Anthropic's Engineers Stopped Building AI Agents. Here's What They Build Instead.

0:00Anthropic's own engineers just said they stopped building a new agent for every single job. And that sounds completely backwards until you see what they switched to building instead. Think about your phone. The AI model is the processor. The AI agent running it is the operating system. And skills, skills are the apps on your phone. You don't buy a whole new phone every time you want a new feature. You just install a new app and all of a sudden your phone can now do things it couldn't do a

0:32minute ago. And skills are exactly that. By the end of this video, you will stop babysitting a pile of half-trained agents and start building one that gets better every week. So in this video, I'm going to show you exactly what an AI skill is, how to build one for any job you want done in a couple of minutes, and where to steal the best ones other

0:56people already made. Let's get started. Here's the trap I fell into for months. Every time I wanted my agent to do a job, I'd spin up a whole new agent or sub-agent for it. I made one for content, I made one for emails, made one for outreach. And every single one needed time, monitoring, training, enhancement. But the moment I started using and familiarizing myself with skills, everything changed. All of a sudden, all I had to do was teach the agent the job once, save it, and then

1:31have that skill at my disposal forever. When you learn skill building, you're moving away from the need to build more AI employees and instead, you're giving one employee a bigger toolbox. And the best part is a skill is genuinely just a folder with a text file in it. So, let me show you what's actually inside. A skill is essentially nothing more than one folder with one file, which is typically called skill.md. The top of that file has two lines that matter, the name and the description. The description isn't for you, it's for your agent. It's how the agent decides when to reach for this skill. Then below

2:11those two lines, you just write the instructions in plain English, aka how you want the job done every time it does it. And from that moment onward, your agent does something clever. By the way, it doesn't read every single skill you own on every message. That would burn through your contacts very quickly. It only reads the name and the description

2:31until your request actually matches one. Then it opens the full skill. This is called progressive disclosure, by the way, which is a fancy way of saying the toolbox stays closed until you need to use the tool. So, a skill has two jobs, to tell the agent when to use it and to tell it how to use it. Now, let me show

2:51you how you can build one in minutes. Okay, let's build a skill together. For this video, I'm thinking we build a YouTube research skill, which is one of the skills I personally use the most and teach our clients to use as well. What I want the skill to do is find us viral pockets inside of YouTube and outline what the top five are in order of virality. If you create content on YouTube, this allows you to find great video content ideas. The way it works is we go to YouTube or a YouTube search engine like VidIQ or one of 10, doesn't really matter, and we search for the

3:30niche that we want to look for. So, in my case, for example, it's AI. Then what I typically do is filter by date. So, publishing date, let's put this week or this month. Then we filter by at least an outlier score of two. That's my range. Also, view range above 50,000 and apply. Then we fetch all of the videos here that makes sense for the niche we're working with, and then we try to find the common patterns and formats and titles and topics. We're essentially trying to see are there viral topics right now or within the last month are there viral formats? For example, how to fill in the blank in 30

4:15days. That's a format. We're trying to fetch all of those and turn them into a skill. So, let's do that right now. And there are three ways to build a skill. I'll take you from the most manual way all the way to the one where you barely lift a finger. The first way to build a skill and also the way I would not recommend my worst enemy to ever do is to write it manually. I included it in this video because I think it's important that you at least see what a skill looks like on the inside at least once because it'll show you and help you

4:47understand the mechanics of skill better than the other two ways will ever do. In order to do this, you can click on the little plus sign then on skills then browse skills and we're going to click on add and then create a skill. At the top of that file, we will include the name of the skill. Let's call it YouTube Pockets. Then the description which remember this is how the agent will know when to fire that skill. So, it's important to There you go. In the example, use when asked for updates, right? So, let's write finds viral YouTube Pockets use when asked to find viral YouTube videos, for example, or you can

5:33even be more specific use when use when I say use YouTube dash pocket. I already have a skill that is exactly like it. So, I don't want to confuse my skills too much. I want to do the skill as a demo instead. So, I'm going to go with this, but if you're creating a skill for the first time, then describe when or what action you would be performing for it to pull up that skill. And then here, we describe how we want the skill to work or the instructions. Those would be the exact steps you want it to follow when applying that skill. Think of it

6:05like handing a rulebook to a new hire. I I wrote down every time I say the keyword YouTube pockets, I want you to use VidIQ and search through the niche I want. Filter out uploads 4 weeks also filter out uploads with an outlier score below 2x then read all of the top titles that come back and find pockets patterns in the titles. For example, how to fill in the blank in 7 days or X ways to get rich using fill in the blank. Those are title formats. Before you write anything, ask me questions until you have everything you need. And I'm going to press create and boom, we just

6:38created our first skill with its own skill.md file. The great thing about this is you can click on download if you want to share it with a friend or a colleague or teammate and eventually you can update it and have multiple versions of this. But I don't know a single person who builds skills like this day-to-day. So, let me show you how I actually do it. Okay, let's move on to way or method number two. This is the one I use for almost everything which is we don't write the skill, you describe the job and your agent writes the whole skill for you. And the whole thing lives

7:14or dies on the prompt you give to your agent. So, here's a good prompt you can send your agent when creating a new skill. Great thing is Claude has a starter prompt. If we go to skills, browse skills, add, and then create with Claude, then it gives us this skill. So, here's what we're going to do. We're going to input it and then it's going to start asking us about the skill. Now, I already have the previous instructions that that wrote. I'm going to send it to

7:41it and we'll go from here. There you go. It asked me a bunch of questions so that it really understands how that skill is done, and I'm going to go ahead and answer each and every single one of them, 1 to 12. All right. We just spoke a lot. It didn't write this. I just spoke it out into existence, and we're

