Teach It Once, Use It Everywhere

A couple of issues back, we talked about just getting in there — opening a chat, typing a question, seeing what comes back. No pressure to do it “right.” Just showing up and talking to the thing.

If you've been doing that for a few weeks now, that part's done. You've cleared the part that stops most people.  So here's the honest next question: now what?

Start here: is there something you do the same way, every time, because you've learned that's just how it's done right? Editing emails before you send them. Reviewing a document the same way each time it crosses your desk. Anything where you've already worked out “this is how I like it,” and you just haven't written it down anywhere. 

In the Air Force, every job on an F-15 had a technical order behind it — the TO. It laid out the exact procedure for a job, step by step, and it didn't matter if that jet was in the hangar, out on the flight line, or stationed on the other side of the world. Same TO, same standard, every time, wherever the jet happened to be.

A skill is your version of a technical order. You write down how you want something done, once, and it applies wherever you need it — this email, that document, this manuscript, that report. You're not repeating yourself. You're just handing over the same instructions again, in a new place.

The big example. I've been working on a book manuscript, and for a while I was feeding it to Claude one chapter at a time in a regular chat — “here's chapter 4, what do you think?” I'd hand over a chapter, take whatever came back, move to the next one. It felt like progress. It wasn't really collaboration — I was re-explaining myself every single chapter: what I wanted it looking for, what “good” meant for this book, what kind of feedback actually helped versus generic praise. Instead, you build a skill once — here's what a developmental editor should look for in this manuscript, here's the tone I want the feedback in — and then you can hand over any chapter, and it runs the same standard every time. Same TO, applied to chapter 4 or chapter 40.

The small example. A skill doesn't have to be that ambitious to be worth building. If you edit emails before you send them — tightening them up, making them sound more like you, cutting the corporate stiffness — that's a skill you could build in five minutes: “Every time I hand you an email, tighten it, make the tone warmer and more direct, and cut anything that sounds stiff or corporate.” Small task, same idea, same payoff: you stop re-explaining yourself.

The easy part: you don't need to write anything technical to build either one. You do the task the normal way, then say something like, “turn what we just did into something you'll remember, so I don't have to explain it again next time.” That's the whole setup.

Try this: Pick one thing you do the same way every time — editing an email, reviewing a document, giving feedback on something. Then try: “From now on, every time I ask you to [task], I want you to always [how you like it done]. Can you save this so I don't have to explain it again?”

Here's a starter list — not a technical menu, just five common situations where a skill replaces a question you're probably already asking on repeat:

1.                   The email cleanup. You edit your tone before sending, every time. Teach it your voice once instead of correcting it every time.

2.                   The recurring summary. Anything you ask to have condensed the same way — a long article, a document, a set of notes — into the same format every time.

3.                   The feedback pass. You review something (a resume, a proposal, a piece of writing) against the same mental checklist every time. Write the checklist down once, as a skill, instead of reciting it each time.

4.                   The “make it sound like me” pass. If you rewrite anything — a note to a client, a message to family — in your own voice after a first draft, that's a repeatable standard worth saving.

5.                   The recurring decision-check. Before a decision you make more than once (a purchase, a hire, a commitment), if you always ask AI to poke holes in it the same way, that's a skill too — you're just formalizing the questions you already ask yourself.

None of these need code. All five follow the same “turn what we just did into something you'll remember” setup from Section 2. 

Next week, we're going to look at something that makes skills even more useful — giving AI a live connection to things like your email or calendar, instead of files you hand it by hand. See you Tuesday.