Introduction: What “Skills” Mean for LLMs

I'm going to be talking about skills, specifically skills in the context of an LLM, and advanced use of skills.

Because I bet, hands up, hands up if you've heard of what a skill is. Brilliant.

Hands up if you've written a skill. Okay, nice one.

Hands up if you've ever asked an agent to write a skill for you. All right, cool.

Defining a Skill (and Why Reuse Matters)

So let's start by answering the basic question, what is a skill? What is a skill?

So the first answer is it's basically a set of instructions It's kind of like a prompt that is to say a piece of text that you throw into the LLM You know do this But the key with the skill is that you write it to a file somewhere and then as a result you can reuse it

Which makes it very very powerful. So anytime you find yourself asking the LLM to kind of do the same thing again You're almost certainly going to benefit from saying hey agent Agent, would you mind making this skill for me so that I can do this in future?

And often what I'll do is I'll work through something. When I get an output that I'm happy with, I'll be saying, great, now let's generalize this as a skill.

Does this make sense so far? Okay, cool.

How to Get an Agent to Write a Good Skill

And so there's a few things I would suggest go into helping the agent to help you write a good skill, because that's what I'm proposing you should do.

A year ago, I would have been standing up and saying, here are the components of a good skill. You should define a persona and the context and the goals and the output format and all this kind of thing.

At this point, you can basically just fire up Rebel or ClaudeCowork or Codex and say, hey, I want to write a skill on X, and it will do most of this stuff for you. So you can just do it through conversation.

So some of the things that I would recommend, and I'll go quickly because I think this is almost solved for us.

Use Voice and Provide Rich Context

Use voice. If you aren't already, make sure that you're clicking the little microphone button or that you've got your own microphone transcription

on your laptop and just burble at the computer and say, hey, this is the skill I'm trying to do.

I'm going to be writing a presentation this evening and I'm going to need it to do the following stuff and oh, by the way, and oh, I just remembered

and oh, make sure you do this because we talk faster than we type and we end up providing richer context so you'll get better results.

As always, great.

Include Examples and Let the Agent Interview You

helps to include some examples of where the kind of output that you want the skill to produce, okay, you know all this stuff probably.

Have it interview you to clarify your intent. This right here is worth the price of admission if you're not already doing this.

So in other words, hey, I want to write a presentation skill, ask me questions one at a time. Okay, what kind of audience is this for?

And how many slides? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it will clarify with you.

And by the time you've thought through those questions, and the elements are really good at asking questions, then the skill that you get is going to be much more likely to be what you actually want it to be.

Iterate Like an Engineer

And then the final thing is you've got to think like an engineer. That is to say, you've got to say, okay, great, I've got my new skill. Now let's try it.

And it will invariably not do exactly what you want, because nobody ever can read each other's minds. And so

So then you say, okay, that's good, but here's what I'd like you to do to refine the skill. Make just small updates, and just make sure that next time it does it this way, and next time I want more slides, and I want more images, and I want it in purple, or whatever.

Okay, great.

From Single Skills to Composable Building Blocks

So, let's say we're writing a skill to write a presentation. Now, you could imagine doing all of these things, and you might end up with this enormous long skill, this wall of text, which you probably won't read. That's for the agents. to read.

But in the process of writing that skill to write a presentation for you, you might start to think, well, you know what? A lot of this overlaps quite a lot with the skill I wrote last week for writing a LinkedIn post or for updating our company marketing or for storytelling or or market research, because there's little pieces of this that are common, and you want to reuse them.

And this is the key idea that takes you from being pretty effective to very effective. It's the idea, and imagine the skill kind of like the way a kid views Lego.

So you're trying to build a castle, and in the process of doing that, you've got a whole bunch of pieces that you put together. And you can put those pieces together to build a castle,

But then next week you decide to build a fire station and the week after that you decide to build a spacecraft and It's all based out of these composable smaller pieces.

Okay, so let me show you what I mean Here is an example where we said, okay I've got my blog post sort of overall thing that I'm trying to achieve and as part of that

Maybe I've got an adversarial review skill and we'll talk about that in a minute Maybe I've got a skill about design guidelines or branding. Maybe I've got a skill about tone of voice

Maybe a skill about background research and then I noticed that oh wait my presentation skill could reuse the same Tone of voice skill the same brand skill the same adversary review the same research Same with my social media post and so these are quite related But actually I think you'll find that a lot of these end up being reusable in lots of different contexts

So if you do a really good job of defining your company brand guidelines or tone of voice Then everything else that you do just works better magically as a result

Make sense so far? Okay, super. All right.

Decomposing a Presentation into Smaller Reusable Skills

So just for fun, let's ask the question, what are the composable skills that might go into a really good, big, that you might draw on in order to write a presentation? Anybody want to shout out?

Review. Good. Branding.

Okay, shout louder. This is good. Tone of voice. Audience. Audience.

research opportunities nice call to action okay great so you can imagine that each of these could be a small skill that you'd reuse in a whole bunch of different places call to action goes

into your website opportunities and threats analysis also could be reused for your strategy analysis uh and i've forgotten a bunch of the others market research could go in a whole bunch of places uh let's see what do we have oh wow yeah all right you nailed it oh and uh you might

You might have a skill for generate me images. Or you might have a skill for ask me questions one at a time in a way that you find really helpful. So all of these are different ways of breaking up one big thing into lots of pieces that you can reuse.

