How to Turn Any Book Into a Claude AI Skill (Live Build)

Full video transcript

Hey everybody, Darby here with GenAI University. We are going to be kicking things off today inside of our Claude Mastery Intensive series here on February 17th, 2026. We’re going to be digging into how to use Claude to identify and build skills around frameworks that you can use as deliverables for yourself, your team, your clients, anyone that you’re working for — using Claude to help with using your frameworks, your own methodologies, and translating those into actionable deliverables. Gonna give people a couple minutes here to tune on in and say hey to those who are here on time. What’s going on everybody? What’s going on Mark? What’s going on Hannah, Torsten? Big Jason. How’s everyone doing today? Happy Tuesday. Good morning y’all.

And I did make a post about today’s workshop to come to the table with a framework or with a methodology of some sort that we can use and put into action from this — a skill, which I know many of you here live in and on the replays already have a lot of your skills, your methodologies built out in some way, shape or form. So it’s probably just a matter of gathering some documents and some resources you’ve already created. But did anyone actually bring those here and is ready to implement in real time? If not, it’s cool too — I have a demonstration that we’re going to be walking through. I’m just curious if anyone has their own method they’re going to be turning into a skill here while we’re on the call. Have some time to jam back and forth if you’re running into any questions about that as well.

Mark, you’ve been cooking with some frameworks on your end for all the education consulting. Hannah, I know you’ve been working on some skills. I hope that your skills reappeared in your account. They did.

They did, thankfully.

Yeah, that happened live on a workshop one time after we set up like five skills and then I went back and it was gone and about had a heart attack. But yeah, glad those reappeared. That is always good. Right, let me make sure we’re all set here. Any — yeah, see, okay, cool. We got John — turn your brand guide document that you want to turn into a skill. Okay, awesome. You’ll be able to do that here while we’re walking through this process.

Some of what I’m going to show you guys today, we’re going to dive right into it so that we can see the kind of flow of how to work with Claude. Much of this process is adaptable to whatever skill or whatever framework or method that you would use to walk somebody through on a consistent basis to produce some sort of deliverable, some sort of report, some sort of audit that you do from like a client discovery call. Maybe you interview somebody and then you produce a two or three page executive brief that walks them through a strategy that you’ll then guide them through implementing. Just one example off the top of my head.

Another example — one that I know an agency that I work with, we developed a skill around a while ago, was in a PR branding agency where they interview a client that’s onboarding with them as an agency, and then they deliver this four-page report that basically walks them through their positioning and how they’re going to help them implement, over the next 90 days, a road map towards getting them more press for their brand. They work with a lot of authors and a lot of people in that regard. It’s the same process every time, though. They do the interview. We transcribe that interview using Fathom. We run that Fathom interview through a skill, and then it produces a four to six page report that they’ll then walk through with their clients and implement. And we’ve literally done hundreds of those over the last two years.

150, probably — so not hundreds, 150 or so of those reports. And one very specific part of their process that they walk people through, that’s kind of what I’m going to walk y’all through today, is taking a framework or a method that you already have. If you already have a book that you’ve written on a process, you probably already have your frameworks organized inside of the book. If you’re thinking about writing a book, you may have a framework that you include inside of the book, or a skill that you’ll use to accompany the book to help people that are implementing the concepts that you’re teaching in your book.

What I’ve noticed with a lot of books — authors that create these books that have proven processes — is a lot of people don’t have an AI to accompany their process either. And so they’ll give people this is the how and the framework for doing it, but often people are left with executing it fully themselves, as opposed to having some AI tools that can help support them inside of that process. So I’m going to show you how to do that with the book that we’ve been using as a reference for our upcoming book intensive, and then we’ll have time for open floor questions and reviewing here. But I want to demonstrate this in such a way as to show one approach for taking an existing framework that’s been proven time and time again, extracting a really specific deliverable, and then turning that into a skill that you can use again. And you can rinse and repeat this process for a ton of your other stuff that you’re doing.

One quick question I see here from John: “I use Plaud to record many in-person sessions. Can I use the Fathom skill?” I’m not sure I understand what “use the Fathom skill” means exactly, John, but if you’re recording sessions inside of Plaud and are sending those recordings over to a skill, maybe that’s the case. But if you want to give a little more context there, I can jump into that.

