Claude Skills Built Me an AI Agent Army (They Run Everything Now)

In this episode, Amir takes us through how to use Claude skills to build digital employees. We go through AB testing idea agent, marketing insight agent, and then we build one live together. You're going to learn about what cloud skills is, why it's the biggest thing that happened since sub agents, and how to actually build them yourself. Amir, what are we learning today? >> Today we're going to talk about claude skills. I'm going to tell you what they actually are, how they're different from projects and sub agents and claude, and why this matters, and how you can actually apply for work. >> Okay. And by the end of this episode, are we are we going to be able to apply Claude skills? >> 100%. I'm going to show you first I want to talk about what it actually is and why it matters. But I'll show you how to use existing skills in claude that they just came out with and how to create your own and how to apply for your work. So whether you're in marketing, in data analysis or any sort of document creation, you can actually use skills to do that. >> Cool. Let's do it. >> Cool. So first thing is I want to talk about cloud. So not a lot of people are familiar with cloud projects and I want to talk about what that actually is and why it matters and how it's kind of related to skills. So within Cloud AI specifically, you can actually create projects and they're essentially workspaces with a set of custom instructions. So this is a system prompt and it has relevant context, memories, and tools. So say for example you're part of a a broader marketing team and you want to create a project that will uh have a set of instructions to analyze marketing data for example or generate a newsletter and you want it to connect to specific tools um have relevant context and files. So this could be a glossery of terms you use within your organization, your brand guidelines depending on the task it is that you wanted to do and then also have memories generated from the chats that you have within that project. So it's really great for collaboration with other team members. Now you can also use it yourself as well, but really uh the ability for you to create repeatable tasks and do you know certain set of instructions with external tools and data. So if I'm in a marketing team, this is something that I want to look at and essentially within cloud share with my team members and create projects around it. All right. So the only thing with projects I would say that it's important to one work with your team members to actually refine the system instructions and then always have relevant context files. As your business changes, the data changes, you need to update it and you have to go back and constantly update these context files. Um and I'll talk about why context is important in this specific session and kind of how it ranks up against skills. Now the next part of it is sub agents. With sub aents, this is more relevant in cloud code specifically. And I actually use uh sub aents in cloud code to spin up multiple agents. And multiple agents are really great at breaking down complex multiworkflow tasks into individual tasks with specialized agents. So what does that mean? Say for example, you're building a very complex feature and you want to delegate the front end to one agent and the back end to another. So within the chat, you can actually spin up these agents to say, "Hey Claude, create an agent that will work on the front end using this set of rules and then create another agent to spin up to do the back end for it." And what's interesting is the context is isolated to that conversation window. Um, and so whatever context is provided or gathered in that conversation is actually um used as an input, but those agents have a set of system instructions as well. Now, where things get interesting is skills. And I want to talk about kind of why this actually matters. Um, skills are automated workflows and tasks that you can apply globally at a project or individual level. So whether you're an existing project, you have a set of system instructions, you can use skills which is an add-on or augmented skill set um within that project or individual chat and it can do a set of set of tasks, create documents, create PDFs, analyze documents, um it can actually help build MCPS for you. You can use skills to create other skills or create you know visual art as well. Now when do you actually use this? It's for very specialized tasks based on the constraints and guidelines and steps built by you the expert. I think uh it was Kaparthi um a couple days ago he had an excellent analogy where it's like AI is essentially your coworker or someone that like reports to you. You want to train it. You want to build the guidelines. You know this is not verbatim but like basically what he was trying to say was yeah it's someone that you work with and you can kind of build the limit the constraints around it and guidelines on how you want it to respond to you. And this is kind of similar in some nature. uh you can create for example let's say you are a paid media expert and you run campaigns for your clients and you want a very detailed analysis on your visit to booked appointments and what the conversion rates look like and how that attributes to the different channels you have and what's performing better than the other in terms of campaigns. You can create a scale that can follow a set of custom instructions but also scripts that you can build out yourself to analyze that data. And I want to circle back later on why that actually is important. Um, but