You need to be skillsmaxxing (10x your Claude/Codex)

0:00Remy:The people that understand how to use skills, how to use plugins with codecs and cloud code just have this unfair advantage. But there's so many questions around it, like how do I use it with my team or how do I post it on GitHub or what are the skills I need to know? So on today's episode, we break it down super clearly. I brought my friend Remy and he clearly explains how to use skills, how to use plugins, and how he runs his entire company with a bunch of skills that gets him the best output out of Cloud Code. What's really cool is Remy actually drops a bunch of the prompts in order to actually go and do this yourself.

0:38Remy:and he basically just explains exactly what you need to do in order to implement all these skill chains basically multiple skills together to actually help you live a more productive and hopefully revenue generating life enjoy the episode today's episode is brought to you by brex my company's been on brex for a year and a half and i started because i kept hearing companies like versell open ai and thropic were using brex and i figured if they're using it why shouldn't die. It's been a game changer. The thing that got me is how smooth it is. It's got high limit cards, it's got banking, it's got AI that handles the back office busy work like expense reports, which I don't want to do on its own.

1:20Remy:It's really just built for this agentic world. If you're building something new, it's time to get Brex. Check it out at brex.com slash solutions slash startups. Link in the description.

1:38Remy:I begged him to come back on AI with Remy as he's known, right? Yes, AI with Remy. Is here. Welcome back. Remy, by the end of the episode, what are people going to learn? You're going to learn how to effectively manage and distribute skills, agent skills across your entire team. Okay. And like, why should people care about that? Because I think that agent skills are probably like the single most important concept. and agent skills are what really actually save you time with AI when you're trying to automate out repeatable processes. And I don't feel like anyone's really cracked it, cracked the way to properly administer and share them across their team.

2:19Remy:So if anyone is interested in agents to do tasks and anyone's interested in doing it with teams, this is the episode for them? It is. It sure is. All right, let's dive in. Bang, bang. So before we get into it, I'm just going to do a quick overview on what a skill is for those people who are listening who don't know. If you do, which I'm imagining a lot of people listening do, I'm sure, Greg, you'll do a good job of putting timestamps down below. You guys can just skip ahead. But skills are literally just SOPs for AI. So without a skill, the old way is if you wanted a proposal written, you would have to jump into a new session or a new chat, ask Claude to write your proposal.

2:56You would probably get a result you're not happy with off the get-go. And you have to go through and re-explain all your preferences. the colors, the logo, like, hey, put the price at the bottom instead of at the top, so on and so forth. And eventually you land on a proposal that you're happy with. But what happens next week when you go to create another proposal? It forgets everything, unless you keep going in the same session, which, you know, runs into other issues when you just keep going in the same session for too long. But it's forgotten all your preferences. Whereas with a skill, it basically just allows you to package up your entire kind of way of doing things into a document, a markdown file for Claude to read.

3:36It's literally just an SOP, like a step-by-step guide on how to do a process. I literally just ran before this, you know, before I jumped on, I ran this little demo here. I said, create a proposal for Greg Eisenberg, you know, for the startup ideas to sponsor the newsletter. And it just one-shotted, it whipped out the, you know, the proposal generation skill that I've built. and then it generated this lovely branded proposal here exactly how I wanted it. I didn't even have to re-explain a single thing.

4:05Remy:And most importantly, that wasn't slop. I think a lot of people use AI and they get slop and a big reason is they don't have tight skills. Exactly, exactly. I have a really specific way I like things done and once I nail it, I'll just build a really good skill for it And then I can just like nail it one shot every single time. And the way that I kind of think about how the agent uses skills is it's like I visualize the agent is like the most capable employee you've ever hired. And he's sitting in his desk and he's got his computer, which all your tools like MCPs connected up. He's got his instructions file that he reads before every task.