Bruce is building a daily news and weekly deep-dive academic professional research journal feed that will help him create valuable content for his audience. Okay, great — you can definitely make a skill around that.

And, without further ado, let’s go ahead and dive in, y’all. So what I’m going to do today is share this process kind of rapid fire. Like, we have a skill — we’re doing this process of translating this methodology into a framework that we can repeat again and again, and we’re going to be using Claude for that. So y’all just quick thumbs up, you can see my screen, the Claude screen — we’re all good here. Okay, that’s great. Now secondly, can you see the screen I’m sharing with the published cover? Okay, so this is a book published by Chandler Bolt. We’re using this as a road map for many people that are going through our book writing intensive. Chandler has been helping people for years write books. He’s helped hundreds, thousands of people come through this process, gives this book out everywhere he goes, and knows what he’s talking about when it comes to helping people go from blank page to published author.

Inside of this book, Chandler covers a lot of different content, and so, if you haven’t bought this book or haven’t gotten one for free from Chandler or his team — I’m pretty sure they give this PDF away on their website — he covers a lot inside of this book. We’re not going to cover everything from this book. What I want to do is take a specific assessment that Chandler talks about in this book, and then we’re going to create a skill around that assessment. One of the things that Chandler teaches about inside of this book is the book launch readiness assessment skill, which is one place that we’re going to be able to start.

Okay, so to do this, what I’m going to do is a couple different things. One, I’m going to download this book. Two, I’m going to go into my projects inside of Claude and I’m going to create a new project, and I’m just going to call it “Published Book Skills.” Okay, call this — if you’re starting this on your end, call this whatever methodology that you want to be making and building a skill around. Okay, next thing I’m going to do is upload my book into the Claude chat thread. I’m also going to upload the book as a file into my knowledge base. And I’m going to give Claude a conversational command, testing.

Okay, cool. “Claude, I’m uploading a book for you from the author who has developed a framework for helping people go from blank page to published. And I want to identify the book launch readiness assessment that is covered in this book, and identify a way that I can turn this into a skill that I can use for people who are going through the process of writing a book and are stuck at a specific point and need help with going through this skill in a way that we can leverage our very own Claude skill based on where they’re at right now to where they want to go with their book.”

Okay, kind of my starter conversational prompt with Claude is giving it the PDF, or the framework, with all of the context that I’m going to be providing it. And then I’m telling Claude, hey, analyze this framework, and then let’s focus in on the book launch readiness assessment that we want to create a skill for, and we’re going to use the contents that’s already been built out here. And by the way, I have no problem giving this skill to anybody — give it to Chandler and his team or whatever. This is just an example for demonstration purposes of how to take an existing proven methodology and turn it into a skill that anyone here can use.

Okay, and so what Claude is doing now is reading, assessing, identifying, extracting the text, the PDF, the book contents. It’s going through, it’s understanding everything that we’re covering here. And I’m using Opus 4.6 extended thinking. Sometimes this can take a few minutes to run — I’m okay with that because of the quality at which it’s giving me outputs. You can see it’s already compacting the conversation because the book is a pretty large amount of content, which you might find Claude doing for you there. You may find certain limitations if you’re using different models from Anthropic. Right now, Opus 4.6 — as of this date and time — is definitely the best model that you could be using inside of Claude, and it’s pretty wild what it can do. So I would recommend you guys using it if you’re going to be extracting and building frameworks around your methodologies, especially as you’re going to be turning them into a book.

It’s reading through the entire book. So what it’s doing is it’s ingesting all of the context for all of its methods. So anyone here that has their own methodology can build a project that can do just the same thing that we’re doing here. The key is having the frameworks, having the examples if you have them, having anything that’s relevant to your method and what you’re helping people do and produce on a regular basis, inside of a project specifically dedicated to you.

So now Claude is picking back up where we left off in the transcript. I’m just going to let it run right now. If there’s anyone that has any comments, questions, or anything as to where we’re at in the process right now, please let me know, and you can take this process and apply it to a lot of different things.

