Page ID: Page 219365267025 If You're A Marketer, Copy These Codex Skills (Or Stay Behind)
If You're A Marketer, Copy These Codex Skills (Or Stay Behind)
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Ep. 435
Are you just asking AI questions, or are you actually building repeatable skills?
Kipp and guest Riley Brown (content creator and AI educator) dive into how to level up your content game and marketing efficiency by strategically creating and collaborating with AI agents. Learn more on why documenting your weekly workflows is a game changer, how to turn AI experiments into scalable skills, and what the frontier of agent-powered team collaboration looks like in platforms like Codex and Slack.
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Riley Brown https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMcoud_ZW7cfxeIugBflSBw
Loop: Outlearn. Outmarket. Outgrow. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1637636105?ref_=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cp_ud_dp_VPTVJUW097F1PLSGOQTH&bestFormat=true
Claude https://claude.ai/
Anthropic https://www.anthropic.com/
SupaData https://supadata.ai/
Notion https://www.notion.com/
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welcome to today's show this is a wild one we're sitting down with riley brown who was one of my favorite ai thought leaders and experts and he's taking us behind the scenes how he builds agents skills how he works with them across his company how even went through his entire six year imessage backlog and who's brought to tears this is a really powerful really interesting show let's get right into it on show we are here with riley brown who is content creator ai educator somebody i followed very closely on x dot com and the internet for a lot of ai insights and advice and riley you're one of the people i've have been really excited to have on the show because i just think that you have very clever ways that you build and use ai and i just wanted to bring that to our audience because i find it most interesting thing about ai is to learn how other people are using it and like actually better understand what's possible so i'm super excited to have you on the show today and maybe just start with how the heck are you using ai every everyday because you are using it to the ninety nine for percentile i think compared to most people or at least most non tactical folks that i talked to first of all thanks for having me on the show i'm really excited i guess the way i use ai is very dynamic i'm constantly asking ai to do something like that and then i'm having the ai take whatever i do that's useful and i turn it into a skill that i can repeatedly use and i think that is step one and in fact i'll just show my screen real please basically taking everybody on a tour inside your codecs and how things are actually getting built let's go ahead and when you open up codecs right and actually let's talk about what is codecs codecs is open version of claude code or their cloud desktop app and all of these frontier labs or the the big companies like ant ent x ai open they're try to create these apps called super apps and this is what i've been talking about for a while this is a place where you can interact with ai agents or you can use ai agents and the number one thing that i think you need to understand is like the this agent can basically do anything on your computer and so for me i have a ton of these skills and so i've created all of these different skills which are just repeatable workflows that i can just use at any given time my favorite skill that i use and then i'm constantly using as a youtuber is this youtube researcher skill and this youtube researcher skill uses an api it's called super data to really quickly pull youtube transcripts and it can also search youtube like i could have it go check all of your episodes rank them by popularity and then it will only analyze the top ten videos and so i could say analyze my last ten videos and give me advice and this is a very simple prompt that i can use at any given time this whole youtube researcher skill it is an instructions file that it can use at any time and i think if you're a marketer anytime you use ai for something useful and whether you're retrieving data or whether you're creating a certain type of asset you can just ask claude code or codecs in this case to turn it into a skill so that you can use it over and over again so i think that's kind of a good step one your put is basically hey if you take the time to build a skill then the prompt is actually pretty basic and you could leverage that skill which has a lot more context than you would put in a one off prompt i think this is to be one of the things people actually struggle with when it comes to ai rarely is that it's not using ai it's understanding how they work i think a lot of people the step they're missing is like oh i have youtube channel i need to analyze it on a regular basis because of that i need a repeatable way to get all the data i need to analyze and to set instructions for how i want that data analysis to actually go and so i think one of the most important things people need to do is actually document what are the things they do in an average week every week because they need a foundation of these skills that's really get a transform how they use doesn't be codecs c in ai model right yes hundred percent and to kind of dig a little bit deeper in that one thing you need to understand here is like notice here is it's kind of like taking a while and yes this is kind of the future of using agents is multitasking and this is one thing because the longer agents take the more it's going to feel like del to a coworker this is a short task i've often found times where i'm working on four different chat sessions with agents at the same