Agent Skills as SOPs for AI Teams

YouTube video: How I Use Skills + AI Agents to Run My Life Channel: Greg Isenberg Published: 2026-08-19 URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHsftiyT9pQ

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I talk with Remy, known online as AI with Remy, about agent skills and how to share them across a whole team. Remy explains that a skill is an SOP for AI: a markdown file that teaches Claude your exact way to do a task. He then shows his system. He keeps his team skills in one GitHub repository, and he installs that repository as a plugin in Claude Code and Codex. The result is one source of truth, automatic updates for e

Transcript: The people that understand how to use skills, how to use plugins with codecs and claude code just have this unfair advantage. But there's so many questions around it, like how do I use it with my team or how do I post it on GitHub or what are the skills I need to know? So on today's episode, we break it down super clearly. I brought my friend Remy and he clearly explains how to use skills, how to use plugins, and how he runs his entire company with a bunch of skills that gets him the best output out of Claude Code. What's really cool is Remy actually drops a bunch of the prompts in order to actually go and do this yourself. and he basically just explains exactly what you need to do in order to to implement all these skill chains. Basically, multiple skills together to actually help you live a more productive and hopefully revenue generating life. Enjoy the episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Brex. My company's been on Brex for a year and a half, and I started because I kept hearing companies like Verscell, OpenAI, Anthropic were using Brex, and I figured if they're using it, why shouldn't I? It's been a gamecher. The thing that got me is how smooth it is. It's got high limit cards. It's got banking. It's got AI that handles the back office busy work like expense reports, which I don't want to do on its own. It's really just built for this agentic world. If you're building something new, it's time to get B. Check it out at brex.com/solutions/artups. Link in the description. [music] >> [music] >> I begged him to come back on AI with Remy as he's known, right? >> Yes. AI with Remy >> is here. Welcome back, Remy. By the end of the episode, what are people going to learn? >> You're going to learn how to effectively manage and distribute skills, agent skills across your entire team. >> Okay. And like why why should people care about that? Because I think that agent skills are probably like the single most important concept and like agent skills are what really actually save you time with AI when you're trying to automate out repeatable processes and I don't feel like anyone's really cracked it cracked the way to properly administer and share them across their team. So if anyone is interested in agents to do tasks and anyone's interested in doing it with teams, this is the episode for them. >> It is. It sure is. All right, let's dive in. >> Bang bang. So, before we get into it, I'm just going to do a quick overview on what a skill is for those people who are listening who don't know. If you do, which I'm imagining a lot of people listening do, I'm sure Greg you'll do a good job of putting timestamps down below. You guys can just skip ahead. But skills are literally just SOPs for AI. So, without a skill, the old way is if you wanted a proposal written, you would have to jump into a new session or a new chat, ask Claude to write your proposal. You would probably get a result you're not happy with off the get- go and you have to go through and reexlain all your preferences, the colors, the logo, like, hey, put the price at the bottom instead of at the top, so on and so forth. And eventually you land on a proposal that you're happy with. But what happens next week when you go to create another proposal? It forgets everything unless you keep going in the same session, which you know runs into other issues when you just keep going in the same uh session for too long. But it's forgotten all your preferences. Whereas with a skill, it basically just allows you to package up uh your entire kind of way of doing things into a document, a markdown file for Claude to read. It's literally just an SOP, like a step-by-step guide on how to do a process. I literally just ran before this uh you know, before I jumped on, I ran this little demo here. I said, "Create a proposal for Greg Eisenberg, you know, for the startup ideas to sponsor the newsletter." and it just oneshot it. It whipped out the, you know, the proposal generation skill that I've built and then it generated this lovely branded proposal here exactly how I wanted it. I didn't even have to reexlain a single thing. >> And most importantly, that that wasn't slop. You know, I think the mistake, you know, a lot of people use AI and they get slop and a big reason is they don't have tight skills. >> Exactly. Exactly. like the I have a really specific way I like things done and once I nail it, I'll just build a really good skill for it and then I can just like nail it one shot every single time. And the way that I kind of think about how the agent uses skills is it's like I visualize the agent as like the most capable