what's also interesting is that it actually only loads context when it's relevant to the task. So when a project often times you have the LLM that's determining which context to retrieve and add into the conversation window and reference it. Um but in this instance it's only con based on the judgment of the task whether or not it should pull relevant context and it's just relevant to exactly what you want to get done. So I would say the key takeaway here is that it's repeatable instructions. It's laser focused on a set of tasks pulls in context as is needed and it has the ability to run scripts or run code to perform specific functions. Why this matters because um there's a paper great paper out there called talking about context rot and how essentially um talks about how to do effective prompt engineering and how the right amount of system prompts from you know very detailed to vague and the right amount of context has a huge impact on performance and as you add more context you essentially could be you know I don't want to quote on this but potentially be like degrading performance from the LLMs and likely to lead to more hallucination. Sam Alman, the co-founder of OpenAI, just said that it is the era of the idea guy, and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup. And if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so, too. Now, I think that you can look at trends uh to basically figure out uh what are the startup ideas you should be building. So, that's exactly why I built ideaser.com. Every single day you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox and it's all backed by high quality data trends. How we do it? People always ask. We use AI agents to go and search what are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building and then we hand it on a, you know, silver platter for you to go check out. Um, we do have a few paid plans that, you know, take it to the next level. uh give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more almost like a chat GBT for ideas with it, but you can start for free. Ideabra.com. And if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it. >> I mean, makes sense, right? Exactly. The more context you have, the less likely you are to hallucinate. >> Well, the more Well, well, yes and no. The more context you have, you're less likely to hallucinate. with the right amount of context. So, it's like kind of like like a like a coworker like do you want to give them all the information or just the right amount so that it doesn't bombard them to get the right task done. >> Exactly. >> So, that's that's what I would really call um break it down into. So, I'm going to go through some examples, but I want to talk about the importance of scale and why it's actually solving a real problem that I have faced myself. So with custom skills, how it works is that you essentially uh create this markdown file that explains exactly what the skill is and what it does. And you can actually create reference files that it can reference back into for additional context. So say for example, you create a skill that uh applies uh XYZ's company brand guidelines to presentation and documents. And this overview um essentially you know this the skill overview has a set of tasks and instructions it follows but you can also have an additional document as a reference that is an example existing brand guideline document that it can reference and it's not it's only pulling it when it needs to. You can take it another layer and you can essentially create custom scripts as part of that scale. Now um there's a great documentation by Anthropic on this and they talk about kind of how to write good scales and descriptions. But what's interesting is that when you are using a cloud project and you have MCPs or tools connected connectors connected the LLM is determining which tools to call based on your instructions and how to perform that task. So say for example you have a raw um like output of your meta campaign ad data or your Google ads data and you have a project in cloud that says like it's a market analyzer. I want you to your instructions are to analyze this data and give me insights. The LLM is determining how to like the model is determining how to actually look at the data and perform insights and it's it's nondeterministic in a way right like it's you know it can look at it differently every single time. um and you're not giving the right guidelines on how to actually take the data and analyze it. And I've seen this firsthand actually working with a lot of clients where like you know um a director of revops is looking at churn data new subscription data and um they'll put the file into the cloud project and it's not giving the right output of insights they're looking for. How this gets interesting is you can actually create scripts that are very specific. So say for example um if you wanted to um have a very set of strict guidelines on how it should actually run and analyze the data then you can create that within the scale itself to say I want you to look at column X Y and Z multiply by this divided by that to the power of this to give me this insight that way it's actual functional code that's running this and it's not deterministic nondeterministic by the model itself. Y >> so um so yeah that that's kind of the beauty of skills itself where uh you're able to really um bound or create the boundaries of what I should actually work towards um for um yeah for for like building out these skills. So yeah you can essentially have metadata with it resources and code you can load it as needed and it kind of breaks down