time each one is taking around ten minutes so really productive people are kind of forced to parallel a little bit and and do different tasks at the same time that's the first thing i wanna say that's a win for all of us that are kinda a a d out in the world it's it's a little hard though if you're somebody who just likes to go deep on one thing for a long period of time it i do think there is some working stylist things that are different in this new ai world hundred percent thanks for watching today's show if you want the best ai resources we've got for you this week you wanna scan that qr code or click the link in the description below and we've got an awesome set of stuff for you one thing i will add let's say you're a marketer and you were saying like what do you do on a day to day basis and usually that's actually too high level what i've been doing is i've just been taking every granular task that i do and really trying to write it down this so i create a youtube video right and this youtube video should be good right and whenever and what i mean by good is well researched and with like a proven format and so one thing that youtube researcher skill does really well is it can go search similar channels to me and then what it'll do is it'll find other people's formats right in a format it's just kind of like their hook and kind of they're set up to the rest of the video and that's what i call a format and it'll look for formats and it can basically port that format over to an outline so if this is the result step one is like coming up with an idea mh and i have a skill in codecs called brainstorm ideas the next step is like creating what i call a hook outline my videos aren't fully scripted but the intro is highly scripted i've learned this the hard way man hook the hook scripts are everything everything and so i have a skill it's called hook outline right this is one of the steps that i do and i will say like fable just came out i need a hook outline for a fable news video please look at my previous agent native episode and use a similar format i need a hook outline oh and then this is kind of the next phase after skills is like put this in notion long form in progress and so codecs can fully control notion and the coolest part about codecs and this is what separates it from cloud c it'll create a notion dock and it'll give me a link for it and i can open it directly inside codecs it has a full in app browser which i think is the future of using agents it's just like you put a browser inside your agent platform you don't i love that use some external browser it it is such a better experience so that's kind of my one thing that i recommend learning is learning the app browser inside codecs and i think cloud desktop is gonna add the same thing and it's gonna be huge i think what most people do is they work in regular chat gp or claude and they just ask questions and don't build anything repeatable and they don't integrate it with any other steps in their workflow and the biggest thing that you're showing is like hey i have to make these videos all the time and because i have to make these videos all the time i need a set of repeatable skills and what i love is you just showed the very basic thought process of like here are the steps i need to follow like i need a hook outline and if i always know i need a hook outline then i need a scale that's gonna go and do that hook outline right yes understand this is what most people i think don't do they don't document the kinda core first principal basic foundations of their work and then say alright i need to actually invest in building the skills and infrastructure to do these things i have to do all the time and do them really really well and one of the reasons why i think people are kind of struggling with using ai and marketing is they're just not good at some specific skill in marketing and that's one thing that's incredibly important is you have to get good like everything is a refinement right when it creates a hook outline i'm editing that hook outline relentlessly because i know i have a specific skill set which is making videos i think i'm pretty good at making videos and so i'm able to refine it and so every step i'm able to make it better than the ai would just create naturally and with marketing it's everything is very subjective and so the first thing that you need to do is just like do the if you're brand new to some form of marketing or content maybe you're starting a podcast like really try and figure out what makes a good podcast once you solve that then you're able to turn it into repeatable thing the unfortunate fact around ai marketing right now you know there's a lot of companies releasing products or agent products with i looked every single a lot of them yes basically what these companies are doing is they connect an ai agent to all of your existing tools and i'm not kidding they literally do random things and they do them in such a way that like it's like a slot machine where it looks like stuff is happening but nothing good is happening and you'll notice that all these companies who automate all of their social media if you look at their company's social media you'll see that they get no views they're just like am and so what you need to do is get really good use ai to turn it into a process while maintaining how good it is it's very important not to lose quality because i would never trade quality for quantity right now in marketing i think the reason you found my content probably is because i put a lot of effort into my videos and i'm very passionate about what i talk about and you can't sacrifice quality for quantity but if you can start creating more stuff at the same level of quality and you just get ai to do all the boring stuff that's just like golden for marketing in my opinion i