employee you've ever hired and he's sitting in his desk and he's got his computer which all your tools like MCPs connected up. He's got his instructions file that he reads before every task and then another, you know, additional context if he needs it. And he's got this big, you know, bookshelf of SOPs, which is skills. And, you know, in his skill, when you open it up, it has a little name and description at the top. And that's kind of just what sits on the spine of all the books. And then when he actually, you know, decides he needs it for a task, he'll pull it off the shelf and then read like the full thing that'll teach him exactly how to do the task. So, you know, that's what a skill is. They are super super valuable. A good skill can save you like literally 2 hours a week and you stack those up and you know it's game over. But the issue like one of the issues we're facing right now is that AI is very much single player. So you know all your team members have their own claude setups on their computer or codec setups and if they build something brilliant or build a great skill you know it just lives on their machine. It's very very difficult to share it properly. And this is like a similar problem that we saw back when personal computers first came out and people were using, you know, tools like Microsoft Word. You'd build a doc, you'd have a document you're working on and it was just like on your computer and, you know, when you wanted to actually send it over, you would have to just, you know, like mail it, export it, and then mail it. And you'd have a bunch of different copies floating around and no actual uh central source of truth. And then Google Docs thankfully solved that. you just have like one doc that lives in Google Drive and everyone can kind of be in there collaborating and it's just like one central source of truth. We're kind of in our Microsoft Word era of skills at the moment. Everyone's just creating skills. They're super valuable, but they just live on everyone's machines and then sharing them around and actually managing them across a team is really really difficult. So yeah, we're here right now in this uh Microsoft Word era of skills. So like I'm saying, you've built a great skill. Now what like what do you do? How do you share it with your team? Some quick examples of some that I've literally built just this week that have been like game changers that I've wanted my team to have is a notion formatting skill. So, if I open up like this was a little doc where I was prepping before the pod and I like all my notion docs formatted a certain way. I I like lots of white space so it's super readable. Lots of divider lines, little blue highlights for elements. And you know, if you just let Claude like go and build you a notion doc, it's a mess. Like all the text is crammed together. It's not readable at all. So, I have a specific way that I've taught Claude how I want all of my notion docs to be formatted. And I've just packaged up that up as a skill. So, every time I ask Claude to build something in Notion, it pulls his like notion formatting skill off the shelf, his SOP, and reads it so he knows what to do. So, that's one that I want all my team to be using so that whenever they're building stuff in notion, it all looks the same and looks nice. Another one is my brand voice. So, AI with Remy brand voice for all like the, you know, email assets and landing page copy, etc. So, I built out a skill for that. And another one's email formatting. So, I use resend as one of my ASPs. And I have like a, you know, nice kind of email format that I like to use with highlights similar to the notion doc, like lots of white space and like the blue buttons and then the little signature at the bottom as well as the logo up the top here too. So I basically taught Claude exactly how I liked emails formatted once saved as a skill. And now I want all my team to have that exact same skill for when they're, you know, building notification emails to go out or or marketing emails, etc. So there are some examples of skills that I've built just this week that I would want all my team to be able to have access to and be using on like a daily basis. So how do you actually go about sharing the skills? Well, originally like one way was, you know, you would just save it as a skill file or a zip file and you would send it to them on Slack or email and they would just upload it into their setups and now they've got it. It kind of works, but then you run into this nightmare of as soon as you make a change, their file doesn't auto change. It's a duplicate. And if they make a change, you don't receive that as well. And if you share that out to the team, everyone's kind of improving on skills as you should always be looking to improve them. You end up with like 10 different copies and like no central source of truth. One of the other ways that I originally used to share this across the team was with like Drive or Dropbox or Obsidian as well. So, you know, if you download like the Google Drive desktop app or the Dropbox desktop app, you can see them show up in your file system and you can like basically open that folder up in claude. So you could could like theoretically create a skills folder, have them all live in there. Uh but first issue is that claude does not read