14 of my skills
In a mad dash in February and March I built out what's now 100 skills.
Here's a selection.
I skipped the kind of skills that you might find in skill databases.
Cap-Table
Maintaining a cap-table is a pain in the a**, at least for me. Track every new grant and vesting schedule, make different views for reports, investors, tax ... Kill me. This skill tracks all investments and grants in a SQLite database. It gives me whatever view, table or chart I want on the fly. E.g. "Show me the sum of all vestings for the BD team."
Yes tools like Carta exist, but they wanted 8k / year. More importantly they wanted me to enter all my data there in a UI. Why do that when I can own my data, work on it with agents and build the views I want without being restricted by a SaaS feature set.
Vesting Schedule
Chart
What's the right chart type for this data? This skill helps with that. Chart holds a database of 181 chart types, and what each is useful for. When I work on a dataset I ask "what's a good chart for that" and it has good ideas.
It's not like there is a fixed set of charts. People come up with new charts all the time. But it's a very good starting point. Most of the charts are from this excellent Data Visualisation Catalogue.
Clean Drawing
Now everyone uses Excalidraw, the alpha has decayed. And it's often faster to hand-draw anyway. But, at least for me, hand drawings are always just a little bit too messy. So this skill turns hand drawings into slightly cleaned-up versions. It still preserves your handwriting and character, but does some small retouches. I often like the result better than Excalidraw.
I played around on paper to get to the correct curve for Auto spread in Turbine, and then used this skill to clean it for the project proposal.
Content
I can't find the time to stay up to date with all the latest blogs / podcasts / tweets from people I follow. But I also want to discover very relevant things. So this skill tracks content sites I like, blog, podcast, etc., and downloads the transcripts into a local database. I then sometimes score them against a query, e.g. filter by "my interests" or a full text search keyword, or qmd, and pick something to read.
Ran it over all Lex Fridman transcripts and asked for the top 3 for me out of the hundreds of podcasts they might have published.
Contracts
Sometimes you need to write a lot of contracts. Investment rounds, stock grants, hiring. The contract is always the same, but you still need to manually prep it, review it, upload it to docusign. Please no! This skill holds up-to-date templates of everything, and I can easily issue, send and track new contracts programmatically. Issue 20 new stock grants to the team and track it all? Easy.
Documenso is great for this. Docusign I found a pain. They make you jump through 10 hoops to get a developer key. I did, I tried for weeks, I'm still waiting for it.
Document Image Restoration
A little fun one. I was re-reading The Adweek Copywriting Handbook and wanted to share some of the ad examples in the team. But my version had such bad resolution that you could hardly make out the words. By chaining some text and image models you can get a nicely restored version!
It's not perfect. It does hallucinate some words, and in this case it almost defeated the point when in ad copy every word counts.
Database
Many skills work with the same stuff. Call debriefs, call prep, and customer research all work with call transcripts, people and companies. If you let agents track data in files the data quickly becomes inconsistent or duplicated in different places. Giving my skills one shared database made a big difference. It holds the CRM, all communication, Telegram messages, emails, Slack, an index of important files, and all content. It holds all structured data and indexes unstructured data.
The database grounds skills and sessions: SQL queries make work deterministic and scalable. And the schema is unambiguous and blocks inconsistent data, which protects you from a lot of hallucination, and makes complex projects and data migration simple and traceable, like moving a thousand leads from one place to another.
Hidden Gems
I am so annoyed that Google Maps is hiding results from me! I'm in a new city, I first search e.g. for a nice cafe to work in. Then later, while walking around, I find a cafe that's amazing, and that wasn't on the list Maps showed me. It even has 5 stars and many ratings! Again and again, the best things don't show up on the map. But they are in there, in the Google Maps API. The hidden gems skill knows my interests, grabs everything from the Google Maps API in 500m around me, reads the reviews and filters for what I'm searching for. It works. It works so well!
For years I wondered why Google doesn't improve their filters, e.g. you can only filter for 4.5+ but not for 4.8+. Well maybe they just wanted you to build this yourself and pay them 5$ in API fees to scan a new neighborhood.
Location Prospecting
If you are on the move, choosing the next place can be a difficult task. This skill scores locations and gives me a map by score.
It can rate by metrics like the health of the ecosystem by Forest Landscape Integrity Index, the combined temp, humidity and sun hour weather scores from Weatherspark and reviews from travel sites, the available activities that overlap with my interests and how they are rated there by people.
I also have a crazier "bottom up" mode that starts from a specific place, like an Airbnb I stayed at, and then searches outward: It looks at who else stayed at that Airbnb, where they stayed, who stayed in those places, etc. It builds a map outward from one me to many humans and then looks for the overlap in the places.
Marketing Examples
I like Marketing Examples. I don't like the navigation. Made a page where I can swipe through examples, pick a random one, and navigate categories.
My Interests
The ratio of noise on most sources of information, Twitter, podcasts, even specific blogs, is so high that it's annoying to sift through it to find the few things I find inspiring. My Interests is a skill that has a precise definition of my interests, short and long-tail. Equipped with this agents can pre-score and filter any source of content to what most likely interests me. It's doing a very good job.
How to keep this up to date? I capture most of my thinking in Obsidian, so my recently touched Obsidian notes are a very good reflection of what I care about at the moment. My Interests has an updater flow to update the file every week.
MyNoise
I like listening to dronal background music for work. MyNoise is the best: high fidelity generators for any mood. Not a playlist, not a fixed loop on YouTube. Instead it gives you generators you can modify and customize. This skill holds a mirror of the catalogue descriptions and I ask it to recommend me new generators to try out.
▶ Play on MyNoise
Roadmap Sankey
In our team every proposal links to a problem we want to solve. Over time a lot of proposals accumulate, and it can become hard to see the bigger picture. The roadmap sankey shows what connects to what and lets you filter to the things product, team, priority and stage of the proposal.
We currently have 153 plans that link to 14 goals.
Text to Podcast
I often prefer to listen to something rather than read it. I feel like the content sticks better and I have more ideas. This skill turns some writing (a file or website), into audio. It formats the text into a readable transcript; for example turns bullet points into paragraphs, and spells out the math in a sentence. Then it hosts it, exposes it on an RSS feed that I added to my Spotify.
I like this on train and car rides, planes, or walks in the forest. I often remember ideas by the place I stood in when I listened to it.
These are 14 out of 100 skills I have atm. Will post updates here now and then.
If you found this interesting; I'd be curious to hear about the skills you built: write me on Telegram @yellow_propeller.