think this is a critical critical point here and i we wrote a book called loop that's coming out on september twenty second and this is one of the things we talk about is that to win in today's world you need quality and quantity actually you need to be prolific you gotta have to be like t swift where you're like oh she's making great music and she's making like every six to twelve months right versus like every four or five years and what i think really resonate with me about what you said and that i would kinda frame is like if you are just going to outsource your taste to an ai model it's gonna be sloppy and spam me and nobody's gonna care you're you use ai to scale instead of outsource your taste and sen ability then you're gonna be able to create more really great things and i think you're like a prime example of that it's like you've built systems to basically get more of your ideas out in the world in a better polished state yes i i hundred hundred percent gray and i call this the human center of mass take tb vpn for example tb vpn created i think one of the best niche shows ever created on the in this kind of internet first world and what they did is they created this show that's incredibly high quality right and that's is what i call the human center of mass they don't use ai for anything really like they just created this show they have this team they have a multi camera setups they interview really high quality guests all the time for like three hours a day five days a week right so that's their human center of mass now they have the power to use ai infinitely to create clips to create newsletters content rounding this like very human thing that is live so people will pay attention right because the clips and the automation around the content that's easy but if you don't have that thing that's valuable at the center that you're just gonna be amplifying nothing and an amplifiers like something times something if the first number is zero the no matter what you multiply by instead gonna be zero that's kinda how i think about it and this is why i'm we're gonna build a massive set here in new york city and i'm gonna be creating as much content as possible i'm just gonna be constantly learning and i'll be doing a lot more live streaming because no once i do that if i create something valuable we can just create systems that post clips all over the internet the internet rewards that if you have that thing that's valuable at the center when a buyer ai for a solution like yours do you know if you're showing up or not and hubspot we've got a great product that actually helps you get discovered in ai search hubspot au helps you show up in these moments with the right answers buyers are looking for before the first click before the first fill that's the moment hubspot au is built for go check out hubspot au you can trial it for free and it's gonna help you understand how you're showing up an ai search and how you can show up even more so remember earlier i asked for a hook outline and you have two options right i can click this and it will open up the notion doc directly or if you right click and hit open in browser check this out codex will open notion so this is my notion doc oh that's cool and look it's just like and prop just brought fable five back online and this is not a normal model release right this is actually how i would probably do something like this with an intro i'm very nit picky but it at least it like gives me that initial thing where i can just kind of modify it and i don't like long scripts i want a single like a one pager like if i had a one page document to do an episode that's perfect i don't want any more than that and so this is kinda exactly how i do it it does a bunch of research codecs can do research one thing you can ask codecs say like hey i i want more hyperlinks in the outline just because i want to be able to talk about the primary sources where you got this information so can you please add those hyperlinks in the outline also use many sub agents to do research on different parts of this and then just update the notion docs and so that's kind of one thing that i would do is because when i make a video i like to pull up the primary sources and i noticed here that they don't have a ton of primary sources and so you can just ask ai to change it and on top of this you know i'm actually noticing here that there's not a lot of hyperlinks i can just say by the way when you're done with that please update the skills such that whenever you're researching something that requires the internet you should always include the hyperlinks inside the outline i want to see all hyperlinks that you use you should never write at a bullet point that references some research you did and not cite it so please add that to the and just to show here we can add it to the hook outline skill and that's just kind of a dynamic way that you can use skills that i think to me and and if i'm the average person watching this and i'm not doing any of this yet you now need to work with ai and yourself like you used to work with other people right where you used to send an email and say like hey i just had this idea or i just failed this thing that's really important for this project can you go and add it to this project or i found this data point that's really relevant to this thing we're doing it's not just about sharing up another humans it's about sharing it with your agents with your skills so that they have the context and understanding necessary and that you're actually getting like the again i think one of the core themes of the shows the repeatable benefit of actually building the skills and foundations yes and i think a lot of people over complicate skill creation i've seen so many videos online this is how you create skills there's a template to create skills