Hey! Ankur here, and this is the 12th edition of Lazy AI — 5 mins of reading to help you stay ahead of the AI curve.

I spent a good chunk of today doing something I haven’t done before — teaching Claude how to think like me. And by the end of it, I was genuinely..stunned!

Let me start with something you’ve probably felt.

You open Claude (or ChatGPT), type a prompt, get a decent response. Then you spend the next 10 minutes going back and forth — “make it shorter”, “make it more casual”, “no, not like that, more like this.”

By the time you get what you want, you’ve spent more time correcting the AI than you would have just doing it yourself.

Sound familiar?

Now imagine if the AI already knew all of that — your tone, your structure, your quirks — before you typed a single word.

That’s exactly what Claude Skills do.

A Skill is a set of written instructions you give Claude once, that it then follows every time you ask it to do a specific task.

Think of it like onboarding a new employee. Normally, every time you ask someone new to do something, you have to explain your preferences from scratch. But if you give them a detailed playbook upfront — “here’s how we write emails, here’s the tone we use, here’s what we never say” — they hit the ground running from day one.

A Skill is that playbook. Written once. Used every time.

You write your instructions in a plain text file. No coding. No technical knowledge needed. Just plain English — “always open with this”, “never use these phrases”, “when I say X, do Y.”

You upload that file to Claude once. And from that point, whenever you ask Claude to do that task, it reads your instructions first.

That’s it.

The difference in output quality is significant. I’m talking about the difference between Claude giving you something that feels like it was written by a well-meaning stranger — versus something that feels like you wrote it on a good day.

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Honestly, you can build a Skill for anything you do repeatedly with Claude. A few examples:

The pattern is the same: anything you find yourself explaining to Claude over and over again is a candidate for a Skill.

Most people use AI like a search engine with better grammar. You ask, it answers, you correct, you move on.

Skills flip that dynamic.

Now, instead of you adapting to the AI, the AI adapts to you — permanently.

And here’s the part that I find genuinely exciting: The better you know yourself — your style, your standards, your workflow — the more powerful your Skills become. It’s one of the few AI features where self-awareness is actually a competitive advantage.

You don’t need to be a developer to build a Skill. You just need to know what you do repeatedly and how you like it done. Start with one task — the thing you use Claude for most often. Write down your rules for it in plain English. Upload it. See what happens.

The first time Claude nails your tone without you asking, you’ll either be astonished, or worried that AI can replicate you so bloody well!

If you want to know how to set up Claude Skills, check out the article below

I built a Skill for writing this very newsletter — today.

It took a few hours of back and forth, reading my own old issues, and arguing about what my voice actually is. But by the end, I had a file that tells Claude exactly how LazyAI sounds, what to never say, and how to structure every issue.

This newsletter — the one you’re reading — was written with the Skills file. Took me less than 30 minutes to draft.

If this got you thinking, please share it with someone who uses ChatGPT every day but always feels like they’re starting from scratch.

It takes a lot of time to do this, so sharing it would mean a lot 🙂

See you next time..

Cheers,

Ankur