4:42And then another, you know, additional context if he needs it. And he's got this big, you know, bookshelf of SOPs, which are skills. And, you know, in a skill, when you open it up, it has a little name and description at the top. and that's kind of just what sits on the spine of all the books and then when he actually you know decides he needs it for a task he'll pull it off the shelf and then read like the full thing that'll teach him exactly how to do the task so you know that's what a skill is they are super super valuable a good skill can save you like literally two hours a week and you stack those up and you know it's game over but the issue like one of the issues we're facing right now is that ai is very much single player so you know all your team members have their own cord setups on their computer or codex setups and if they build something brilliant or build a great skill you know it just lives on their machine it's very very difficult to share it properly and this is like a similar problem that we saw back when personal computers first came out and people were using you know tools like microsoft word you'd build a doc you'd have a document you're working on and it was just like on your computer and you know when you wanted to actually send it over.

5:48You would have to just mail it, export it, and then mail it. And then you'd have a bunch of different copies floating around and no actual central source of truth. And then Google Docs thankfully solved that. You just have one doc that lives in Google Drive and everyone can be in there collaborating and it's just one central source of truth. We're in our Microsoft Word era of skills at the moment. Everyone's just creating skills. They're super valuable, but they just live on everyone's machines. And then sharing them around and actually managing them across a team is really, really difficult. So yeah, we're here right now in this Microsoft Word era of skills.

6:21So like I'm saying, you've built a great skill. Now what? Like what do you do? How do you share it with your team? Some quick examples of some that I've literally built just this week that have been like game changers that I wanted my team to have is a Notion formatting skill. So if I open up, like this was a little doc where I was prepping before the pod and I like all my Notion docs format a certain way. I like lots of white space. So it's super readable, lots of divider lines, little blue highlights for elements. And you know, if you just let Claude, like go and build your Notion doc, it's a mess.

6:54Like all the text is crammed together. It's not readable at all. So I have a specific way that I've taught Claude how I want all of my Notion docs to be formatted. And I've just packaged that up as a skill. So every time I ask Claude to build something in Notion, it pulls his like Notion formatting skill off the shelf, his SOP and reads it so he knows what to do. So that's one that I want all my team to be using so that whenever they're building stuff in Notion, it all looks the same and looks nice. Another one is my brand voice. So AI with Remi brand voice for all like the email assets and landing page copy, etc.

7:25So I built out a skill for that. Another one's email formatting. So I use Resend as one of my ESPs and I have like a nice kind of email format that I like to use with highlights, similar to the notion doc like lots of white space and like the blue buttons and then the little signature at the bottom as well as the logo up the top here too so i basically taught claude exactly how i liked emails formatted once saved it as a skill and now i want all my team to have that exact same skill for when they're you know building notification emails to go out or marketing emails etc so there are some examples of skills that i've built just this week that i would want all my team to be able to have access to and be using on like a daily basis.

8:07So how do you actually go about sharing the skills? Well, originally like one way was, you know, you would just save it as a.skill file or a zip file and you would send it to them on Slack or email and they would just upload it into their setups and now they've got it. It kind of works, but then you run into this nightmare of as soon as you make a change, their file doesn't auto change, it's a duplicate. And if they make a change, you don't receive that as well. And if you share that out to the team, everyone's kind of improving on skills as you should always be looking to improve them you end up with like 10 different copies and like no central source of truth one of the other ways that I originally used to share this across the team was with like drive or dropbox or obsidian as well so you know if you download like the google drive desktop app or the dropbox desktop app you can see them show up in your file system and you can like basically open that folder up and clawed so you could like theoretically create a skills folder have them all live in there but first issue is that Claude does not read from a skills folder in google drive it has to read from its special like dot Claude slash skills folder so in order to actually get Claude to even read this you need to like sim link it in and make do like basically just do a bunch of like hacky stuff to get it to work and this you can get away with this if you've got a small team and you're all like technically savvy enough to understand like folder structures in Claude and agents.

9:29But the minute you bring on a junior or someone in marketing who's not super tech savvy or AI native and you want them to be able to use a skill and use your skills, things just break all the time. People don't really understand what they've done. People don't understand how to set it up properly. And it's just not the most efficient way at all. And if you wanted to use Obsidian, same deal applies as Google Drive and Dropbox, except now everyone has to set up and install obsidian too which is a pain in the ass so drum roll please how do we share skills across the team the best way that i've found is by putting them all in a github repository and making it a plugin it sounds simple but it's so so effective so essentially like all it is most of the viewers already understand this but github is just like you think of it as like google drive for code.