when first of all every single goal platform is different you know the way you create skills in the cloud app is different than the codecs app so the best way to create skills get the agent to do something then correct the agent get it to do something better and then tell it to say hey i really like that please turn it into a skill so i can reuse it and then you can give it a name for the skill and it will just create it and my intuition is that the way skills are created will change over time they it may be completely different than these like markdown file system we have now it may start looking like a skilled tree and so i don't think it's worth it going deep into like how to construct a proper skill because if you just ask the agent you're talking to they can create the skill for you and so that's one thing i'll add i have found it's not about creating the perfect skill it's about having the agent create a skill and then having some basic evaluation step of like yeah hey this is the kind of output i want for this skill let's let me test it and do i actually get the output that i want and if i do them skills good and if i don't i need to be specific about what the gaps are and give the assistant and the model that feedback and it will fix the skill for me and then this google will be good yes i think that is the the correct way to do it hundred percent okay so what i think is interesting is you're going between skills and the applications and really showing us how you actually build an ai native workflow and work very differently in this case for for both content which is something near and dear to my heart so let's say we've done all of this this is also kind of unique and stuck in your codecs on your machine how do you collaborate with other folks that are building your content with you yes okay so this is a hundred percent the next way that we're going to act with ai agents claude released something recently it's called claude tag cloud tag is a way to basically take kind of the the the fun parts of cloud code and turn it into this super agent that you can use in a team and i think it's really interesting however i'm not sold on being vendor locked for this type of thing and what i mean by that for those who don't know what vendor locked means it's it's just basically saying open ai and philanthropic will try and get you to use their agent platform so that you don't use any of the other models because on cloud tag you can't use gl five point two which is an open model that was created by a chinese company it it's like actually a really good model and it's a lot cheaper than using their models and so you want to be always trying to optimize and for most marketing tasks as we talked about earlier won't require frontier models and so i like to set up agents in a way that i can use any model and these are agents that are becoming more and more proactive and they operate in slack anyone can talk to him at any time and no one's figured out this workflow yet i've talked to fifty people about this hundred actually oh a hundred people on how they're setting up with their team people have figured it out for coding no one's figured it out for anything else really like operations or marketing especially because it's so subjective and so we're in the early innings of this so that part's really fun most people are just like i don't know what to do with agents and if i do i just kinda do my own little codecs or cloud code and i think extending them beyond your desktop is a really important thing and slack is one way to that right it's not the all be so be all but it's one way this is actually something that we've been really passionate about and so our company in new york we've been doing a lot of consulting recently just because i have a big audience and people are coming to me and they're like hey riley like how do we set up agents in slack and you know two months ago we just started setting it up for people i have a really talented team and we just kind of like product ties it this is actually the first time i'm talking about this publicly that we're kind of gonna launch this product in a little bit and we've been trying to figure out how do we add agents to slack and this is a paul graham agent that i created i think i created this last night and paul graham agent is an agent running on a cloud computer and this cloud computer never dies so this agent can work twenty four seven and it has a specific set of skills and it has a list of connections which are kind of like plug in so it can be connected to like the company's data and the same way that when you use codecs it is just an agent running on your computer which works for individual use cases and it also works only when your computer is on correct these are the two things that drive me nuts it's like i feel like i'm mobile by myself and feel like what i can congrats to be on all the time and so but there is some benefits to having it on your own computer because it can read the documents on your computer it can very easily control imessage oh by the way it added all those hyperlinks which is really cool fun fact but one of the coolest use cases of an ai agent is i had to analyzed six years of my imessage data and just analyze it and i was pushed to tears multiple times because like it was telling me about friends that i've drifted away from since college it told me that i need to reach out to my family do i'm not kidding it was one of the most like i was like oh my god i called like i spent the next three hours after that calling old friends because i hadn't talked to them and you know in life's part like you you drift out like people you were really close to way back in the day like i haven't get six years of imessage data exported it's just reading them on your mac you have to set up a bunch of permissions