So I just want to make sure here — let me see — Hannah, if you didn’t have a methodology, would you have to do deep research to help you develop one? Yeah, you could. And I would say start with the big idea — hey, this is what I want to help people produce, help me create a method that will help people get to this result — as a starting point with Claude. And so, because if you can think of — and I don’t know in your case, I know that you have a few different things that you could probably take and do this approach with, but like saying “I want to go here, help me develop the steps that could help me get to that point” in a repeatable way, and then Claude will work through and create some sort of instruction manual that you could then refine and build and add into it, or give it additional context and modify and mold throughout the course of a conversation. Probably wouldn’t one-shot get it to the perfect skill right away, especially if you’re trying to come up with and iterate on a method that you may already know in your head but need help refining. But once you get to a point where, okay, this is really solid, I can repeat this again and again — turn that into a skill. And then once it becomes the skill, you can start to test it inside of your own process, and that feedback loop from your testing and then refining the skill is going to be where it’ll just get better over time.

Yolanda says: “What are some best practices for creating skills? I noticed you created several skills from one book and published them.” Yes, so Yolanda, what you’re referencing is the series of — I think it was like 12 total skills that I’ve created for those that are going through the book writing intensive. I spent some time over a weekend putting those together, and that came from a deep analysis of this book, and then identifying a number of different — which ended up coming to 12 — different skills that we could create individualized skills based on. It took me several hours to do that. And so, before jumping in and thinking you need to create a ton of skills around every single thing that you could possibly do, I would focus on the number one thing that is taking time right now that you would like to streamline as a deliverable specifically.

You know, in the case, the one I chose to start with today for the demo was based on a book launch readiness assessment, because why would you go through the process of writing a book if you don’t even know if you’re ready, or you should be writing a book right now, or what you would write a book about. So what’s the order of operations that your client needs to go through in order to get to the next step in working with you to get the best results? And so I would start there, with where people tend to run into friction, or if they skip this step, then the next steps that they end up in, they’re not going to be set up for success. And so I would focus on skills that help getting people started there — which is why the place that we start most people when we’re working with them, especially agencies, is some version of the MarketSauce blueprint, because starting with your target audience or customer avatar in a marketing campaign is usually where you start with this stuff.

Claude is getting challenged right now, as we can see — we’re doing this live, and it just ran into a little bit of a limitation. So I’m going to rerun it again. This happens sometimes with a book at this kind of size — it might run into some context limitations, which we may be seeing here, timing out a little bit. So I’m going to give it another run and keep an eye on it as we’re running things out here, but I want to talk through why we’re going through this process, because AI does AI, and — Yolanda says she’s been having issues with Opus 4.6 with extended thinking this morning. I’ve been having issues with Opus on co-work being able to work too, and yeah, so we’ll see what happens. It’s going back through here again.

So I’m going to keep a check on the comments as we’re doing it. And again, this is kind of part of the AI operator in us, working with these tools — if sometimes AI is just having a morning, didn’t have its morning coffee, the nitro machine was out — it’s always going to start me off to a bad morning. If that’s the case, maybe we take a different approach to it, right, and adapt as we need to. But hopefully we can get things moving along here, which is why I wanted to get things started here soon.

Hannah says: “Your sales research prospect really helped me with the discovery call and amazing proposal.” Awesome, love to hear that. Was that one of the ones that we created from your onboarding call, Hannah?

No, it was actually a skill that you had that I just leveraged with my transcript, the discovery call, and it helped me generate an amazing proposal. So yeah, thank you for that.

Awesome. What was that from? The MarketSauce cookbook skills. Yeah, yeah, okay.

Cool, glad to hear that.

I did ask you whether it is best to create a skill and then export it to GitHub and have Claude draw on it if we’re going to be uploading it continuously.

Um, I don’t really have any of my skills in GitHub right now. I’ve just been keeping them stored inside of my Claude account because I’ve been mainly using them directly inside of my Claude interface.

But can it be done?

Doesn’t work right now — it’s having some issues. But this seems to be — Claude is maybe overloaded right now, maybe because we’re stretching it a little bit too much or something along those lines. Let me do this then. See, this is where we’re gonna adapt a little bit. Maybe Claude is struggling with this, but —

Mine actually went through. Not to say that that’s special or anything, but I’ve been working on one alongside of you this morning, and it’s basically mirroring your process. So it has actually gone to the next step.

All right, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to open up a different tab, because I was doing a little — I was just making sure that it could analyze the book this morning, and so maybe I have another chat which could work with it. So I’m going to go ahead and give it another run in another chat.

No, I put it there so it wouldn’t be in my screen.

Excuse me. I think, to address the question, Assad is uploading the separate skill as a file. If you were to add it into your GitHub, yes, you could add it as its own MD file for reference to use in there, but each individual skill is going to have to be its own individual MD file. Does that answer your question?

