Get your free personalized podcast brief

We scan new podcasts and send you the top 5 insights daily.

Brown avoids manually editing text-based skill files, which can be brittle and model-dependent. Instead, he refines his AI's performance by providing direct, outcome-based verbal feedback, such as, "You didn't do a good job. Change the skill so you don't do that again."

Related Insights

Don't just regenerate content you dislike. Provide specific feedback and then explicitly command the AI to "update the skill" with this new information. This creates a system that learns and improves from every interaction, moving beyond generating generic "lazy slop."

Don't write agent skills from scratch. First, manually guide the agent through a workflow step-by-step. After a successful run, instruct the agent to review that conversation history and generate the skill from it. This provides the crucial context of what a successful outcome looks like.

Providing direct, strong negative feedback (e.g., "this is garbage") to an AI model is more effective than polite language. It acts as a clear negative reward signal, helping the model better understand its deviation from the requirement and produce superior outputs.

Don't get bogged down with complex skill creation templates. The most effective method is to engage in a feedback loop: have an AI agent perform a task, correct its output until it's perfect, then simply instruct the agent to turn that successful interaction into a new, reusable skill.

Users often abandon AI when its first output is poor, akin to firing a new employee after their first attempt. Instead, train AI by providing clear, specific, behavior-based feedback repeatedly. It learns from reinforcement just like a human, but at a vastly accelerated rate.

Instead of complex prompts, interact with AI agents as you would a human employee. When the agent makes a mistake (like a broken link), provide simple, conversational feedback. The agent can then understand the error and self-correct its process for future tasks.

Pigford built a meta-skill that reviews each development session, including conversations where he repeatedly corrected the AI. It then distills these corrections into a central project document, effectively teaching the AI agent not to make the same mistakes in future sessions.

The best AI results come from iterative refinement. After an initial build, continue conversing with the agent to tweak outputs. Tell it to adjust sentence structure or writing style and redeploy. This continuous feedback loop is key to improving performance.

Instead of manually maintaining your AI's custom instructions, end work sessions by asking it, "What did you learn about working with me?" This turns the AI into a partner in its own optimization, creating a self-improving system.

Build a feedback loop where an AI system captures performance data for the content it creates. It then analyzes what worked and automatically updates its own skills and models to improve future output, creating a system that learns.