like yeah codex is like i could do it but like be really want me to have to go it's like do you really want me to have to you have to enable these three things manually and it can be catastrophic blah i'm like yes just do it and yeah it just codex it did it took like forty minutes analyzed all of them they categorized it so i to create a little dashboard of all like the different interactions it was just a crazy experience i actually did film it i just couldn't release it because it was so personal to me like i there was just too many i would have had to create code names for all the people and like i you know i wanna do that to my friend so they was just like a truly fun like personal experience anyway also with codecs it has something called computer use it is the best consumer available technology that can control your computer computer use will basically control your computer as you and this is actually something you should understand as a marketer because a lot of marketing is using software like canvas maybe you're using photoshop or you're using tools on a computer ai agents and this is scary this is genuinely scary and i'm scared about this and i'm on the frontier of ai or at least totally close to is ai over the next twelve months will get better and faster at controlling a computer than most humans like almost all humans like it'll be able to control a computer i was talking to someone at a frontier your lab and they were saying they're like this is a fun time right when you use computer use you kind of watch the mouse move around it'll stop for a little bit move around and it's starting to get faster but he was saying within the next twelve months you won't even be able to follow it you can't even watch it work because it will be moving that fast if you have a fast enough computer and so ai will be able to be faster than you at controlling a computer which you better get really good at giving it instructions giving it an agent instructions will become more important beyond this codecs also released a tool called record and replay for this specific reason what recording replay does you could say hey can you please record my screen and then turn it into a skill i'm gonna call this skill can controller i don't know basically you can take a workflow that you do as a human on your computer you can ask codecs to record your screen and it will just start recording your screen watch it's gonna pull up a screen recording it takes a sec i've confirmed the recording workflow once capture starts i should stop and wait for you to tell me you're done so now for up to thirty minutes it will cut you off at thirty minutes i can just do a task i don't wanna show it now because that'll take a while but like once i hit stop this is what would happen i'm done recording it literally enters this in automatically and the agent will be like i've stopped the recorder i'll inspect what you did on the screen recording and turn into a skill called can recorder that is the future of skill creation is not even talking to your agent or getting it to do something and turning into a skill it's just recording yourself showing it yes and that goes back to your point where like as these tools can use your computer more reliably it makes sense you're just like hey this is how i use my computer on a regular basis why don't you know exactly what to do and then i could just tell you so i don't have to go and do it myself exactly and that's one of the reasons why i think like mac minis and hardware especially mac hardware is gonna continue to get more expensive if you need to buy a computer i know the price just recently increased i think they're gonna go up more this is not financial advice or this is not investing advice this is me saying like because ai agents can control computers the demand for having many of these computers will skyrocket it yeah you know if if companies can truly get an agent to control a computer and they need physical hardware to do certain tasks there's no limit to how much companies will spend they will drop fifty million dollars on computers if it is worthwhile to them if they see a positive roi so that's one thing back to slack because we just talking about physical computers and there are some benefits to getting ai agents to control your computer but most tasks i would say ninety five plus percent plus tasks can just be done in the cloud and they can be done through cli they can be done just through basic api calls because every action that you can do on notion can be done by an agent now and they've basically created notion so that it can be controlled by agents that's coming to everything right and so yeah i think you can create these cloud agents and so i can show you how call is is set up okay so this is not publicly launched we're gonna be launching in a couple weeks and we just wanna get some feedback and so this is kinda how we're setting up our product right basically you have this agent's dot m d file that the agent reads every single time it runs and you can actually manually edit this and you can very easily just add connections so you can create a connection here and so let's just look up notion so i'm gonna connect this to my notion this is my vibe code studio team now the agent has contacts over my notion it's that easy and then in the overview you can like at mention notion so you can say like whenever you create advice put it in a database inside notion then you can just create this document and this is kind of the source of truth and you'll see that there's like file references and so you don't wanna make your agents dot d file too long you can just add references to where they are show up on a computer this is a computer that's running in the cloud basically and it runs twenty four seven and you can also set up cro jobs right yep and again i