Free AI skills
A trilogy of small, steal-able AI skills for the three moments in any decision or build. Each one turns a single AI chat from a confident-answer machine into a thinking partner that pushes back. Free to use, free to share.
How it works
A skill is just a set of instructions you hand an AI so it works a certain way. Here's the whole flow — no account, no cost, nothing to install beyond a file.
Pick your moment
Choose the skill that fits where you're stuck — finding direction, making a decision, or getting delivery right. Each is one file.
Add it — or copy the kit
On Claude: Settings → Capabilities → Skills, upload the file or drag it into a chat. Not on Claude? Open the printable kit and paste its prompts into any chatbot.
Describe your problem
Say what you're wrestling with in plain language. The skill triggers on its own and runs the rest.
The skills
Everything lives in one open GitHub repository under a Creative Commons licence. Install the skill into Claude, or grab the printable kit for any chatbot.
01 · Direction
Who am I, what am I good at, and where should I go next?
Make the AI interrogate you — one question at a time, no advice until the end — like a demanding hiring manager. Then have it build a real plan from your answers.
You get back your skills gaps, three career pillars with exit roles and salary bands, a sequenced action list, and the network you'd need to build. It works because it withholds the confident summary until it has actually understood you.
02 · Decision
I have a direction — which path do I actually commit to?
Convene five AI advisors — the Contrarian, the First Principles Thinker, the Expansionist, the Outsider, and the Executor — to pressure-test one hard decision from five directions at once.
Then you play chairman: the skill synthesises the fight into a single call and a first action. Instead of one agreeable answer, you get a real argument you can weigh.
03 · Delivery
I'm in motion — how much rigor does this actually need?
The third skill, on delivery: a sensei that tells you how much rigor a piece of work actually needs — so you neither over-engineer a throwaway nor ship something important half-baked.
It starts with what you are about to make, then asks the one question that sorts it: is this cheap to reverse? Two-way doors you just try and pivot; one-way doors earn the rigor. And it protects the one thing that never got cheap, your attention.
Next
The trilogy sharpens how you think. When you've made the call and it's time to make the thing, that's the companion series.
Build With AI
Skills that hand you a working tool, not advice about one — plus the One-Prompt Build Kit, the exact prompts behind a tool a development agency quoted at $100,000. Free, and they run on the AI you already have at work.
Questions
An AI skill is a small set of written instructions — usually a single Markdown file — that teaches an AI assistant a specific way of working. Instead of prompting from scratch each time, you install the skill once and the assistant follows its procedure whenever it's relevant. These are plain SKILL.md files you can read, edit, and share freely.
Yes. All three skills are free to use, adapt, and share under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. The only ask is that you keep the attribution to the original author — and, for the LLM Council, to Andrej Karpathy, whose idea it builds on.
No. Each skill ships with a printable kit — the same procedure written out to copy and paste into any chatbot, including ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity. The SKILL.md files are optimised for Claude's Skills feature, but the thinking works anywhere.
Isaac Peterson — a non-developer in Melbourne building tools and automations with AI and sharing the process in public. The skills started as workflows in his own newsletter and were genericised so anyone can use them.
The skills come out of my newsletter. Subscribe to get the next one — including the Lean Sensei — the week it lands. It's free.
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