Yes. But is it an efficient system? It’s just so that basically we don’t fill Claude with too much, because it seems that if you add several skills and lots of information, every time Claude goes through a question it has to draw on everything. It checks all the skills, and that’s at least — that’s my understanding — and these are tokens that are —

I know that people have been toggling skills off that they’re not using. Yeah, if it’s on GitHub, then Claude identifies which skill it needs and then it draws on it from GitHub. I’m curious.

Yeah, I haven’t tested it super extensively at that point. But if you’re using — working inside of Claude Code and then having it use that skill, is that what you’re suggesting, or —

GitHub? No, it’s just that I uploaded several skills. So I just don’t want it — actually, there was one specific task that I wanted that required eight skills from the same type, but eight skills. Claude created those eight skills, and so —

— every time it would go through all of them. So that’s quite a lot of skills to go through. So I thought maybe —

Yeah, I don’t have a super solid answer for you right there. Unfortunately I haven’t been running into issues where it’s going off and using every skill in my account. I hear where you’re coming from, and I think maybe it’s worth experimenting with how you’re adding those skills into GitHub, and —

But it seems that it uses up — it uses up tokens, it has to check — and also that if you’ve got them in projects, whatever you’ve got in a project it normally also goes through a lot, so it might use, I don’t know, 4k or 20k or whatever, at any given moment.

And yeah, just a question.

Thank you. I see a question from Coach John that I missed earlier. “Do I have Claude Plus at 20, or the 200 version? Which do you use?” I’m at the Max, $100 a month version right now. I just kept running into limitations on the $20 a month, but I haven’t run into as much limitations on the $100 — to upgrade to the $200 a month, when the $200 a month is supposed to be like 20x what you can do with these. I would run into an issue probably with this in the early morning and run out of my limitation at the $20 a month if I didn’t have the $100 a month Max plan.

I see Bruce bringing up — he ran into a problem with Claude Code crashing when it opened up because he had too many plugins that all started at startup. Yeah, I haven’t dove deep on the plugin side as much, but I do notice that my computer right now is working pretty hard to process this bit. And something about the original Claude thread that I made allowed it to work.

So now we’re moving on to the next phase right here, and we’ll see what we just did. Like, to quickly recap: we’ve given it the published PDF manuscript for Chandler Bolt’s “The Proven Path From Blank Page to Published Author.” And then we gave it an instruction about the context of what we’re doing. And it basically said, okay, this book launch readiness assessment skill would be a really solid first skill based on what is covered in this book. So I gave it the follow-up command: I give you this book, I want you to identify the launch readiness skill, extract the framework, and do all that fun stuff. And what it created was two deliverables.

The asset document — a fully populated sample showing the skill’s output. Jessica is a test subject, someone stuck mid-writing with a perfectionism blocker, and the document diagnoses her. This stuff here, the MD file, is the actual Claude project instructions, the engine behind the assessment. So this is the skill that you’ll want to turn whatever you’re creating here, from your own book, your own methodology, into a skill that you would upload as a framework — contains all the stuff that’s inside of the book. How to run this, right here.

So it’s just — hey, for this workshop specifically, this is why I’m using this example versus my own book, so that you can say this could — this will work with anybody’s book. And the workshop, as we now have the skill, the architecture, now we can create a Claude project with that skill, and then this is where anyone here that has a book — I know a lot of you all already have already written books, or maybe want to write a book, or are planning to write a book later this month — just drop in the comments very quickly a quick blurb: what’s your book about, and where specifically are you stuck. Okay, this can be like a sentence or two or three — don’t drop a full diary on me — but if anyone has a book that they’re writing, what is it about and where are you stuck? If you feel stuck right now in any specific place, I’m going to run this — go live — and then we’re going to continue to talk about building your own skills. Right.

Can you please share the prompt?

I will share — I just shared one prompt here. This was the book, this was the prompt. This may be a prompt that we want to look at also for doing a meta — like a skill-architecting sort of extractor prompt that we can use.

It’s not showing my chat.

I sent the prompt in the group chat for everybody, so you should see it. Can anyone else see the prompt that I just shared inside of the chat?

Yes, it was there twice.

I’m not sure, Assad — no, I mean, because I came in late, so it’s just showing me things that are from a few minutes ago.

