AI Impact HubSkills
Do the work first. Then turn it into a skill.
For teams tired of one person being the only one who does it right.
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A skill is a standard operating procedure the AI can follow — how your organisation does one thing, written down once, used by everyone. Kyle's rule runs against instinct: don't start by writing the skill. Do the work in chat, iterate until the output is genuinely right, then have the AI turn that conversation into the skill.
Keep his division of labour straight and everything else follows: the project is the environment — the contextually aware ecosystem where work happens. The skill is how one task gets done, repeatably. Projects hold context; skills hold method. And a skill travels: write it once and it works across every project you have.
The organisational prize is consistency. In Kyle's words: this is our way of responding to emails — that can just be a skill. If everyone has access to it, it doesn't matter who is replying.
Why work-first beats writing the SOP from memory: an SOP written from imagination describes the process you think you follow. A skill built from a real working session captures the one you actually follow — with every correction you made along the way baked in. The iteration is the authoring.
The best way to do this is actually not to start with the skill — start with actually doing the work. After you've done it and found a way that works best, you then turn that into a skill. A skill you can think of as a standard operating procedure that Claude can follow.Kyle, teaching a climate-sector women's program, May 2026.
- Open a chat and do the task for realNot a rehearsal — the actual email, the actual report. You have a starting point and you know the end point.
- Iterate out loudThis isn't right. Change this. This is what the output is supposed to look like. Every correction is authorship.
- Turn the session into the skillWhen the output is one you would ship, have the AI convert the whole exchange into a reusable skill. There is even a skill-creator skill for exactly this.
- Share itA skill on one laptop is a habit. A skill the whole team runs is how the organisation does the thing.
- Update it the same wayWhen the method improves, don't edit the document from memory — do the work again, better, and re-extract.
The method as Kyle runs it — five steps, and the extraction prompt where the skill gets made.
Open a chat inside the right project and complete the task for real, with AI, end to end. Resist designing anything yet.
An SOP written from imagination describes the process you think you follow.
“Write a prompt and you'll use it once. Write a skill and you'll use it forever” is Nathaniel Whittemore's line, from the AI Daily Brief — Kyle quotes it with the credit attached, and so do we.
Next: The AI second brain.
When everyone has the same AI, the differential is your context.
Read The AI second brain →