from a skills folder in Google Drive. It has to read from its special like Claude/skills folder. So in order to actually get Claude to even read this, you need to like sim link it in and make do like basically just do a bunch of like hacky stuff to get it to work. And this you can get away with this if you got a small team and you're all like technically savvy enough to understand like folder structures include and agents but the minute you know you bring on like a junior or someone in marketing who's not super techsavvy or AI native and you want them to be able to use a skill and use your skills like things just break all the time. People don't really understand what they've done. People don't understand like how to set it up properly and it's just like not the most efficient way at all. And if you wanted to use Obsidian, same deal applies as Google Drive and Dropbox, except now everyone has to set up and install Obsidian, too, which is a pain in the ass. So, drum roll, please. How do we share skills across the team? The best way that I've found is by putting them all in a GitHub repository and making it a plug-in. It sounds simple, but it's so so effective. So essentially like all all it is most of the viewers already understand this but GitHub is just like you think of it as like Google Drive for code. So it's like just like you share files and videos and images across your team with Google Drive. GitHub is just that but for sharing code. So the simplest way to do this is to just push all your skills into a repository. So I have this one here called team skills where I've got them all kind of separated by department and you can see the skills live in here. So for the brand section, I've got these two skills in there. And you know, the rest of the other departments have their various skills in there, too. And this, you know, straight away now, you've got your central source of truth, your one place where all of your skills live, but then the plug-in part is how you make it like easy for Claude to access it. >> And Remy, a lot of people hear repo and plugin making it code. And if you're non-technical, you kind of get scared. But it's like if you're non-technical, it's not it's not hard to do. >> It's not hard at all. I've actually I'm glad you said that, Greg, cuz I've prepared a prompt that we can give to the viewer after the episode. >> And that will basically turn their existing skill folders into this exact repo and plug-in setup for them. But to be honest, like it's pretty simple. I don't have a development background at all. Um, as long as you can understand that GitHub is just a place to store your files on the cloud and then a plugin is just a way for Claude to access them, that's pretty much all you need to know. [snorts] All right, cool. So, quick one about what a plugin is. So, a plugin is literally just a bundle of skills, MCPs, and hooks. You don't even have to bundle in MCPS and hooks. You can just have a plugin with skills or just one with MCPs or any combination of them. But our specific one is a bundle of skills in the plug-in. And it's super super easy to install these. I'm going to just open up the terminal for a moment. So if we open up trusty claude code here, if we type /plugin here, it will bring up, you know, this simple little menu here where we can manage and install our plugins. So if we head over to marketplaces, this is where you add in your repo as a marketplace. So, it's literally as simple as just going add marketplace and then copying the link for your repository. Let me just go back to like the the main one and then pasting this straight in here. And then I've already got it because it uh exists in my in my system already. Like I've already got this repo installed as a plugin, but it's literally just as simple as entering your GitHub repo URL as a marketplace. And then if we go back out, you can see that my team skills now show up here. And then the marketplace is kind of like the app store you're installing. And then the plugins themselves are kind of like the apps. So I've broken down all of my skills by department. And then they kind of have their own plugins here. So for example, like one of my guys that helps with copywriting, I probably wouldn't have him install the finance skills plugin. So you can kind of like get some separation there by department which is super super cool. And if we click in we can see for example if we go down to my sort of bundle of newsletter skills we have you know weekly research the intake the writing one the stories the tlddr etc etc etc and um it's super super simple. Now you've got it installed. One thing that's really really important to note is that you need to have uh everyone that installs it needs to have auto update enabled. So I've got it here. You can see now it's like giving me the option to disable it because I've got it enabled. But that's going to allow it to, you know, the skills to update on your machine if someone else makes a change to them. But now with that installed, if I head out of there and I type like newsletter for example, you can see they belong to this newsletter plugin and then I can just use all the skills exactly like you would in your regular, you know, personal AI setup. >> And this isn't unique

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