It was — the last one was 9:28. I just texted it to you instead of the school group.

Okay, thank you.

All right, so jumping back into it, on the right side we see the actual assessment that was produced. Okay, “Published Pathway Assessment: Current Position.” It ran this as a diagnostic using this skill, and it made up a case study for this person, and this is the report that it output. Now this would be like a deliverable that someone that’s going through this book and this process could get as a result of them feeling stuck or feeling like they have an issue inside of the process.

The skill right here was also created. So it gave me an assessment as a deliverable example, and then it gave me the skill that I can use and download inside of my account. Okay: “Published Pathway Claude Skill — Trigger: run the skill when the user says ‘Run published pathway book assessment. Where am I with my book?’ Then the diagnostic is exactly where someone is writing the book using Chandler Bolt’s SPS 90-day framework from Published, from Architecture.” And so you can see the way that this skill is designed is to consistently deliver outputs following the phase one, phase two, different milestones that were laid out from here, and when triggered, ask these questions.

So — diagnostic again, if anyone has a book idea and if they’re stuck on anything, we can use as an example — I can use an example on myself, but now that we have this skill built out — see, it even uses this blue color for what this looks like — I’m going to download this skill, which I think I already actually did. So the next steps from here are very important to watch, in terms of this flow, because once you get this flow down you’ll be able to do it for any skill.

We’ve got, on the left side, the skill assessment, and then the actual skill that we want to use into our account. On the right side, we have the skill right here. So I’ve downloaded the skill and I’ve also copied the skill. I’m going to go to my account settings, bottom left, capabilities, skills, add skill, upload skill. Oh no — see, why is it not working? So, add skill, create skill, skill, MD file — why is that not working?

I don’t know if anyone else runs into this issue with Claude, but sometimes I get the skill —

Yeah, the note needs to have that YAML front matter that gives it the name and the description.

Yeah, doesn’t always create that for you.

So if you run into this — we ran into this on Thursday, and then we fixed it. Like, this is Claude troubleshooting. So do I just need to get —

You can ask Claude to format it so it accepts it as a skill. That should work.

Yeah, it’s exactly —

Usually there’s maybe only one or two lines before the actual formatting, but you can probably ask it right in that chat.

Yeah, so I’ll just say, “Hey Claude, I’m getting this — update the skill so that it’s actually properly formatted to be uploaded as a skill.” All right, again, may sound simple, but I promise you it’s effective. If you’re stuck with Claude and you’re like, “Hey, this thing is broken, it’s not working,” try asking Claude to help you with fixing the way it formatted it based on the errors you’re getting, and there’s a good chance that we’ll be able to help. Same thing goes with just technical troubleshooting — Claude can be pretty effective at that as well.

All right, so it’s got the patterns, it’s refining that skill, it’s getting that skill set up. And so obviously we want the skill to be in the account so that we can use it again and again. And then I’ll show you how to set up the project with the instructions to execute this skill on a recurring, repeatable basis, following this framework, again and again.

And I see Shelley shared your book and where you’re stuck right now — thank you so much, we’ll run that as a test as this is building it out. Are we seeing how we can apply our own skills, our own methods, or our own sort of frameworks into starting to build out a skill from this demo? Is this clicking for anybody here? Is it still confusing as to where we’re heading? We’re going to tie it all up here once Claude wraps up the skill formatting. See, Yolanda says it’s clicking, Hannah says it’s clicking. Okay, good. And to really reinforce this — going through this process and executing it is going to help with the overall reinforcement of everything.

All right, there — all right, cool. So let’s do this now. Uploaded the skill. Download the assessment. All right, I’m going to go back here now — capabilities, skills, drag and drop the skill. Don’t fail me now, Claude, the world is watching. Look at that — perfect. So now we have the Published Pathway Assessment skill, it’s in my account. I can click on it, I can open up the skill. Okay — what? It’s just one of those mornings.

They had some big trouble yesterday with a skill server that wasn’t available at all, so —

We were having — I should have told them we were having a workshop this morning, I would have gotten their stuff together. All right, it looks like it’s here. As you can see, it’s obviously given an example of that skill. Let’s keep things moving, because we don’t want a little bit of a Claude hiccup on this end to stop us from getting to the point where you can see how this is repeatable inside of a project.