8:00going to see what it comes back with. All right. It has three more follow-up questions, and then it says we should be done. All right. We answered its questions briefly. I mean, it already had good guesses as to what would make for a good skill here. It was great because that's what it's all about with you using Claude this, you know, it can think and reason what is the best way to get from point A to point B. And now we're going to let it run and see what it comes back with. Here we go. It's created the skill. I'm going to click on save. With that, let's tell it use

8:32YouTube pockets for the AI niche, and let's see if it works. Look at this. It's taking all the right steps. I've no idea what these searches are, but that's part of its process. It's fine. Searching for the keyword, it's ranking by top outliers, then it's validating them. So, obviously, none of these videos would fit and our pocket AI opportunities, AI robots, faceless AI YouTube channel. Yay. There you go. So, it found the most viral pockets inside of AI right now, which is expected. AI danger explained calmly. This is very nice. Highest potential uh with title suggestions. A reasonable person's guide to how AI takes your job. That is very

9:16grim. The dark future of AI agents. I can easily see this being in the millions if that is your niche. Want to be an AI commentator. Hit number two, contrarian AI opportunity takes. The biggest AI opportunities aren't where you think. Why the AI agent boom is just getting started. These are great new titles for your channel. Five insane,

9:37and this is the third pocket by the way. Five insane AI robots in 2026 you'll want at your desk. Oh, it actually gave us four pockets even though its requirement is a minimum of two, but it didn't just stop at the minimum. This AI history niche is exploding. This faceless AI niche is exploding right now. So, those are four different pockets meaning four different sub niches within AI as a niche itself as

10:01the mother niche as I like to call it. And it gave us great video suggestions for just that. This is exactly how I work on both my videos, but also our clients' videos to come up and ideate what videos would work best for each and every one of their niches. Just like that, we just created a skill by telling Claude itself to do it for us. Now, what if I told you there was an even lazier way to do this? And honestly, it's a pretty cool function. And finally, on Claude there is a If we go to browse skill, click on add, there's a record your screen option, which if we click on

10:40it, we can start recording ourselves as we're doing the thing so that Claude can literally learn step-by-step how we want something done. Now, this skill isn't maybe the perfect skill to do it because I wanted to use an MCP like vidIQ to access the data, but say you want data extraction, you want very specific things that you typically do manually by hand, then you can record yourself doing it and it will learn every single step of the way and it will see what you're doing. Okay, he opened this folder on his desktop, then he created a new file, and he named that file this, and he got

11:17this name from that place, and inside that file he put in all of these different other files that he downloaded off of his email. So, it will learn every single step of the way that you previously did manually, and then it will be able to recreate that for you. That way you never have to do it again, and you can just ask it to do that process, and it will do it for you. Just know that this record feature is Claude's own. If you're on another agent like Hermes agent, then way two or method number two is your main move, because a good prompt works literally

11:52anywhere. And once you can build a skill, the real shortcut is not having to build them at all. Now, here's the part that saves you the most time. You do not have to build every skill you need yourself. Always, always look up if the skill already exists or not. And there are two places where you can find

12:13skills. The first is the official one. You click on the little plus symbol, you go to skills, you go to browse skills, and from there you can find a whole array of skills that are free for you to download and install onto Claude. There's a ton here that are absolutely gold, but as you can see, you are limited to, I don't know, over 200, let's say, skills. The second and much richer place to look for skills is the community. There's now an open standard for skills, which means one skill folder works across Claude, Codex, Cursor, Hermes, you name it. And there are full marketplaces built around it. GitHub is

12:56by far the most popular place you can find a ton of free and open source skills. You can use the search bar to find anything you're specifically looking for. Say, for example, marketing skills, and there you go. But GitHub can be very keyword search specific. This is also where you can find a lot of my free skills that I've open sourced like a Hermes agent mission control dashboard, X book marks where you bookmark things on X, and then your Hermes or your open Claude agent goes and reads them for you at the end of the day and actions the things that you've bookmarked. There's a ton that I've open sourced. You can also

13:34go to the trending section of GitHub, which will show you all the not just skills, but all the repositories that are trending on GitHub. Now, for skill specific libraries or repertoires, there are skill marketplaces like claw marketplaces.com. It has a ton of great skills. One of the skills is called find skills, which is literally a skill that you install and then it helps you find skills. So, when you say things like how do I do X or find the skill for X or is there a skill that can, it will trigger and it will find or search for the skills for you. There's skills MP, skills marketplace as well. There's lobe

14:10hub. There's a ton of skill marketplaces. And to install them, it's simple. Say, for example, I want to install one of my skills like my most popular one I think is the Hermes agent mission control. You just copy the link to that skill. You go to your claw chat, to your Hermes chat, whatever it is. You paste it in and you ask it install it for me. A quick disclaimer though, always always before you ask it to install, but before you do, read the entire skill and scan for anything malicious or any malware. Always do that

14:49because these are third-party skills. You never know what a stranger is trying to do because skills run code or scripts and you never know what they've injected into them. So, always have your agent scan and make sure that that skill is safe for you to install. Most skills are fine to install, but it's always better to be safe than sorry. And just like that, you don't need more agents anymore. You need one good agent and a shelf of skills. You build the three skills you use every week, then you steal the rest and supercharge your claw or any other agent you use with all the skills it needs because you don't need

15:26to buy a new phone for every new task. Comment which skill you would build first. I'm curious to see what people use Claude for the most and I dropped my starter skill.md template plus the full list of places to find skills plus all the prompts that I used inside of this video in a free doc. The link is at the top of this video's description so you can copy the whole setup right away. If you enjoyed this video, make sure to leave a like and if you're new to my channel, then subscribe because I have a ton more content like this coming your way. Oh, and the algorithm gods just

16:02told me you're very likely to enjoy this next video as well, so click it and I'll see you there.