exactly how you should write these skills. >> Now let's jump into some examples. >> Let's do it. This this the fun part. How do you actually apply this? So, the first one we're going to go through is an artifact builder. >> So, you can actually go to Claude and it's preloaded with some existing um skills. So, we're going to go to capabilities and essentially you'll see there's some existing skills that are preloaded. So, I have created these two ones right here. We'll go through them, but I want to show you the ones that are already already in there. So, you can have an artifact builder, an MCB builder, and a skill creator. So it's very meta. You can create skills with skills. So we'll go through an artifacts builder one and I'll show you an example of what that looks like. So say for example, you want to create a tool that is um relevant to marketers. Marketers, you know, when they run campaigns, they always have to have UTM links to do proper attribution back to their data to see okay, which campaign was driving the most and when they're seeing the analytics. So here um you know I have added the artifacts builder skill please create a UTM link generator for my marketing team. So what's happening here is that Claude is now going to reference that skill specifically that we have defined. And I'll show you what that skill looks like. >> And essentially, it's reading the documentation to understand how to build components. Artifacts are essentially these like live apps within cloud itself that you can create very functional web apps. And you can also share with your team as well. So what it's doing is it's actually referencing that skill here and now creating an artifact/web app of a UTM link generator that marketing teams can use. And you can actually just share this with the rest of your team as well or your entire team can use this as well. I mean, it's literally a web app. >> It's literally a web app. But what's interesting is >> we're now creating a set of specific instructions and skills. We're adding a skill to this LLM now that knows has to follow this versus before you're saying, "Hey, code this web app." And it's kind of you're not really defining the the guard rails or the the parameters of what it should do. >> And and what happens is people get frustrated that they're not getting the right result. >> Exactly. >> And then they're like, "Oh, you know, AI doesn't work for me." >> Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So this is where it gets interesting, right? Like you as an individual, you have the opportunity to um work with Claude and skills to build exactly the skill you're looking for to do. That's a repeatable task. So if you as a a marketer are doing weekly tasks of reporting, create a skill that can actually help you with that. Just explain to it in terms of what you're looking for, what you need. Be very detailed. if you were to assume that you're hiring someone else to do it for you. >> Yeah. I mean, it really is I mean, it really is thinking about AI as a teammate. >> Exactly. >> Especially a junior teammate. >> Exactly. >> That you have to really give it guard rails and really give it context cuz that's how you would, you know, if you hired someone junior, you would be like, "Okay, these are the tools that you're going to use." because they don't know the tools they're going to use because they're new. This is the context that you need to know about our business and how we operate. And then you kind of drip feed them. You don't want to overload them, right? Cuz then they're going to they're not going to remember everything or they might, you know, it might Yeah. just might be overwhelming. So you drip feed them the context over time. >> Exactly. But what's also interesting is if you start now as these models get better and as the toolkit expands you now have this like history of like training and reference and and metadata and memories that you've created over time now then so like someone like me who uses cloud a lot I now have a lot of pre-context of like memories and experience building these projects now I know exactly how to use skills and apply it here. So I think that's where it gets really interesting. Um, I generally think scales is probably the a huge problem solver for a lot of problems I've seen firsthand working with people. Like I've worked with a lot of teams right now that have actually like a lot of go to market teams that have used cloud as part of the workflow and the number one um feedback I get is the output was not on what I expected or it's incorrect. There's two reasons for that. One is the promp prompting is not good, right? the prompter >> the prompter it's the problem is them but the latter of it is it's also the you can prompt you know I worked on with them on right setting the right guard rails the prompts the access to tools the right retrieval of context and it still doesn't get it just right and I think this is where skills come in and solves that problem where it's just that task so you now have an artifact that's fully functional and working you can actually share with your team members if you wanted to and you can essentially like provide a URL like humble.com or ideabrowser.com and it will append um um the rights like Google and you know CBC you know was it Black Friday Cyber Monday? Yeah, something like that. And it'll actually create those um I will append it for you. I don't know why there's a clear button. It should be a submit button. You can also sell this to other people as a as a product, right? >> Yeah. So I think uh Claude in collaboration with someone else created this like repository