So we’ve added our Published Pathway Assessment. What I’ve done with the MarketSauce blueprints, and what I would encourage you, if you have a really clear report framework that you’re looking to produce, is setting up a project. But I’m going to rename this project now, “Published.” So say I had 50 clients come through and I want to run this for every single client, on the dot, to run this report — this is just my approach — is setting up the project to be dedicated to understanding the method, and also having the instructions, pasting the full framework inside of the instructions, saving those instructions. And then — so since Shelley, you wrote your blurb, I’m going to say “Context equals” — so we can see, just to break down exactly what we’re doing here, execute the Published Pathway skill, which is — assessment. I’m going to say “Assessment for Shelly, context equals” — okay, so that’s just we’re starting that. Right, this context could be literally an entire one-hour deep-dive interview that you’re doing with a client, and you’re giving that as context for something like this.

The purpose in this part of the demonstration is to show that, one, now that we have extracted this framework from within Chandler’s book, Published, a very specific assessment that can be a deliverable to help clients inside of the writing process. We’re now giving this Claude project a reason to execute, with context provided. So: execute the Published Pathway assessment for Shelley. Context is: “Wrote 120 cases, 20 per each step for my framework, struggling that 20 per chapter is too many, I want high-level help to choose the best 10.” The book is “The Truth About Succeeding in Small Business.” Right, and so obviously — if you’re working with anyone on writing and going through your book, Shel, like people have — having a human eye and having an understanding of where you’re at is helpful with this. Like Chandler has an entire program that helps people on the ongoing part of working through all the different areas that somebody runs into an issue if they’re struggling with getting the book out of their head, because there are so many things that can come up that can stop us — which is why accountability, in a lot of cases, is the most helpful thing with actually getting the book out and overcoming these obstacles.

But if this was an obstacle that was preventing you for weeks or months or years from getting the book out, having an assessment like this that can deliver a report to you that you can review and then work through — like maybe, what do we want to process, what are the next steps forward to choose the best 10, right? Whatever that looks like, this assessment will produce a report based on what I’ve given it, what the assessment does, and then that report can help you, Shelly, with moving and implementing, self-selecting, removing it down to 10 — whatever it is. I’m going to pull up our chat on School just so I can share this with you whenever I do have it, so that you can have it handy.

But the nice thing about skills, or running them like this, and you have a really repeatable assessment or report or audit or anything like that, is if you have multiple clients that are coming through and doing intake forms from a Google form, that type of thing, you can take those outputs and you can run multiple of these assessments inside of, you know, their own Claude project, or you can do different Claude projects that you clone if you want to go that route. I don’t know how much time running this assessment manually may take somebody in the traditional sense, but this skill is designed to help accelerate that process and identify some ways to get over this particular roadblock in the writing and publishing of your book.

So I encourage everyone here, as you’re thinking through your own use cases and your own clients that you’re working with — what is the roadblock, the friction point, that people keep running into that are working with you, that maybe is taking your time to review and provide insights and strategic analysis and your own perspective. What is the method that you’re running everybody through anyways, and how are you gathering the context ahead of running one of these assessments to make it most relevant and helpful?

And so we can see here, now we’ve produced this assessment for Shelly, the Published Pathway assessment, and the assessment is ready. The diagnostic at a glance: milestone six, “revision and polish blocker isn’t writer’s blocker or missing content, it’s the abundance trap — 120 cases, no curation system, every case feels important so none get cut.” The small hinge: a four-criteria scoring rubric, scoring one through five, top 10 per chapter make the book, the other 60 become her pre-launch content pipeline — blog posts, LinkedIn stories — cutting isn’t wasted, it’s strategy. And then it’s the launch recommendation: a 99-cent strategy, which Chandler covers in the book for launching that book, and the doc includes a full 90-day roadmap.

So now we see here this document, the assessment produced for Shelly — it’s eight full pages. You can see the sections, outlining phase 1, phase 2, phase 3, phase 4. And again, to highlight, these phases and these different portions of the phases are stuff that is outlined in detail inside of Chandler’s book. Okay, and depending on where Shel’s at, it’s going to identify and hone in on that one section of the phase. It’s right here: “You’ve done this, you’ve built something most people never get close to, but here’s the gap, right, and getting this down to 10” — which I’d be willing to bet you already knew that this is where we’re at a roadblock, Shelly. It’s a matter of what’s the plan to move forward here and get these down to 10, and so this assessment is designed to help do just that.