A Quick Exercise: Identify Your Own Composable Tasks

Great, thank you, Nip. OK, now I'm going to invite you just to close your eyes for one moment and think to yourself, what is a big task

you'd like to do that you can imagine breaking up into composable skills? I'm just going to give you 10 seconds to think about it. A big task, and what composable skills might go into that?

Anybody have any good ideas? Stock trading, what kind of composable skills for that? What kind of composable skills might go into a stock trading? Anyone's welcome to shout out.

Research, price. Orchestration's a good one.

Okay, so I think you're getting the hang of this, and actually I think it's a lovely example to think through. You probably already did this, I get the sense. But if we were to decompose that kind of complex rich work you were doing what might the pieces be? Okay, great

Advanced Patterns: Critique and Multi-Perspective Thinking

So I promised you advanced skills and I want to just give you a couple more thoughts to go away with the build on this

Adversarial Review (Devil’s Advocate) Skills

So I talked about adversarial review adversarial as in adversary as an enemy I often call it the devil's advocate in other words.

Let's say you're working on something imagine you had someone super smart whose job was just to come along and throw stones and criticize everything you've done now on the one hand that's quite demoralizing on the other hand it is often quite helpful and so one of my

top recommendations anytime you're working on something important would be write yourself a devil's advocate or an adversarial review skill whose job it is to say hang on is this even worth doing is there a simpler way to do this is there a better way to do this did you notice these problems you didn't think think about this.

And then at the end of that process, if you can bring yourself to go through it a few times, you will invariably end up with a higher quality output.

Okay, so let's go one more level. Great.

The “Board of Advisors” Skill

So the next level up from an adversarial review is a board of advisors. There's a reason that pretty much every successful company in the world has a board.

What you really want is a whole bunch of people with expertise, diverse expertise and perspectives and background and and expertise that are coming together,

and out of that kind of dialectic of different people disagreeing with different views and different intents and different knowledge, you end up with a synthesis that's way better than any one of those perspectives could have come up with.

So this is the next level up from the adversarial review. You have multiple adversaries.

And so if you're a startup, you can imagine that if you were writing a strategy document, you might say, okay, I'm gonna create a skill that will pretend to be the CTO.

I'm going to create a skill that's going to pretend to be the head of sales. I'm going to create a skill that's going to pretend to be the information security officer.

I'm going to create a skill that's going to be pretending to be the chief sustainability officer or whatever the roles are that you care about.

And then, and this is the fun part, you put them in a room, you give them a clear goal about what it is that you're trying to do.

Maybe you use your voice to say, okay, here's the strategy document, here's the decision I need to make, should I buy a house, leave my wife, raise money,

whatever it is that you need to do, and then say, okay, I've defined skills for each of my different advisors, and then I'm going to put them in a room with this brief, and I'm going to leave them with a crate of Red Bull and some croissants, lock the door for

an hour or two, and have them argue, and then at the end, maybe the orchestrator skill will We'll say, okay, here were all the perspectives we heard, and over the course of bickering for an hour, we eventually came to the following proposals or conclusions or critiques or, you know, progress on whatever we're thinking about.

And I really can't overestimate how effective this is as a way of pushing your thinking forward. And, of course, the fun is once you've created your CTO or your chief sustainability officer or your InfoSec or your whoever, if you've created these as skills, you can easily just recombine them.

Going Meta: Auto-Assembling Advisor Panels

And if you want the next level move, then you create a board of advisers skill that just says, hey, assemble me a board of advisers for the following problem. You pick the handful of expertise and diverse perspectives that will be most relevant and let them bicker.

And at that point you can literally just be like here's my problem Use my board of advisors skill it will generate the agents the perspectives for you And then assign them to different sub agents and then synthesize it all for you And that really at that point you sort of created meta composable skills

And it's just so much fun not only to see the different perspectives come out and to be like oh, yeah That is a good point. Oh, yeah, I hadn't thought of that that, aha, yeah, I guess I do need to consider that.

And oh wait, I do see a way to get the best of all worlds. And you can really have fun with that synthesis and that orchestrator.

Putting It into Practice (Exercises and Examples)

OK, so eyes closed time. Just take a moment and think, what is a major decision or piece of thinking that you would like to do where a board of advisor might help you? And just close your eyes and think for 10 seconds.

Anyone willing to share an idea for where they might use one? What's the impact of AI on my career path? that is a great question. I'd be interested to hear the answer.

Should me and my missus go out to eat or should we cook at home? That is a lovely question. You might want to give it quite a lot of context for that.

Yeah. Okay. Amazing. Nice.

So if you've got a long backlog full of ideas, help me prioritize them. And the product person and the salesperson and the whatever person might very well disagree, but hopefully at the end you get a happy synthesis.

Yeah. Great.

So if you're trying to decide, should I get a mortgage and got a whole bunch of different latent variables that I'm trying to optimize. All right, super.

So I think you guys get the hang of it. I'm gonna stop here.

Wrap-Up and Next Steps

But if you've got a pen or a mobile phone with a notes app or a tattoo needle and a bare patch of skin, now would be a great moment to just scribble down for yourself some ideas for either composable skills

that you wanna write or decisions that you wanna try and experiment with a board of advisors with.

And a lot of this stuff ships with Rebel, by the way, so you're welcome to try that and you'll find that it's pretty good at this stuff.

And I guess I'll just say come and talk to me afterwards if you'd like to hear more about ways in which we teach people to use skills, use knowledge work harnesses to just next level up your use of AI.

We've just created a new agentic course and actually pulled a lot of the best ideas from that course for this. So we would love to see you.

Final Invitation and Q&A

I I think that's me. I look forward to any questions and a discussion afterwards. Thank you.