Get Started Skills

This is the shite first draft of a post that takes you through the process of getting started with skills. When I say “you”, I mean the author of this post because at the time of writing, I have a limited understanding of what a skill is in the context of AI systems. Hopefully by the time that this is published, I (and you) will have a deeper understanding of the topic.

Here’s the initial outline at time of writing:

  • Introduction to skills
  • Case study/practial application
  • Step-by-step with Mistral AI
  • References

Okay, let’s get to it.

Introduction to skills

At its simplest, a skill is the ability to do something well. We humans take many of our skills for granted, the ability to stand upright, walk, sit down, play chess or guitar, or shoe a horse. It’s probably rare that you give much thought to how you acquired these skills, but in many cases the ability to do these things is the result of prolonged practice and teaching.

Here are a couple of definitions from the dictionary

We all know that a skill is a type of work or activity which requires special training and knowledge to do something well.

In this article, we are focused on how you teach skills to an AI agent so that you don’t have to start from scratch each time that the agent performs a task for you.

The agent is the autonomous entity capable of performing tasks, making decisions, and interacting with the environment.

Case study/practial application

Practical applications abound. At time of writing

Debbie O’Brien provides a great introduction that I am tempted - at time of writing - to reproduce here without her permission. That wouldn’t be cool, but if I do re-use some steps, I hope she’ll forgive me.

One of the things that she links to in her post is skills.sh which is a directory of skills of hosted by Vercel . One of the examples that caught my eye there was https://skills.sh/coreyhaines31/marketingskills/copywriting

weganTODO

Debbie’s article led me to create the following directories and files:

In the SKILLS.md file I tweaked the content that Debbie provided for my own amusement:

---
name: good-morning
description: A skill that responds to good morning with a cheerful greeting
---
# Good Morning Skill

When the user says good morning, respond with:

- "Hi Walter, hope you have a great day!"
- Ask if they have had any coffee yet?
- Include a funny joke about sports with a focus on Ireland, rather than American sports such as baseball, basketball, or American football.
- Tell them what the weather is like in Mayo, Ireland today.

Running the following couple of commands from the terminal:

$ claude
$ good morning

Let to the following console output:

Console output from executing skill

Some notes from stepping through Debbie’s article. It didn’t reproduce consistently. When I retried over a couple of sessions, the following input:

$ claude
$ good morning

Led to output:

good morning - How can I help you today?

AFAIK, you need to have the project directory where you create the skill properly configured for the agent (Claude Code, in my case). That means, I think, that the initial steps before you run the good morning skill is:

$ claude
$ /init
// cycle through the set up wizard
$ good morning

Expand on it to, for example, ensure that titles in this blog/article use:

  • Sentence case
  • Active over passive voice

Step-by-step with Mistral AI

Provide a download to whatever it is that I manage to accomplish.

References

My source notes

Transferred from the word doc where I initially jotted down the ideas for this article.

Write a blog post about skills

Use the following collateral from Elastic about this:

See CloudFlare docs at https://github.com/anthocf/cloudflare-docs

Article by Deb O’Brien on https://x.com/debs_obrien/status/2029269909255966977

See also Stripe’s use of minions and https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-coding-agents

Intercom’s use of Claude Code https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-we-use-claude-code-today-intercom-brian-scanlan-eb7cc/

Content wrangler https://substack.com/inbox/post/191499486

Bill Sawyer https://www.linkedin.com/posts/billsawyer_i-have-noticed-that-several-prominent-technology-activity-7440038278361190400-BzBw

David Garcia https://blog.techdocs.studio/p/docs-are-fuel-for-ai-not-every-company?hide_intro_popup=true and https://blog.techdocs.studio/p/strategies-for-improving-technical

Reem the writer: https://reemthewriter.substack.com/p/technical-writing-ai-agents