Getting into someone’s brain

AI is great at answering questions, the only problem is that it can’t really narrow down the source of the answer. I could link it an article, or even a set of articles that it should base its answer on.

What I personally like to do is create skills out of the publicly available knowledge of a company I admire, or a person I look up to.

One example of that is the Apple Design skill I made. Apple’s WWDC videos are a goldmine of knowledge, and they happen to have transcripts available for all of them, so I asked an agent to create a skill out of them.

Now, whenever I make something and want it to have a design language that is similar to Apple’s, I can just ask the skill to generate a design for me. It gives me significantly better results, because it contains the knowledge and tips from the videos.

This doesn’t have to apply to design or engineering only. I do that for lots of stuff.

I have a skill for marketing that is trained on my notes from books and blog posts. Whenever I want to send an email to my audience, or write any public-facing content, I ask that skill to review it for me.

I’m still in the driving seat as I’m the one who is writing the content, and I most likely roughly remember all the principles I made notes on, but the skill helps me make sure I’m not missing anything.

I also have a product thinking skill. It’s trained on lots of interviews from people I admire that work on great products. Whenever I have a product idea, I ask that skill to review it for me. It works amazingly well.

It asks me questions, which really helps me think through the product idea and validate it properly. It still has me in it, because in order to make the notes this skill is based on, the things said in the interviews had to resonate with me enough to make notes on them.

These are domain specific skills, but I also have skills made out of one person’s knowledge. A /steve-jobs skill, which is based on his interviews, and a /paul-graham skill, which is based on his essays available on his website.

Now whenever I have a question about something specific and would like to hear the opinion of a person, I invoke the skill and ask it to answer the question. I essentially made small brains of these people that I can talk to.

This way I have a fleet of skills, each made to help me with a specific task. This way I don’t have to go through my notes and research stuff every time I want to do something, I just ask the skill that is dedicated to that task.

I packaged the way I build these into a /emil-borrow-a-brain skill. You simply feed it a person or a company you admire, and the skill will create a skill based on their knowledge.

Note that if you installed the skills using the general install command, you don’t have to install it again.

npx @aiforui/install emil-borrow-a-brain --token=…

It collects everything they published and keeps that raw copy outside of the skill folder. Then it goes through each piece and pulls the useful claims out of it. Those claims get grouped into theme files like product thinking, marketing, etc. At the end it writes the skill file itself: their core ideas, their method, etc.