of skills. I I don't I I I don't want to butcher the name so I'm not going to say it but basically there is a directory of some sort with skills and plugins because they recently came up with plugins as well which is like a collection of context and pl tools and skills and prompts allin one that you can install for your cloud workflow. So there is a huge opportunity for people to sell skills. Absolutely. >> Okay. Sorry. What's the difference between plugins and skills? So yeah, yeah, plugins just came out last week, which is like a plugin. You you plug it in and it has ancillary features, >> MCP access, context, system instructions, and I think skills now. I'm not don't quote me on this. Cloud's been shipping. Cloud's been shipping. I'm having trouble keeping up. >> You know, when I was I was building this out, when I was writing this out, I was like, I'm trying to understand what skills is. And as I was actually building with it, I was like, it's clear to me. Cuz initially, my gut reaction was this is over complicating it. How is this different from projects, >> right? >> And now I understand why. >> Okay. >> Yeah. So, uh yeah. So, we we essentially, you know, https idea browser.com. We can go Google CPC Black Friday Cyber Monday and then generate the URL and we have a URL. Boom. >> So, that's one use case. Let's make it more interesting. Um I am interested in finding AB testing ideas for my website. >> Yeah. So I have a skill that essentially looks at AB test generator and what it does is that you provide a URL and it will come up with headlines or experiments for you to run for your website to increase conversions and it actually uh the skill I created the skill using the skill creator. I said I'm going to give you a URL and you're going to run a framework on actually how to run good AB tests for me. So we're going to test this and see what it looks like and then I'll show you an example of how to create your own skill as well. So, hey Claude, I have just added I have added the AB test generator skill. Can you run an can you provide me with AB experiment ideas for humble.com? And what this will do is here because I have access to uh an FCB called firecrawl, it would actually use firecrawl to scrape the URL, the page and the contents and then come back with a very clear framework on experiments to run. So while that's running, maybe I'll just show you an example of what that actually looks like. And essentially, it looks something like this. So it gives you an experiment pipeline impact, confidence, ease, um, IC score. And, um, you know, it was actually a really good one. I actually did it right before this call, before the session today was it asked me to, it told me to actually test um, shifting the case study that I have above one section above. So it's like hero section and then case study go to immediately social proof and I was like damn that's a good idea like why am I showing the features when I should show do the social proof. So I'm running AB test right now to see which one is likely to drink drive more conversions and signups. So um that's interesting like it really breaks down exactly the control the variant the headlines you should be testing. So, experiment number one, experiment number two, and if I really wanted to, you know, just take this, put it into my app, and then run run through an experiment. >> You know, would be really cool if you can automate this so that you, you know, every month send me a report. >> Yeah. >> What to change? >> Exactly. Exactly. So, um, if you really wanted to, yeah, you can. You can probably write a skill, uh, that I wonder if you can. I wonder I wonder if you can already do that today where you write a skill that writes a script that automatically sends you rapport every single week or every month. Yeah. >> Why not? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> So, yeah, you know, I am going to plug in my app and say we do that automatically in our app. So every week we we have like four sets of sub agents that go through your website and give you insights from like a copy conversion marketing like um a designer as well. So every week and then we give you like an optimization score. So similar um kind of similar approach here but I think doing that within cloud is actually really interesting as well. Now what I really really really want to show you is a problem I've been trying to solve for the past couple months with these companies I've been working with which is take data and give me the insights that I actually want to look at. It's such a repeatable task and it's so important that I think I can't confirm yet skills has probably solved that problem for me now in a way. So um I uploaded a file called traffic analytics. It it's just basically like a a CSV of um just a bunch of campaigns and you know revenue data and whatever. And I was like, I need some insights on this. And that's what really matters to a lot of people in terms of just did cost go down did you know CBC go up down? What does the trial conversion look like? XYZ. So I um I provided a file and it referenced the scale and has a set of scripts within that scale to then do a comprehensive analysis of the data the traffic data. So overall performance your total spend was 400k your revenue was 854K. uh net profit, conversions, which channel did better than the other. Um so you have a clear idea and I'll be honest like I you know you know I am going to be honest but um I would say that I I I would I would say that if I had done this through a project and I just uploaded a file with set of instructions without running scripts, it would have