never even manually go through this process i just tell the agent to create an automation and that's all cro job whenever you see the word cro jobs you think of automations and so that is basically how i think about it is like you have the connections and then you have platforms platforms is the coolest part you can add it to slack you can add it to imessage and you can even put the agent in group chats we actually got that working last week and it's way more fun than i thought it would be and so we're moving from a world of single player ai agents you know on codecs c to multiplayer now this is where companies are running into problems and i'm not speaking just from us and anyone trying to solve this multiplayer agent problems is are you trying to create a god or are you creating kind of mini employees right do you want a content writer agent or do you want an ai agent that runs everything on your company with like different skills that you can at mention you know that that can just do anything in the company and we don't know what the right answer is because it would be annoying if you have thirty agents and none of the agents have his shared memory so like the because you might wanna use one of the agents for something you're using with another agent like if you're were at a content researcher agent and then the content creator agent you would definitely want them to like be able to talk to each other or like get memory and so we're in this very early innings stage of creating agents that anyone in a company can use but the right way that it's set up is not clear yet and a lot of companies are working on it so it's pretty fun i think what you're showing us is the frontier of collaboration and work and how it's changing and some that's uncertain but some of it is certain and that there are really personal and unique things to each human which you're gonna wanna do on your local computer your imessage example is a great example of that right but then there's a lot of tasks that you need to do with others and you need to do in the tools and products that you work with those people in and the slack and this paul graham agent is a really good example of that so if i look back on the show as we kinda close things out riley it is we've shown you the importance of recording documenting and understand your work so you can build repeatable skills we've then showed you how you could even move that kind of agent experience into new platforms like slack and better integrate all of the products you're using as we close out here is there anything else rally that you think people need to know about building and codecs building modern agents for their day to day work yeah i think we covered it from an individual perspective right getting the agent to do something useful and then turning into repeatable workflow workflow task many of you listening maybe you already do that maybe you use skills kind of similar to the way that i was using it maybe you're more advanced than i am the next phase is trying to figure out how to do it with a team and that's why i think slack is winning is because like you know so many times like our our marketing team is now six people and i want them to be able to create a hook outline the same way as me but with codecs it's not that easy like and it you should also be able to collaborate on it when if trevor is asked to do some research on an episode we should be able to see that document in slack or somewhere where we can access that and kind of iterate on it together right that's the team collaboration side and so that's kind of the next phase step one is learning how to use agents on your own computer individual create skills and then you want to basically figure out a way to like turn that into a team and there's all bunch of problems that come with this because you have to figure out permissions which agents can people talk to what is your agent allowed to do as soon as you introduce an agent into like an external slack that you share it opens up risks of the other people trying to like talk to the agent get it to release sensitive information there's a ton of risks and so these are things that companies are trying to solve right now and the roi from creating good team agents where your team already talks is just gonna be so incredibly high you're basically adding intelligence to the place you already do work and so it it is going to be valuable and so that's kind of the next phase i hope i hope that answers your question a little bit it was and i think it's i think you're giving people tremendous perspective of the frontier of agent building and what is changing and how rapidly everything is changing and because you're doing that i wanna also make sure everybody go follow riley he is creating amazing content again he is one of my must follows i'm constantly consuming your stuff and i could not be more excited that you joined us on the show today riley thanks so much i appreciate it's yeah thank you for having me let me tell you about a show i love hosted by my friend ross simmons each episode a host an in analysis of some of the greatest creations and creators of all time with deep dive conversations on the creative process that went into building companies brands stories and more if you like learning about history learning about the creative process you'll love this podcast this podcast is perfect for anyone who wants to learn how to system ties their creativity but still be organized ross just did a fantastic episode about reddit and ai distribution in the playbook that everyone is missing listen wherever you get your podcast this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrate well i can see the clients hold history calls court tickets emails and here's a task from three days ago i totally missed hotspot spot girl better him four