10:18So it's like just like you share files and videos and images across your team with Google Drive. GitHub is just that but for sharing code. So the simplest way to do this is to just push all your skills into a repository. So I have this one here called team skills where I've got them all kind of separated by department and you can see the skills live in here. So for the brand section I've got these two skills in there and you know the rest of the other departments have their various skills in there too. And this, you know, straight away, now you've got your central source of truth, your one place where all of your skills live.

10:52But then the plugin part is how you make it like easy for Claude to access it.

10:56Remy:And Remy, a lot of people hear repo and plugin, making it code. And if you're non-technical, you kind of get scared. But it's like, if you're non-technical, it's not hard to do. It's not hard at all. I'm glad you said that, Greg, because I've prepared a prompt that we can give to the viewer after the episode. And that will basically turn their existing skill folders into this exact repo and plugin setup for them. But to be honest, it's pretty simple. I don't have a development background at all. As long as you can understand that GitHub is just a place to store your files on the cloud, and then a plugin is just a way for Claude to access them, that's pretty much all you need to know.

11:38All right, cool. So quick one about what a plugin is. So a plugin is literally just a bundle of skills, MCPs, and hooks. You don't even have to bundle in MCPs and hooks. You can just have a plugin with skills or just one with MCPs or any combination of them. But our specific one is a bundle of skills in the plugin. And it's super, super easy to install these. I'm going to just open up the terminal for a moment. So if we open up trusty Claude code here, if we type slash plugin here it will bring up you know this simple little menu here where we can manage and install our plugins so if we head over to marketplaces this is where you add in your repo as a marketplace so it's literally as simple as just going add marketplace and then copying the link for your repository let me just go back to like the the main one and then pasting this straight in here and then I've already got it because it exists in my in my system already like I've already got this repo installed as a plugin but it's literally just as simple as entering your github repo url as a marketplace and then if we go back out you can see that my team skills now show up here and then the marketplace is kind of like the app store you're installing and then the plugins and themselves are kind of like the apps so I've broken down all of my skills by department and then they kind of have their own plugins here so for example like one of my guys that helps with copywriting I probably wouldn't have him install the finance skills plugin so you can kind of like get some separation there by department which is super super cool and if we click in we can see for example if we go down to my sort of bundle of newsletter skills we have you know weekly research the intake the writing one the stories the tldr etc etc etc and it's super super simple now you've got it installed one thing that's really really important to note is that you need to have everyone that installs it needs to have auto update enabled so I've got it here you can see now it's like giving me the option to disable it because I've got it enabled but that's going to allow it to you know use the skills to update on your machine if someone else makes a change to them but now with that installed if I head out of there and I type like newsletter for example you can see they belong to this newsletter plugin and then I can just use all the skills exactly like you would in your regular you know personal AI setup.

14:15Remy:And this isn't unique to Cloud Code like if people are using Codex, ChatGPT yeah they could they could use this too right? Same thing exactly like I have tested this with I use it in Codex and Cloud I haven't really tested other harnesses with it yet but I imagine that they would have a very, very similar functionality. So, you know, I've got that installed here in Codex as a plugin as well with all of my like team skills. And then you can click in and see them all here too. And it works just the same in Codex. If I whip up a new chat, here we go, newsletter. You can see I have all the skills here to use as well.

14:53So yeah, you're 100 % right. You can use it across multiple harnesses as well, which is super, super cool. What makes a plugin a plugin is, so you've got literally your GitHub repo where you've just dumped in all your skills. And then there's just a couple of little JSON files that Claude read and Codex read that actually like turn it into a plugin. I don't have a clue at all how it works. I don't need to. I just got Claude to set it up for me. So, you know, I've built this like lovely prompt here that will get Claude to build that out for you, which we'll get in your hands. There'll be somewhere in the description, right, Greg?

15:26Remy:Mm-hmm. Wonderful. And now that this is set up, you essentially just get everyone on your team to install the plugin on their cords and their codexes. And then now you have like skills in one central source of truth that are distributed across your entire team for them to use. And you also have version control. So if, you know, one of your team members makes a change to the skill and like completely ruins it, you can also go back and revert to like older versions as well, which I think is super, super cool. So now when I build something brilliant, like my notion formatting skill, and I want my entire team to be using it, I just add it into the marketplace, the plugin, the Git repo.