probably hallucinated some of the data. That's what I was going to say because I >> when I look at this, this feels this if this wasn't in in Claude and I had a product manager send me this, I would be like, "Yeah, you know, this feels like that level >> of fidelity." Um, it just, you know, it just it it's >> it looks right. >> It looks right. >> It looks right. >> I mean, I can't confirm cuz I don't know the I didn't look at the Excel, but I'm just just looking at it looks right. >> Yeah, it does. Yeah, exactly. So, and and I'll show you what it looks like essentially within the breakdown of the skill itself. So, skills um what you do is you have the actual skill.md file itself. So, this again is a breakdown of what the skill is, the scripts it should run and then yeah like generate data for 90 days, generate data of 7 days, generate data for 10 campaigns and then what the structure should look like. So, you can actually use this to define it. And you know if I want to take a step further I can use cursor to then update the scale itself. Um and I'll show you an example of how to create your own scale. And then you can also reference files. So you can see here it says see references metrics MD for detailed metric definition and typical ranges. So if we want to go back into references we can see what metrics MD has which is all the you know definitions or glossery. So as a marketer, you get to define what these are and you should be doing that so that you know when you run these scripts and skills, it gives you exactly what you need instead of getting the LLM to actually do it for you. And then the scripts are made by cloud itself where it's running a Python script on, you know, calculating all this for you. So it's accurate in some way or another. >> Yep. >> Cool. Um let's see where we are at. Yeah. So let's now create we we've gone through AB testing ideas. We created an artifact. We got some working insights. I think we should now just create our own skill. Do you have anything in mind? Tell me if this is possible. So I tweet every day >> and I also have a newsletter and every single week I basically I use my tweets like if it rips on Twitter I'll kind of expand on it on my newsletter. >> Okay. Um, I have a specific type of style how I write on my newsletter. So, what would be really cool like this is some this is something I would hire for potentially like almost like a ghost writer. >> So, is it possible to have a skill that basically like looks at my tweets and turns it into long form content that I can review and and be the editor of? >> Okay, let's try. Let's let's let's find out. Um, we're doing a lot. You're like, "Maybe." >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. No, absolutely. I think I think we can figure out we can we can try. So, hey Claude, I just added the skill creator skill. So, we're using the skill creator to do that. Can you make me a skill that takes an existing tweet provided by the user and turns it into long form content for LinkedIn >> for uh >> for newsletter >> newsletter >> for newsletter. Okay. So I would I think what what I would do in this scenario is making sure that we have a reference file, right, of your existing newsletter. >> I would need a and would you need like an export of all my tweets? >> Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe we can try to do one example one right now and then um >> and then see. But ideally what I would do is actually I actually have this I have an automated bot that looks has all my tweets and then finds the most viral ones and tries to like expand on it. Ideally, we we would export all of your tweets. >> Yeah. >> And then >> and then, you know, we would in order to keep it updated, we would need to make sure that we're, you know, constantly updating. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So, um, while that's running behind the scenes, I'm going to scrape I'm going to get some examples of, uh, of your posts on Twitter. Yeah, >> that's me. >> Okay. So, what's a good tweet? Yeah. You find a tweet that like speaks to you and then we'll >> Okay. I like this one actually. It speaks to me. >> Okay. Pricing. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean, this is a perfect one cuz it was too long for Twitter. >> Yeah. >> But I'd still posted it anyways. >> Mhm. >> Um but if I did even if I did this on a newsletter, I would totally expand on this. I got you. And then um >> for the newsletter, where's where's the best? I mean I I >> I don't even know if you can >> Yeah. How do I >> find it? Go to I think Greg Eisenberg. Do gregisberg.k.com. >> Um All right, cool. So, let's take this actually and we're going to copy this and then create notes. Export this example newsletter. >> Export it as a markdown. Right. >> Yeah. As a markdown. Exactly. Exactly. So, we're going to go back to Claude now. So, now that we have an example tweet post and example newsletter, um we're going to um up uh we're going to upload that as a reference file in there as well. So, what we'll do is let me just drop this in here. Add these files as references. You know what's interesting is they actually gave you a zip of the scale for you to upload. And we're saying now like add this as a reference into that scale. >> Okay. Stuff is happening. >> Things are happening. We're seeing instructions. Yeah. So, we're adding instructions. So, similar to I showed before where there's instructions to reference the file in the folder, we're going to see a zip now with a folder called references. And if you open it up, you'll see these two examples in there. Boom. So, now we can essentially download