Skills, Skills and More Skills!

What Are Skills?

Skills are like recipes for your AI. You do something once – get directions, transform an image, draft an email in a certain style – and if it works, you save it. The next time, you just say the keyword and it does the whole thing automatically. It knows your starting point, your preferred map app, your style preferences, everything.

The key difference is this lives in YOUR box. Not at a third-party SaaS, not at OpenAI, not at Anthropic. It’s on your WordPress site, connected to your CRM, accessible from your phone and desktop. Everything you do is saved automatically.

Demo: Directions Skill

I showed my friend Sam at lunch today. I said “give me directions to the nearest Costco” and it instantly knew my starting point, knew I prefer Apple Maps over Google Maps, and gave me clickable links. Sounds mundane? Sure. But this is going with me everywhere – it’s in my hand, it saves and shares, it’s connected to my CRM, it’s on my desktop.

I could send those directions to Ann Stevenson or anyone else via text right from the same interface. That’s handy because the contact is right there in my phone, always the same whether I’m on mobile or desktop.

Demo: Image Transformation Skills

Here’s where it gets fun. I took a picture of a living room from my media library, used it as a reference, and told the AI to transform it into a rustic log cabin with dark wood plank floors, umber colored wall tones, and log cabin style windows. It worked. So I saved it as a skill called “log cabin.”

Now I can grab any room image – searched the web for a kid’s room, saved it to my media library – and just say “log cabin” and it transforms it. The recipe is simple: reference source + tool + skill = repeatable outcome.

I did the same thing with people. Took a guy in a suit and created a skill to change his clothing to a Hawaiian shirt and put him on a beach in Hawaii. The face identity lock is the tricky part – there are prompt techniques to keep the reference face exactly the same while changing everything else. Once you nail that prompt, save it as a skill and reuse it forever.

Real-World: Hockey Tickets and Emailing a Friend

I wanted to find tickets to the Blackhawks vs. Canucks game in March. Asked my AI, it found the game, found the Ticketmaster link for banner seats. Then I said: “Write an email to my pal Harry Maisel. Say hey Harry, that game against the Canucks is on March sixth. Here’s the link to buy tickets. Sign it from Fernando, Spence’s AI assistant.”

He wrote it out – “Yo Harry, what’s up my good man” – signed it from Fernando. I can send it through the CRM, through email, or via text. It keeps a record of everything. And the whole time, I’m adding contacts by voice: “Add Harry Maisel, harry at maisel.com, 312-555-1212, tag him as awesome friend, add to the main list.” Done.

ML Claw: Building a Plugin in 15 Seconds

While showing all of this, I popped over to ML Claw and gave it a task: “Build a single file WordPress plugin that says Hey everybody, it’s Fernando, and scrolls across the screen. Then launch it.” I hit “run immediately” and while I was still talking, it wrote the plugin, activated it, and had the Fernando Scrolling Banner running on the site. Marked it complete, moved on. That’s the asynchronous task manager working alongside the skills system.