stop prompting. start hiring.


Hey Reader,

If you're still collecting prompts, you're living in 2024.

Most people do this when they get serious about AI: They realize that in order to save time, they should be saving their best prompts somewhere.

In a word document, in Notion, in a folder, etc.

And the idea is not bad, but there's a better way in 2026.

You don't hire someone by retyping or pasting their job description into every conversation. You hire them once, train them, and from then on they just know and improve from your feedback.

This is the mindset you need if you want to successfully delegate knowledge work to your AI chatbots, assistants and agents.

2025 and '26 brought something brand new that replaces this whole system: Agent Skills.

It's built on the same idea, but instead of prompts, you make Skills and save them.

And you only have to build a Claude Skill once. You bake in the role, the voice, the context, the rules, the examples. Now it's not a prompt anymore. It's more of an employee.

It lives in Claude Chat, Cowork or Claude Code. You call on it when you need it (and sometimes, Claude calls it for you).

Skills are also more than just a prompt. You can define not just the Skill (a.k.a how to do something), but you can give reference files, scripts and even define subagents that the main Skill user AI can delegate a task to.

And the best thing is that it keeps improving as you use it: so during a conversation, you can ask Claude why it did something a certain way, and how to behave differently and ask it to modify the skill, and it will do it.

If you haven't used Claude Skills at this depth and you haven't touched Cowork yet, don't worry. I'll teach you everything you need to know, give you my Skills to get started, and show you how you can customize them to yourself.

That's what the Guild is for. I've already built the templates. You install, customize for your business, and go. Join us here, doors close this Monday.

Want an example?

Here's my Paladin Slides example Skill.

This is my presentation designer AI employee that made the entire Claude Cowork course's presentation in 10 minutes, I made the final touches and we were recording 3 hours after I had the idea.

What's inside:

paladin-slides/
├── SKILL.md (design rules, quick reference, composition)
├── references/ ← Design documentation
│ ├── design-tokens.md ← Exact hex values, fonts, sizes, spacing
│ ├── slide-layouts.md ← layout types and when to use each
│ ├── template-map.md ← which layout types are which slides
│ ├── paladin-template.pptx ← .pptx template w/ master slides
│ └── paladin-style-reference.pptx ← Visual reference deck
├── assets/ ← Files used in slide output
│ ├── paladin-template.pptx ← Template copy for the build scripts
│ └── background.jpeg ← Default atmospheric background image
└── scripts/ ← Python scripts (for building stuff)
├── append_style_ref.py ← Appends style reference slides to a deck
└── restyle_masterclass.py ← Restyles old deck to match new brand

(this specific skill doesn't have subagents because it doesn't need one. But I might improve it later if I want to have a persona to focus on the storytelling, a persona to create practice exercises, and a persona to add images or whatnot)

Would you like to get access to more of my Skills, including the modified skill creator that lets you create complex skills with a single prompt? (it's going to test the skill and optimize it for you as well).

Join the Paladin Guild and you'll have access to all of them.

In fact, Barb just joined yesterday, and she told me she wanted what Paul had (in my previous email). I sent it to her with a few instructions on how to customize it for her use case, and this is what she wrote:

You should also join us, we have over 30 entrepreneurs in the Paladin Guild who are not AI automation experts or AI agency owners but regular entrepreneurs who have a business (designers, consultants, eCommerce managers, real estate agents, etc.).

Join here while it's open for May:

Count down to 2026-05-11T20:00:00.000Z

Dave Talas

P.S: If you're not ready yet, I have a bunch of free tutorials on my YouTube channel, I think you'd find this one about Skills very useful.

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