Section two, the blocker exists — a quote from Chandler in the book: “You can’t edit while you write. If you do, you’ll end up with three perfect chapters at the end of 30 days and nothing more.” So right here, it’s giving you next three moves: build a case scoring rubric, so create a one-to-five scoring system — which you could take this report — I see you made a reaction there, Shel, something sounds like something just landed for you. So scoring rubric, and so it’s going to — you basically run your process now, your book manuscript against this assessment, and then have it run this rubric for your chapters and create that sort of outline for you. Complete the self-edit read-through, and then hire an editor and launch the content bench. And so it gives you this kind of curated 90-day roadmap. So if you do have a methodology for launching a product or service, or how you’re working with clients, you can incorporate your own way that you would approach doing the 90-day roadmap, post-launch, recommended launch strategies. Again, all of this is based on the published book — it’s just focusing it towards Shelly in your use case.

But then the action item here is: build the case scoring rubric, create a spreadsheet with 120 rows. See, I wouldn’t actually go and do this manually if I were you, Shel — I would take this assessment and then give it to Claude and be like, “Build the case scoring rubric following the instructions here, here’s my manuscript, execute.” Just give it that, and then let Claude do it. It’s going to take you forever to go through and manually go through all this process — use Claude’s AI capabilities to help with this analysis and decide what needs to be cut, and then you’re done.

So that is the Published Pathway assessment. I could run this for 50 people in the next hour, and probably max out my Claude account if I did. But if I was working with people, then — let’s say everybody’s coming into this book writing intensive, but everyone is stuck in their own specific way — we can run this now for anyone that’s coming through this process based on this book and this framework, to help get you guys unstuck. Shelley, go ahead and check your School message, it’s inside of your School DMs.

And let’s go ahead and hone things — let’s do another look-back here about where we started from: taking Chandler Bolt’s book, and extracting the one skill that we wanted to make, to create a repeatable skill around a methodology and a framework that Chandler already wrote and built inside of the book. We identified that as the Published Pathway skill, and then we refined that skill, uploaded it into our account, and that skill is now — it’s living inside of our skills, which — let’s see if Claude is still having a moment, which it may be — we’ll see, that skill is here. I would recommend, if you’re building these skills out, keep them inside of at least a Google Drive folder, so that you don’t just have everything sitting inside of Claude.

But what we did also is we built a project. I’m actually going to change this name one last time, because it’s the Published Pathway Assessment. Anyone comes to me now and says, “Hey, I have a book I want to write, but I’m stuck doing this,” I’m like, “Cool, fill out this intake form, or send me a few sentences or a few paragraphs or a novel about where you’re at with your process.” I can take that information and I can run it through this project that’s going to reference this book. It’s going to reference these instructions — these instructions are the skill that I’ve given it, this framework that I can do this same process again and again.

Okay, start to finish, how we went through this process — and I see, yeah, I see Assad took the skill, the prompt that I started with today, and made a prompt for Claude to create a skill from any expert framework. Okay, this is great. So now what we’re going to do, so that everybody here can now basically take and do what we just covered — so this is what Assad just shared, which was basically taking the first prompt that I gave today based on Chandler’s book, and then Assad formatted it in a way that it could be a repeatable prompt for anything.

But what I’m going to do now, because this is a great example of a reason why — now that we have gone through this process for extracting this framework and this method and whatever we just did — the skills don’t have to be 50 pages long to be effective. Sometimes the more short and concise that you can get is actually more effective. Okay, so what I’m going to do, I’m going to go back to my settings. So once you create an awesome skill that you’re like, “Oh, that would be great for me to just use again and again,” go down to capabilities, go to skill, “I can create with Claude — skill is for expert frame…” what are we saying? All right, so now, again, it’s like taking it full circle. Now if you want to make your own skill with Claude, you just say, “Hey Claude, I want to make a skill using your skill builder ability, and here’s the prompt, or the skill, the outcome that I want to build — something repeatable — use your skill creator skill to help me with turning this into a skill.” We’re gonna have so many skills by the end of the year, an incredible amount of skills. And these skills will stack and build on top of each other too.

So this skill — Claude will help me build a skill that will help me with doing this. Again, if someone were to come to me and say, “Hey Darby, I have these 15 methodologies, and I have 20 years of experience, and I have all of this stuff — how do I turn all of these into things that I can now have like my own AI agent do, and execute and implement on, to help my clients, to help my team, to help whatever you’re wanting people to do,” and I say, “Okay, let’s work on it,” right — like, we’ve got to obviously identify what’s the first one that we want to do.

