How Skills, Evals, and Loops Clone Your A-Players Reliably

All right, so I'm going to show you the 3-part combo. So using skills, evals, and loops to reliably create more A-players in your organization. Because what happens if you have more A-players in your organization? You're going to reliably grow faster, you're going to hit your numbers also higher than you've ever imagined, and everyone's gonna have a better time, right? The, the challenge is everyone's like, well, how do you get more A-players? So what I'm going to show you real quick is how you want to think about this. It doesn't matter what kind of business you're in, but in the context of this video, I'm going to show you how services as software works and how this applies to really any And then I'm going to show you how we use this 3-part combo to move a lot faster. And literally, you can steal this. What you can do is you can take the transcript from this video and then make this into a skill itself, and then figure out how you can deploy this for your company. So let's get into it. Okay, so first and foremost, what I want to call out here is if you look at a typical services business, it would take a lot of time to, let's say, manage one client. Okay, so the labor hours per account would be a lot, maybe 80 hours for an account. I'm just making things up right now, right? And then you might be— if you're talking about revenue per employee for an account, It might be not too high. This is like in the situation where this is pre-scale, negative $200K. And maybe the accounts per strategist, maybe you can only staff— maybe for each account, you can only have 5 accounts per strategist per person, right? That's basically what it is. The whole idea here is when you think about business as an example, is you want the number of hours you're spending per account to come down. You want the amount that each person can take on to go up. And that means your revenue per employee goes up, which means that you're able to do a lot more With less. That's not saying you should cut a bunch of people. That's just saying that ultimately, when you have such a high revenue per employee, your entire organization is operating a lot more efficiently. But the question is, how do you actually get there? And this 3-part combo is going to help you get there. Okay? And one of the things that I had talked about before was a skills dojo, right? So in another video, I talked about the concept of having a skills dojo where you have all these skills like a video caption generator or like an ex-long-form post writer. And this has been good for us. It's literally generated millions of views on X for us and it's driven a bunch of leads as well. And so you have a lot of these, these skills that, that are in your head that you want to make available to other people. And we've made this available to our organization. And also this is something that we've been starting to implement for our clients as well on the single brain side of things. Okay. So there's, there's like an Instagram carousel skill. There's a deck generator. There's design.md files you can have to keep your designs consistent across the board for it. Let's say you're doing ads, you're doing carousels, you're doing PDFs. Whatever it is exactly, these are going to help you scale a lot more, right? So the question is, how do you start to democratize the skills internally? One, you should have a skills dojo, and I covered that in another video. But more importantly, what I didn't cover in the other video is this piece, okay? So it's this concept of we're doing this 6-week apprenticeship with certain people on the team right now. And the whole idea here is that, you know, we have— it's a 6-week program, and now we're already at week 3, and we're teaching people the concept of what is a skill exactly. What is an eval and what is a loop, which I'm going to cover briefly. And then you should screenshot parts of this and then steal it for yourself, right? And plug it into your Claude, plug it into your ChatGPT, plug it into one of your autonomous agents. That's fine. So we have this Pod of One program, which is a 6-week apprenticeship ran by yours truly. And by the end, every person can build and use Claude code, Codex skills, and they have 1 to 2 real skills shipped to the Skills Dojo with evals. Again, that Skills Dojo is something that I showed you a little earlier and has the confidence to train other people on this. One person can basically now do the work of 4, 5, or even 10 jobs. Right, by leveraging AI. And so what's happening right now is I'm spending my time training this group of people. I'm doing a 1-hour training every Wednesday. I'm having each of these individuals connect with me for office hours. These are 30-minute office hours. And so they're, they're all at different levels and they're all working on different things. But the key thing here is that I'm training them, right? Just, I'm meeting them where they're at and I'm training them. And so the idea here is once we finish off this cohort, that they're going to be able to train other people on this. And this, this is why we call this an apprenticeship. So this is, this is Jedi training right now. And then eventually They're going to become Jedi Masters on their own. They're going to be able to train other people, right? It's also important that if you put something together like this, you have to define what the definition of success is, what the definition of done is, right? And so we want to make sure that at the end of this, each person has taught one of these skills to one other person. And these merge skills, all of them have to have an eval, which I'll talk about in a second. And then you want to have 1 to 2 real skills shipped per person, right? So anything that, again, is manual right now, that you're figuring out how to make into this skill, that's good. So you don't want this to just be a bunch of theater where people are watching you and then people just