What are AI skills, and how to use them well?

Dear Reader,

In the early days of AI (...long forgotten 2023), using the right prompts was the key to using AI effectively.

Prompts have now been replaced by Skills.

So why does it matter and why should you care?

If AI were evolving, skills would be akin to the first Palaeolithic (Stone Age) tools. They amplify what AI can do by funnelling its abilities to a specific purpose.

Most importantly, skills enable you to do something you couldn't do previously. In this weeks post I explore how you can automate Obsidians most powerful feature: Bases. A base is a table that aggregates notes based on specific criteria, and is extremely powerful for organising large vaults, making folders and tags obsolete.

But bases require technical expertise, which many lack.

An AI skill can solve that. You just tell what you want, and the skill takes care of it for you.

There are about 100.000 other skills which you can access, and there is a skill to create skills.

I hope this week's blog post will be useful to you. It also includes access to my budding, effortless academic skill repository, which I plan to start building out.

Finally, this post is an experiment in adding short narrated videos to my blog posts. (Let me know if you like this format more than just text+images.)

Summary: The tutorial explains what Claude skills are (patterns of AI behaviour), where to download them and how to create your own. It presents two more advanced use-cases: Creating "atomic statements" to analyse papers in a fashion, which helps you write your own work out of the findings, and creating Obsidian bases. (Bases are an advanced, extremely powerful feature, which few can use well enough. AI makes it available to all.)

Last week's email polls showed that ~30% of people were uninterested in using Claude and Obsidian (the results were far better for Gemini and Obsidian, which is very similar).

If you are not interested in this topic, please let me know why in the poll below.

I am always trying to make this newsletter as relevant as possible. And you would be surprised at the amount of data science I have thrown at it to understand what you are interested in from clicks alone - I am none the wiser.

Thanks for being part of EA!

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

Ilya Shabanov, The Effortless Academic​

The Effortless Academic is a community, newsletter and learning place for the modern academic, where you can learn to leverage academic tools, digital note-taking strategies and AI for a stress-free, successful career.
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If you're ready to dive in, start with the foundation of Digital Note Taking to remember and synthesise ideas, the AI Lit Review Course to learn about recent (AI) tools for finding, reading and skimming relevant academic papers, or the AI writing and publishing courses to effectively publish your ideas.