My channel has this many subs, it's about AI automation.
• My content pillars are N8N, RAG agents, Claude Code, voice AI, and then...
• Topic: Topic: youtube video · google · gave

[1:16:30]

• I also gave it the raw data, which is a Jason file.
• I gave it a competitor list for me and I gave it an actual script to run analysis on my youtube channel.
• And so in this case, what you can see is that I went for option B where I'm storing those reference files on those scripts, not directly nested in this skill.
• Basically the idea is it doesn't matter where those actual reference files or scripts live, as long as you point to the right spot in the MD file.
• Topic: Topic: second brain · wiki · youtube

[1:18:00]

• That doesn't mean every single time the skill is invoked that those reference files will all be called.
• And just in case you guys were wondering if you've watched some of my previous Claude Code videos where we've used the WAT framework to build automations.
• The tools were the actual Python scripts, and that's basically just the scripts that you might write or the references that you would add in.
• So cursor, anti-gravity, codecs, because it's so based in Markdown and it's essentially just a prompt,
• Topic: Topic: operating system · think · business

[1:19:30]

• The first one is you can be explicit, which basically means you can do a slash command and say the skill name, and it will just directly fire off that skill, or it could just be natural language.
• So if I had a school post skill, I could say slash school-post, or I could natural language just say, hey, help me write a school post about X, Claude would find that skill and then invoke it.
• So when you ask Claude to do something, it will first read through the Claude.md file, It will analyze your request and it will search through the skills and see which one do I have that helps with this query.
• And if you had all of these skills to look through and all of these skills are, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds of lines, then if cloud was searching through all of these every single time, that would surely eat up a ton of your tokens.
• Topic: Topic: second brain · wiki · youtube

[1:21:00]

• So if I need to look at any scripts or references or templates, or I need to pull in some brand assets or more context, I'm only going to do that if their specific requests requires it.
• And so hopefully now you're starting to understand a little bit more about under the hood, what's actually going on when you ask Claude Code to do something for you.
• And once again, I'm going to show you guys opening up a brand new project and setting up a skill from scratch So you understand the full process, but I just had to give you guys some context first.
• Now we have this thing called the feedback cycle, which basically means you invoke the skill, you actually watch the agent work,
• Topic: Topic: project · step

[1:22:30]

• And so that's why it's actually important to watch the agent work the first couple of times, because that's how you're able to identify opportunities to speed it up and save tokens by doing things like this.
• So here's an example of the pulse check skill that we actually ran earlier.
• Now this skill gets invoked when I ask for a pulse check or checking in on commitments.
• So what I did is I hard coded, the these list IDs, because when I was watching it, I realized every single time it was doing this, it was calling the ClickUp MCP, and it was gathering all these lists and it was searching and parsing the results and then it would extract the ID and that just was taking so long and it was costing me a ton of tokens.
• Topic: Topic: scheduled tasks · routines · run

[1:24:00]

• We're just focusing on skills, but just wanted to give you a little taste of what's possible in the skill.md files.
• So another good example of needing a reference doc like that is in my skill builder skill.
• But really the main idea that I'm trying to drive home here is that processing markdown files for your agent is so much quicker and cheaper than actually making API calls or HTTP requests, executing functions and reading tons and tons of tokens.
• So the goal is your skills will get to a place where you can invoke them, focus on something else for 10, 15 minutes or whatever, and then come back and have a finished result that is really, really good.
• Topic: Topic: youtube video · google · gave

[1:25:30]

• So we're about to hop into a live build of a skill from scratch.
• Do you need understanding of current projects, current priorities?
• If you don't have Visual Studio Code, just go ahead to a browser, type in VS Code, and then go ahead and download this.
• You just have to go to Extensions on this left-hand side, type in Claude Code, and then install this, and then log in with your paid Anthropic subscription.
• Topic: Topic: project · step

Backlinks

AIOS · Anthropic · Claude Code · ClickUp · LinkedIn · MCP · Python · SOP · Skill Builder · Skool · VS Code · Visual Studio Code · WAT · YAML · YouTube · Hot cache · Index · Topic: connect · routines · Topic: operating system · think · business · Topic: project · step · Topic: scheduled tasks · routines · run · Topic: second brain · wiki · youtube · Topic: youtube video · google · gave