go back to doing their work. You can't accept that. So a skill is the unit, it's reusable, and it's not a one-off prompt, right? So that's why we're not just talking about prompt engineering here. You want people to reuse this stuff. So you have the skill first, and then the dojo will compound this, and the eval is the bar. So let's first talk about what a skill is at a high level. Okay. The whole idea here is that when you have a skill, I'm going to scroll to, let's say, the bottom over here. Okay. When you think about a skill, let's say you have like a title tag writer, right? So a skill focuses on just one, ideally one thing. You're not just saying, hey, help me do keyword research, help me do backlink building, help me do Reddit as well, all in one skill. You want it to be separated. That way it's easy for the machines to parse. So you might have a title tag rewriter over here. Okay. So given a URL, a target keyword, rewrite the title tag to team standard, keyword front-loaded, title body, 50, 60 characters, optional brand suffix. Counted separately, no clickbait, right? This is a— it's a tiny job and this is easy. It's a very simple idea here to show. And then discovery call recap, okay? Or you can have like a hook generator over here, or like the skills that I showed a little earlier. I'll, I'll kind of move back over here. You look at the, again, X long-form post writer's case. Is this right? Writes posts for X in your founder's, CEO's authentic voice. Every post should feel like a person wrote it, not a content team, not a bot. And there's a bunch of things in here. Don't use em dashes, don't use, uh, it's this, not, not that type language, right? Build a bunch of ASCII diagrams in there. So it has a bunch of these diagrams that you can do. Uh, make sure this is 1,500 to 2,000 words or so, and then we'll just continue to repeat it over time. And you can see here's some system flows over here. So there's examples in these skills. There's feedback loops, input format, output reference. Like, we have a lot of these things. Here's a checklist. Here's a pattern checklist over here. Here's a humanizer score as well. So you can combine, uh, different skills with it. So we wanted to, we wanted to make it human sounding. That way we don't have to just keep going back and forth with these. By the way, if you're enjoying this video around skills, evals, and loops right now, then you have to check out SingleBrain because this is where we tie everything together and we build managed marketing agents that live inside of Slack and Microsoft Teams that ultimately help our clients grow a lot faster. So a lot of the concepts that you're seeing right now, maybe you're like, oh, this is overwhelming, I don't want to handle it. These are all the things that we're building and these are the loops that compound for our customers and they're just able to move a lot faster. And we find that every single relationship that we're having here, it's very collaborative. Hey, can you do this? Can you actually add this? Can you do this over here? Because once they see it, they can't unsee it anymore. And we want you to be able to see the same thing too. So check out Single Brain, B-R-A-I-N, singlebrain.com, and we'll see you on the other side. The way I think about skills is this is to me the intention behind creating processes. Because a lot of people, you know, back in the day, when I say back in the day, like a year or two ago, everyone's like, oh, you got to create process, you got to create process. The problem with that is nobody uses these processes. But when you have these skills out there and your team's using them, I have a Skills Dojo, you could actually track which teams are actually using it, which individuals are actually using it, and then who's scoring high, who isn't scoring high. And you can figure out how to coach those people, and you can also figure out how to reward the people that are very engaged with this, right? That is what I would say. I mean, ultimately, you know, with, with this, when I'm doing the training, let's say later this week or tomorrow actually, by the end of the hour, every participant has a scaffolded draft skill for their own role and open a new pull request against the Skills Dojo repo. The skill does one clear job, document it, is documented for a peer to run it. And encodes a standard that the participant personally holds, right? So one draft skill, one job, 100% room shows their best skill live in 5 minutes. And so even creating this program requires you to yap to your Claude code or your Codex to draft this out for you. But it's really important you ask it to ask you clarifying questions. And so if you don't spend the time planning this, you're planning to fail, right? So this is what's going to happen tomorrow. This is the run of the show. Okay? So this is helpful for me because I'm spending so much time in terms of on the product side, on moving the company forward, on recruiting, all these different things. I'm kind of jumping around all the time. So this allows me to just kind of drop in there and do it. But I'm also doing this for you right now too. So this makes it reusable, right? So anyway, this is a— it shows kind of what the definition of done looks like. And then we can probably go through the skills repo, but this is what a skill is first and foremost. But you can't just create a skill on its own because if you don't do an eval, An eval actually, just to me, it's just a definition of done. It's what success looks like. If you don't have a good eval, so the eval is the bar written down, a few golden examples, clear pass/fail criteria, and a short rubric. If you don't do that, your skill's going to be in trouble because it doesn't know what good looks like. And so no skill merges into the dojo without one. Build the eval, prove the skill passes it, get peer upvotes, and merge. Okay? So then next week when I go on this, we're going to have 5 starter cases over here, include 1 