16:08And then it's distributed, as long as I have auto-update enabled, it's just distributed onto everyone's Claude and Codex accounts, which is super, super neat.

16:17Remy:Yeah, and the other cool thing about it is there's a lot of good skills that you can download. I noticed you had Corey Haynes' marketing skills. Yeah, shout out Corey, they're incredible. Yeah, I know the boring marketer has his boring marketing skills. There's trusted creators and people who have skills on the internet that you don't need to start from scratch. So you can basically download some of these skills, have that as your foundation, start adding skills based on the type of business that you have and what you want, and then all of a sudden your team has access to that too. Exactly. And one thing that I do too, which is probably important to mention, is I have a separate repo called Remy Skills.

17:04And these are just like my personal ones. So these are just ones that I don't want my team to have for whatever reason. Or maybe they're just ones like you said, I've downloaded off the internet and I'm not ready to like roll them out to the team. I'm just like playing around with stuff. It's kind of like my personal sandbox, if you will. And also like personal skills, for example, like I've got an inbox triage skill, which teaches Claude like how I want my emails to be handled. I also have a morning brief, which is very, very specific to my apps and how I want to operate. So those ones, it wouldn't make sense to roll them out to the team.

17:33Everyone kind of needs to build their own versions of those. So I just have like this Remy Skills repo as well, which, you know, you can guess is also set up as a plugin in itself. If we go into the plugins again, I have that installed here as a separate plugin. And I just had that installed on mine. and my team doesn't. So that's kind of where I keep track of all my own personal skills as well.

17:57Remy:But like why even have that? You know, like if you're not sharing it with teammates, like why? Is it because, you know, version control or like why do it? I just like having them in one source of truth. I also like, I'd rather than be somewhere on the cloud. So if I'm running like a Hermes agent on a VPS or some sort of cloud agents, they have a method to access my skills rather than them sit like all locally on my file system and version control is cool and um i guess those two are probably the main reasons cool yeah i mean it makes sense like also something on your local computer can get compromised yeah and yeah like it's in the cloud now um great it's also i've got a story for you i oh yeah i remember it was about two months ago, Claude deleted my.claude folder with 150 skills with like probably 500 plus hours of work into it.

18:57And I had no backups. And that was pretty, that sucked. So that's kind of also a defense against that.

19:05Remy:So you have a little bit of PTSD. So you're basically saying like, don't be like Remy from two months ago, be like Remy of today. Yeah, exactly. It was so stupid that I didn't have backups, but I just, I don't know. I get it. It's sort of like we're all moving at blazing speed right now. We're all trying to figure out how we can get the most from AI. And we all want to build stuff because we see a lot of opportunities. Sometimes what ends up happening is by going so fast, you're missing the mark on certain things. Security is one big thing. Backups is another big thing. So I'm happy you're going through it.

19:44Yeah. So having that little personal skills repo works nicely for me as well. Once again, like take this with a grain of salt. You know, just if you've got a setup that you've already built that works for you, keep doing it. But this is just how I've been operating. And I've found it to just be so, so effective that I really, really wanted to share it with you guys. One fun thing to touch on is, you know, now you've got your team skills repo, right? And also, too, one thing to note is I, I don't know about you, Greg, but I genuinely believe that like skills maybe not yet but at some stage i think they're here to stay and i think that they're literally going to add like enterprise value to companies because it's just like the same way you have sops to train employees to do tasks it's like if you build good skills to train agents on how to do like real economically valuable tasks in the business um those are just like a super super valuable and uh so this kind of gives you a nice central place where you as the company have ownership of the skills.

20:41This is built out within my like GitHub organization. So that way too, if like I have employees that are working for me and they build some really, really cool skills that are super valuable and they're on their computers, if they leave, I kind of can keep, you know, ownership and control over those skills. So I think that's a really cool sort of byproduct of this system as well. And one other thing is I have built this nice like UI to go over the top of my skills. So I don't know before you think like oh here we go there's another obsidian graph this one is uh this one's pretty cool. So I have all of these skills in my GitHub repo.

