My Structured Skills Library

A living collection of the AI writing skills I actually use — readable, copyable, and always current.

---

Most skill or prompt libraries are dead the day they’re published. My Structured Skills Library is different: a live, self-updating collection of AI writing and teaching skills, organized by five information types, with copy-paste templates you can adapt to your own notes, tools, and voice.

---

Too many “prompt libraries” or “skill libraries” are graveyards … a pile of prompts or skills someone wrote once and never touched again.

This library is the opposite. The Structured Skills Library is the live set of skills I use in my own writing and teaching workflows, and it updates the moment I change one.

Each skill is a small program written in plain language, organized by five information types, providing structure for both human and machines to better access, perform and evaluate these skills.

You can read any of them like a short guide, or copy the whole thing and adapt it to your own work.

How it runs

The library mostly maintains itself. Every skill lives as a markdown file in a knowledge base on my own machine.

When I write a new one, an AI drafts a public version, tags it, links it to its neighbors, and files it in the library.

When I revise the working skill, the public copy updates to match. Every so often I run an audit that checks the whole thing against my own written standards, making sure links, structure, and voice don’t drift.

The result publishes straight from Obsidian, so what you’re reading is never stale.

If this intrigues you and you haven’t yet built your own local AI knowledge base, stay tuned. more to come on that front.

What you’ll find

• A readable page for every skill: what it does, when to reach for it, and the thinking behind it.

• A copy-paste template inside each page, complete and working, with the personal parts marked so you know exactly what to change.

• Skills grouped by workflow: drafting and revision, course design, and general knowledge work.

• A short guide to the information types themselves, so you can build your own skills the same way.

How to use it

Start with whatever problem is in front of you, for example:

• auditing a draft for AI patterns

• synthesizing your notes

• planning a week of class

• handing a long chat off to a fresh session

There’s a skill for each, and each one tells you when it fits. Read the page to understand it, copy the template when you want to run it, and change the bracketed parts to point at your own files, tools, and voice.

You don’t need my setup to use these. You need your own standards written down, and the library shows you how I wrote down mine.

➡️ If you don’t know what those standards are or how to develop them, check out my course Writing with Machines.

What it costs me

The money side is smaller than people expect, and it doesn’t have to be Claude at all. I run it on Claude Cowork, the desktop tool I use to build and update the library, comes with the Pro plan at about $17–20 a month.

The only other tool is Obsidian, for the notes and the publishing. I do pay around $100 a year for syncing and the publishing tool.

But nothing is locked to one company. That’s what I love about it.

The whole system is plain Markdown files, so you can put any agentic model on top of it.

It already works with ChatGPT’s work mode, and it will run on free, open-source models on your own machine — slower, probably, but free. Conceivably you could do this whole thing for nothing.

(More on local, free setups in a future issue.)

What it actually takes

But the subscription isn’t the real cost. The real cost is thinking.

This library didn’t fall out of the machine finished. It came from a long back-and-forth. I had to redefine what a “skill” even is and making sure information types were correct … something that is oddly difficult even for machines.

The audit and the templates exist because I made the same mistakes often enough to name them.

This is what Manny Silva calls “docs as tests.” You explain your standard, the machine tries, you correct it, and slowly your standard becomes something a machine can actually run on.

The whole thing took me about a day to get up and running, and most of that day went to deciding what my standards were, not fighting the tools.

After that, the work compounds. Once the standard is written down, each new skill is faster than the last, and the machine handles the tedious parts, the metadata and links and consistency checks, while I keep the judgment.

More on all of this to come for everyone, but paid subscribers can check out the library using the form below. ⬇️