adversarial. Adversarial. One held out. And so I'll explain what that means in a second. And then skill clears its own eval before merge, and then 2+ peers upvote to merge it into the dojo. And then it's live and it's merged into the dojo, right? So then we'll go through this next week. Like, what does a good eval look like? What does a bad eval look like? And honestly, you could just have the AI write it. But to continue on the title tag one. So like, what does a good eval for the title tag skill look like? Well, the eval set is URLs plus keyword, exact title you accept, include one keyword edge case and one no keyword adversarial case. Okay, so Hard check would be you want the title body to be 56 characters, keyword in first 40 characters, no banned superlative, and any miss equals fail. Okay, so again, you're trying to be specific here. When you have the definition of what success looks like, it makes it easy for the machine to run it through that to decide if when it ran the skill, did it actually follow what that definition looks like? Okay, so the definition I've done here is once we finish this, you have You know, Pierre has reviewed it and upvoted it. And so we want people to start to get used to the dojo, right? But the whole idea here is that, again, you can't have a process without defining what the definition of success looks like. That's all an eval is. That's all a skill is. Skill is a process. Eval is just a definition of done. And you don't need to scare yourself into like, you know, what does an eval mean? That's such a big word, right? It's a scary word. But I would just say that, again, the eval is how you prove a skill is good without trusting The vibes. That's ultimately what it is. That's what I would say. Now the next step is, okay, let's, let's say you figure out how to do a skill. Let's say you figure out how to do an eval here. Now you have to figure out how you can chain these things together. So if you chain and run your skills to kill your number one weekly bottleneck, for example, it might be doing client reporting as an example, or it might be sales follow-ups as an example, or it might be doing sales discovery as an example. If you're able to move from one skill to running skills repeatedly and chaining them, to removing your single weekly, your biggest weekly bottleneck, then you now have an intro to agent loops, right? Which is what the founder of Claude Code or the founder of OpenClaw have been talking about. These are north star examples of what running agent loops look like. And what ends up happening is once you chain these skills together, you can just run these loops inside of Claude Code or Codex. You know, some people are like, oh, is it just a slash goal or is it just a slash loop? And so to me, it's just, yeah, it is kind of that, but you need to have the right skills for it, right? And again, that's why you need to have good definitions of what success looks like. I think that the number one thing is you need to figure out, like, when we do this, you have to name your number one weekly bottleneck and then figure out what skills you can chain into it. And then we can figure out what does before and after look like. And so one example might be from my side, we have all these skills for coming up with ideas. So we have my content ingester, which will pull from my content last week, and then I'll have my hook generator as well. There's also like my dot chart generator as well. There's all these different things that if you— if on their own they're already pretty powerful, but when you combine them one after another, it becomes even more powerful, right? And so That's what it is ultimately. You want to show that you're able to— what good looks like here is that you run your chain repeatedly to clear bottleneck, but then more importantly, you need to make sure that you can chain 2 or 3 more skills. And then not only that, ideally this can run with minimal handholding and other people on the team are using it, right? That's when the organization really starts to compound. And then we move on to graduation over here. But what I want to call out too here is in this meeting, it's not just one group of people. It's not just engineers. It's— you got engineers, You have SEO people in here, you have salespeople in here, you have social media managers in here, you have interns in here. It's anybody that has a good relationship with change and is very adaptable and is very curious, they're going to do a good job here, right? And so again, there's a couple things that I showed here. I mean, you got the Skills Dojo, we have all these templates over here, by the way. Like I even have a section here on how to write a good skill, how to write a good eval. So like it says over here, what an eval is in plain language. Again, Forget the word eval for a second. You already do this every day. When you read a draft and think, no, that headline is weak, or yes, ship it, you're running an eval in your head. That's all it is, right? We don't need to— oh, just because Silicon Valley's using all these acronyms doesn't mean we need to be afraid of them, right? How to write a good skill. So I think I would encourage you to have something like this and you can screenshot it, you can make a transcript from this, but you should skillify this video or this podcast that you're listening to right now and then just keep it going, right? If you're not driving this from the top right now, you're listening to this, you're a founder in your organization, you have that power, that is your fault because the founder, you have that invisible hammer where you can just make anything happen, right? And so that's why I think this is so important. This is the 3-part combo that's going to help you create more predictability, more reliability when it comes to minting A-players on your team. There's going to be a lot more predictability with that. So that being said, hope you enjoyed this video and we'll catch you in the next one.