21:17The same way you have like a super based back end for an app that houses all the data this that team skills GitHub repo is the back end for this web app. So every skill you see here is pulling live from that team skills repository and I have a lot of skills that call on other skills For example, like my YouTube publish workflow, I run that one skill and it's like an orchestrator skill that then runs the, you know, the titles, thumbnails and descriptions in sequence. So it will show you like how these skills link together and what they call on. And I can click in here and view, you know, the connections in and out from different skills and view the entire like skill file in here.

21:56and one thing too is I'm starting to find that as you onboard like new team members who aren't like super clued in with AI this is just like a really nice way for them to be able to visualize all these AI SOPs that you've built and I've even added this little ask button down below so I mean this is one I did before I'm like what are the best skills for decision making and it will just search across your private database your company's skills library and it's told me here like all right these are the best skills to use for decision making you've got the LLM council here you've got Matt Pocock's grill me skill another one from Corey Haynes too but if we said in here it's like I've done the weekly research for the newsletter what skills should I run next and this will tell us all of the newsletter skills that we have available and And you've just run weekly AI research.

22:54Next, run this skill. And then after you've done that, run this. So I feel like this is just a nice little skills assistant to help with your team members that maybe aren't as clued in with AI. Or even sometimes if you build so many skills, you lose track of what you've even got. This can be handy too. So this, I feel like, is a really, really nice addition on top of this repository. And one other thing too, I just added this feature in today, so it's brand new. but I added in this usage bar so what it's done is in the plugin it's got a hook so every time Claude uses a skill it triggers a hook that you know tallies it and it basically tracks how many times you're using skills and also tracks by team member what skills they're using and how many times as well and my thought process behind this was I don't know maybe I could build like a little Spotify wrapped at the end of the year it's like you used your proposal skill 56 times but also on top of that I'm thinking I want to see the skills that I never use like after six months like show me all the skills that I haven't touched once and they can probably go I mean you can kind of like be able to keep track and cull down your stack so it doesn't get too bloated so I feel like that's a

24:01Remy:super nice touch on top as well also show me the skills that I'm not using that should be using yeah yeah yeah exactly that could be a little uh question for the skills assistant yeah but um That is pretty much it. We've got the skills repo now built out with like the one central source of truth for the company's skills. Everyone adds it as a plugin into their Claude. One little thing too is if you're on a Claude Enterprise account, you can have like organization plugins. So you can build this out as like the technical founder or get your CTO to build it out and then have it baked into everyone's Claude accounts or Codex accounts so that your lower level non-technical employees just have to, they don't have to even enter the terminal and run a slash command.

24:45So that's a cool way to do it too.

24:47Remy:How should people think about how many skills they should be creating? So on here I see you have different departments, brand, content, newsletter, marketing general. Is the way to think about skills, just think about what are the jobs that you're doing and how are you using LMs to complete them and then create skills? What's the general framework for thinking about how to design skills and how many skills you should be creating? So I generally, if I have a task, like I'm under the firm belief that you can pretty much automate any process within the company, as long as it's not physical, like washing dishes.

25:23You can pretty much automate any online process with a really good skill or series of skills that are chained together. So in my mind, just like any repeatable tasks that I do on a day-to-day basis, I'm like, let's get this down to a skill. I don't want to touch this anymore. And I have some workflows too, where it's like a process, like the YouTube one, that's broken down into, you know, three skills that are run in a sequence. So the way I kind of think about those skill chains as well is if I have a larger process, like taking an edited video and getting it onto YouTube, that could just be one skill in itself.

25:58But the way I think about it is if as part of a larger process, I'm ever going to want to run some of the sub processes on their own, I will just turn into a skill chain. So for the YouTube one, great example. It's like there will be times when I just want thumbnails. or times when I just want titles or just want descriptions. So for me, that in my mind makes sense to have that as a chain rather than one skill. But the way I think about it is like anytime I kind of sit in Claude or sit in Codex to complete my workday, I don't really open front ends of apps anymore. I'll just tell Claude what I want it to do and it will go into the apps and do the tasks for me.

26:31And anytime I've done a task with Claude and I know I'm going to need to do it again, I'll just tell Claude like, hey, turn this into a skill. And that's kind of how I've ended up with so many.