Moving to Skill-Focused Sessions 🎯

Hello.

Welcome to, our first AR department video walkthrough.

I wanted to pick up on a piece that I wrote last week on LinkedIn about AI agents and the mistakes I've made in the past, of trying to treat an AI like a human, with long running memory, long sessions, expecting it to remember everything and be able to just pick up a conversation the next day and carry on exactly like we were, the day before.

Like you would with a colleague in, in the office.

and how.

Actually, my experience was that that just doesn't work well with, with AI.

and actually what's worked much better for me is shorter, sharper sessions, with specific skills.

So the things that you know are repeatable, the things that you know, you need the agent to do those tasks should be turned into, into what?

Called skills.

so this video is really just a quick walkthrough of an example of one of those, how I use it myself, just you an idea of how you yourself can go away and start playing with this.

so the first thing to say is I use Claude.

that's the, that's the AI model that I'm, most accustomed to.

And I prefer, and you can see right now here.

so this is a tool called Obsidian, which is a great way to kind of show markdown, files.

And markdown files are really the currency that an, AI agent uses.

It's, what it understands.

it's the best way for you and the agent to kind of be on the same page is through creation of markdown files.

And Claude again will do this for you.

Now this skill is called an ARC editorial loop.

So that's, AR department, a commercial.

So that's arc.

and it's an editorial loop that I built, specifically to help me with creating content, writing content, in a way that A, sounds like me and uses my voice and B, uses some of the best practices.

You know, I'm not, I'm a programmer by background.

I'm not a creative writer.

and I wanted something that really encapsulates what the best practices are.

So if I went into, you know, using a PR agency or I had a dedicated copywriter in the team, what are the things they would use?

And so working with Claude, and this is the other amazing thing about AI is I didn't build this skill.

This skill was a co developed between myself and Claude.

and we worked on this and created this editorial loop.

So I asked it, I told it what I Wanted to do it, started building this, this skill for me.

so you can see it uses a few different phases and it also uses another skill called write as Carlos, which is a separate skill that we developed using lots of examples of my own written work, on LinkedIn, on blogs, etc.

so that it understands, you know, kind of how I communicate and how I write.

so it's quite simple.

It starts with an idea.

So you know, this is kind of again if I was sat in a meeting with my copywriter or my team, we might be discussing an idea for something that I want to publish or something that I want to put out there.

And this is exactly the same.

It then takes that idea, it runs it through like a peer critique.

so it's an interactive process.

You know, what are the.

Trying to boil down really?

What is the thing that we're trying to say and how do we want to communicate?

It then goes into this restructuring and the shaping of.

It uses some copywriting practices like the layer cake.

it uses the why, what, how?

You know, again, when I've been in sessions in the past with a team, that kind of thing of like well why, why, why?

You know, keep asking that question.

Why should anyone care?

so really trying to get down to the nub of it all.

Then we go into kind of an actual draft and a first pass through of a piece of work and then it's the editorial and again using things that are kind of standard in the industry.

So this kind of vrt, stripping anything that's vague, getting rid of anything that's redundant, getting anything rid of anything that's tangential.

and then finally it does that pass to make sure it kind of sounds like me.

So the idea is that you can go from a kind of very simple discussion based idea into actually a piece of kind of ready to go content and copy.

so that's the skill.

and then I was just going to show you I guess how it works in practice.

So you can see it kind of end to end.

so over here I've got Claude launched.

it's already running inside my AR commercial repo.

and it's as simple as starting with arc.

So little slash, command arc, editorial loop.

And then for this kind of stuff I tend to use my voice rather than typing because it's just it's just an easier way to work.

So I can launch a whisper flow here.

LinkedIn article, around AI slop, and how people today are saying that there's too much AI, there's too much AI slop, we need to stop it.

Everyone should write their own content.

but I want to take a slightly contradictory view to that and say, well actually yes, there is some really poor obvious AI, content out there, but what AI is doing is it is democratizing access to getting your ideas out there.

And I think people in the past who may have been unsure of posting, who didn't feel like they had the copywriting skills or the ability to write good content, are starting to feel more confident by using AI in getting their ideas out there.

And I think that's the most important thing.

we wouldn't have criticized people in the past for using a copywriting agency or using a PR agency to drop draft their material.

and what AI is doing is bringing a lot of those practices into the hands of everyone versus those that can afford it.

So that's the piece.

it's probably about a 6 to 700 word yeah, that's it.

So that's the prompt that's gone in, working away and it's using those loops.

It's going to take me through those four phases, and effectively develop hopefully a nice piece of content at the other side of it that we can then share on LinkedIn.

So as this runs, we'll probably do a little bit of a speed up just so you can see the, the output.

So I'll leave it for now and then we may just do a little edit afterwards.

Okay, so that's finished now.

I just got it to save it to the commercial, folder so that it's saved as a markdown.

and I can now flip over back to Obsidian, and look in our playbooks, and here is our new article reading mode.

So in terms of actually the content, well, you'll see this in, in the next newsletter.

So I will, I will share this in the newsletter.

but what I really want to say is like, I know personally in the past, wanted to write an article.

I've got an idea, I've loads of ideas of things I want to say or takes that I've got, and I honestly would have spent half a day, comfortably, most of which with, with a blank piece of paper, trying to work out how I'm going to express it, how I'm going to put it together, rewriting it, redrafting it.

and so here in the space of maybe probably 10 minutes in total, you know, we've obviously sped up the video, but probably 10 minutes.

in the meantime I could have gone away, made a cup of tea, had a coffee.

it's created a really strong draft.

Now it's not to say I'm not going to edit and tweak this, but I personally find it so much easier to work from.

You know, an article that's been shaped, that's been thought about, that understands the core concepts that we're trying to get across and I have a structure to work with.

It's so much easier and it might take me now, you know, five, 10 minutes more to refine this, and get it out there.

So this is where AI can really help you.

it's, it's bringing skills and abilities that you know, in the past you'd have had to pay a, huge amount of money for to external expertise.

You can start to build this yourself.

And the beauty of it is these skills are your skills.

You can tailor them.

If it does it wrong a couple of times, change it, improve it, enhance it, it just can keep getting better and better.

and it will absolutely transform the way you work with AI as you start to embrace these skills.

So I hope that video has been useful.

I will be doing more both across the newsletter and in these videos.

so if there is anything that you'd like me to talk about or cover or any other areas that are of interest, just let me know in the comments.

Thank you.