this and re-upload it back into Claude. There you go. Sweet. Okay. Two newsletter. And we're now going to go to settings, capabilities, upload a skill, and we're going to upload tweet to newsletter. And now we're going to write the skill. Try in chat. I just had the skill. Can you turn this tweet into a newsletter format? And you you're going to be the judge of this. Tell me if you think it's good. >> Yeah. >> Um, so we'll go back. You know, we already had it, but I'll just copy paste this to see how it works. Okay, and we'll go cloud. Let's see what happens. I'm honest. I'd be surprised if this crushes it on the first try cuz think about how I don't know. I'd be surprised. I hope it does. So, I'm I'm I'm very curious. It's like I this is we're doing this live and I'm curious to see how it actually comes out and I want to get your honest take on it, right? Because for me, at least from a data standpoint to get the insights, I think it's interesting. Um cuz like there was challenges with projects before to get the right insights. So >> honestly, this is fire. >> I mean, so tone of voice. So, we just did this in one shot, but if we really wanted to, we would take all of your existing tweets, all of your newsletters, and then use that to generate a like a style guide or tone of voice, and then kind of refine this. But as a starting point, it's not bad. >> As a starting point, it's not bad. And I I I'll even take it a step further. Like, this is >> It's actually not bad. >> Really good. >> It's actually not bad at all. >> Until next time, keep building and keep raising. Not keep raising. >> Yeah. We don't, >> you know, but keep building. I like uh forward this to a founder who's been sitting on the same price point for too long. Like I like that. I think that's really smart. Right. >> We talking about product market fit. We should talk more about price >> pricing market fit. Like that's a that's a banger. >> That's a banger. That's actually a banger. >> Like if I tweeted that as its own oneliner like that probably would do really well. >> Oh, until next week. >> Yeah, I think so. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. 100%. Now, it would have been interesting if it like if we you know, we could technically say, "Okay, now go scrape like tweets and embed it in there." Yeah, that would be really cool. And the cool thing is you can actually create skills now. >> Dude, this is crazy. >> Actually, yeah. Here's where it gets interesting though, right? Cuz you can now create skills that generate visual graphics cuz that's that's a thing now. You can so >> you can you don't have to do MCP calls like Canva or anything like that. You can programmatically create these visuals. So we can update the skill to say, "Hey, now add images as well in there." >> Yeah, >> this is pretty good. >> All right. >> Yeah. So, you know, we covered why projects matter, how it's different, I think, from skills, and I think we got a good idea that skills are probably more deterministic in terms of what you want to do in terms of how you want to define the skills and you can now do programmatic code in there with MCBS and tools and how impactful context is. >> Yep. and uh you know essentially how it differs from everything else. So and we've covered some use cases as well. The last thing I want to talk about is kind of just like you know I saw this report I don't know if you if you saw from ramp where they were tracking subscriptions for like different AI tools and they saw that there's a dip happening and they're saying there's getting stickier in enterprise but the AI is off ramping and it's not as sticky as we want it to be because cost is coming down. I actually want to say now with what we're seeing with skills and all the education and awareness around prompting we should be able to solve that gap because the reality is a lot of companies are investing in AI and there's reports now saying that it's not actually being as productive as we thought. >> The issue is I think prompting and context >> the issue is people. >> The issue is not Yeah. Yeah. That's the reality, right? >> There isn't enough AI fluency and education around how to actually do prompting. People like write, you know, build me a SAS 1 million AR, don't make mistakes, you know, and the reality is like, no, no, you got to give the right amount of context and do some prompt structure. And um I think when it comes to anthropic, they do a really good job of not only building with intention, but creating the resources, the education to help people actually become more AI fluent and giving them tools to do that. And they're very deliberate with what they create. And it's actually real problem solvers. Like I've never seen a company so dialed into customer feedback and just creating something around it. It's almost like they heard me in conversations about what issues I'm having and you know why skills matter. So um the net of this takeaway is AI adoption may be falling and the adoption rates may be down for this month or this past quarter. I think part of it is just because companies don't have the right resources and the people to build education um on AI enablement and AI fluency and then once we see that come into play adoption is going to come back up and there's the tools now to support that. >> Beautiful. Well, thanks for explaining it to me honestly and everyone else. Um, >> for more of air, uh, I'll include links in the show notes where you can go ahead and follow him. Uh, X is the best place. >> Yeah, Air MXT. A M I R MXT. >> Cool. I appreciate you coming on. >> Cool. Thanks for having me. >> Thanks, man. Thanks.