But if someone comes to me and they’re like, “Hey, I’ve written 10 books on this subject, but none of them have any sort of AI, any actionable stuff, or any tools or any skills built around them,” now I’m working with Claude to say, “Cool, I’ve got this.” I ask Claude for the perspective of what’s the small hinge that’s going to swing the big door. It says: it’s not a book summarizer skill, it’s a skill factory — a skill that turns any expert methodology into a diagnostic, prescriptive Claude skill that leverages — that every book you or your clients feed it becomes a deployable AI agent that can meet the user where they’re at and ready to move forward. Seems like a pretty useful skill to me.

So now let’s confirm — let’s confirm it. You know what it does? Takes a book, extracts the expert frameworks out, outputs a complete installable skill that diagnoses where someone’s at in the framework and prescribes the next step. Framework mining, journey mapping, diagnostic skill assembly, quality check — secret sauce is phase three, the diagnostic layer, which is what separates “here’s a summary” versus “here’s an agent that can actually guide someone through the framework,” applied universally. “Who’s the skill for?” Let’s do both. Okay, so we’re going to do both. “What output do you want?” Skill MD, ready to install, plus reference files. Yeah, give me all the above. “Should the skill include features, interactive intake?” Sure, cool — we could give it more context there. Also, this is Scott — this is Claude’s way of interacting to make sure that it is extracting and on the same track with information.

Okay, cool, and it’s going to go through and execute the skill creation part of this process. By the end of Claude’s thinking here, it will produce what it’s telling me it’s going to produce. I can add that to my skill library, and then anytime I want to create or extract the methodologies or something from a book — use it for myself to implement what the book is teaching — this skill could be used.

All right, got about 5 minutes left here, y’all. This is going to run its course, it’s going to do its thing, and hopefully by the end of this call you can see how you can take your own skills and begin to extract those, and I will get this skill added somewhere inside of the classroom.

You ought to be able — question, Darby: what files do you normally put in the project?

The files in the project are going to be, for something like this, going to be something related to the skill, or the method, or the framework. Like for Chandler’s — for this, in this case, when we were doing the book assessment, I just gave it the book and then I gave it the instructions that we created from that book. For the buyer blueprint recipes that we’ll run, I give it the buyer’s brief book for the full framework context, and then I gave it the exact instructions for that output, and then I run the skill.

Okay.

Thought that’s going to be related to the methodology. Yeah, what was that? Can I ask a question quick?

Yeah, hello.

Sorry, can you hear me?

Yes.

Maybe my Wi-Fi is bad — am I connected now?

Yeah, I can hear you.

Oh, okay, yeah, I just had a quick question — I’m running into the max, I’m on the $20 plan or whatever. Are there different actions that are eating up all of my credits? Because I’m running out of credits basically every day, and I’ve been only on for like less than an hour, so I only got halfway through that process and I already ran out. So is there something that I’m doing that’s eating up the credits?

The more extensive that the outputs that you’re building towards are — going from like Claude’s assessment, “Oh, I’m going to build this skill,” it’s going to require all of this different thought, and Opus 4.6 is taking the most memory and the most use of it — it may just eat them up faster. I mean, it’s like Anthropic’s way of being like, “You should probably upgrade if you’re using this model this much.” I that’s why I ended up ultimately upgrading to the Max plan, because I kept running into the same issue with building out these more extensive skills. But you may want to try using a different model, like Sonnet — like Sonnet 4.5, or even Opus 4.5, or Sonnet or Haiku 4.5, and see how that works with it. The Opus one definitely uses a lot more Claude credits and usage, much, much faster.

I don’t know if you could hear that — I think the reception might be a little bit off right now. Yeah, overall, Opus 4.6 is going to use substantially more Claude credits in your account and hit your usage cap much faster than you would if you’re using Sonnet. And so I would say, for now, at least, do the same process whenever it resets, and run it through Sonnet — you should be able to go a lot further with that.

All right guys, I’ve got to jump for another call. Hope you all enjoyed today’s workshop. We’ll be back on here next week, same time, same place. Other ways to level up our Claude skills.

Great session, thanks a lot.

Thanks y’all. Cheers.