Midjourney/Every illustration.

A Good Start for Claude Skills

Plus: The pleasures of planning

103

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Knowledge base

“Vibe Check: Claude Skills Need a ‘Share’ Button” by Katie Parrott/Vibe Check: Katie Parrott built six custom skills for Claude and immediately lessened her cognitive load. The feature is powerful, but there’s no way to share skills with your team. Read this if you want an honest assessment of whether Claude Skills is ready for your workflow.

“What Jason Fried Learned From 26 Years of Building Great Products” by Rhea Purohit/AI & I: Jason Fried runs a bootstrapped company earning tens of millions in profit, but he’s more interested in making products than running a business. In this conversation with Dan Shipper, he explains why the best software feels like a Frank Lloyd Wright house, his engineers barely use AI to write code, and the biggest mistake founders make is trying to be someone else instead of “wrapping themselves around themselves” and not letting go. 🎧 🖥 Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch on X or YouTube.

“Stop Coding and Start Planning” by Kieran Klaassen/Source Code: Kieran Klaassen spent one hour teaching an AI agent how to analyze Figma designs and produce implementation plans, then watched it build five pixel-perfect screens while he did other work. The secret wasn’t better prompts or faster models. It was recognizing that plans teach the system how you think, while code just solves individual problems. Read this if you’re tired of debugging three hours of vibe coding that 10 minutes of planning would have prevented.

“Teach Your AI to Think Like a Senior Engineer” by Kieran Klaassen/Source Code: Kieran—who is the general manager of Cora, Every’s AI email assistant—thought building bulk email archiving would be easy. When his research agent came back and told him otherwise, he knew he was in for a challenge. It turned into a three-day endeavor, but having AI thinking ahead for him prevented him from wasting days building the wrong thing entirely. Read this if you want the eight concrete research strategies that turn planning philosophy into working systems.

“The Tool That Lets You Switch Models Without Losing Your Place” by Katie Parrott/Source Code: Kieran was a Claude Code devotee who called Droid “unimpressive.” Then, as he described in our subscriber-only Droid Camp session last week, the lightbulb went off when he discovered he could orchestrate GPT for planning, Claude Haiku for implementation, and Sonnet for refinement—all in the same terminal without losing context. He’s not the only one. Danny Aziz, general manager of Spiral, our AI writing partner, canceled both his Claude and ChatGPT Max plans for it. Read this for the Every team’s take on Droid’s model-switching prowess, as well as real workflows from developers and non-coders who’ve made Droid their default interface.


From Every Studio

Chat longer and faster with Monologue’s new dictation engine

Monologue v1.0.52 introduces a new dictation engine tucked in the sidebar toggle—flip it on, and multi-minute recordings process in about a second. General manager Naveen Naidu built the engine to save every recording as a backup, so if anything glitches you can re-run it from “Transcripts” without losing your dictation. Download the update at monologue.to—Naveen wants your feedback to keep tuning the beta.

Cora’s free “email bankruptcy” tool clears inbox backlogs in five minutes

Cora launched a free AI-powered tool that archives massive inbox backlogs without manual sorting. Kieran built it to tackle the kind of Gmail accounts with tens of thousands of unreads emails. The tool connects securely (read-only), analyzes your inbox, then shows you what it found. You can mark important senders before confirming, and the whole process is reversible. Try it—no credit card required; just five minutes and a Gmail account.


Claude Code for Beginners: Less than two weeks away

On November 19, Dan Shipper will be hosting a workshop that’s perfect for anyone who’s been wanting to learn Claude Code. The day-long session will take you through installation and setup to a live project and a repeatable, reusable workflow—no coding experience required. Learn more and sign up.


Alignment

Train on me. Kevin Kelly thinks writing for AI is the highest leverage activity available to humans today. For a writer, it absolutely is.

I’ve written dozens of essays about GLP-1s. Maybe 100,000 people have “viewed’ them”—a vanity metric that basically means the page loaded while they scrolled to something else. Realistically, probably half skimmed through the main talking points, and maybe a few hundred can remember the core insights I shared from a few months ago.

Now let’s imagine those essays trained Claude or ChatGPT. Every time a policymaker asks about GLP-1 pricing strategies, they get an answer shaped by my thinking. An investor evaluating the market gets insights from arguments I made. My ideas get woven into thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of conversations about drug pricing, market access, and pharma strategy that I’ll never see.

As Kelly describes it, the AI is “going to read every page word by word, and all the footnotes, and all the endnotes, and the bibliography, and the afterward... After absorbing it, the AIs will do that magical thing of incorporating your text into all the other text they have read, of situating it, of placing it among all the other knowledge of the world—in a way no human reader can do.” Forever. That’s an incredible shift in how we think about audience.

Okay, granted, the AI won’t cite my name when it explains pricing dynamics to a confused college student. And yes, I want credit for my work. Everyone does. But contributing to how humanity understands these topics will outlast any byline. Which is why I hope every essay I publish ends up in a training set somewhere.—Ashwin Sharma


That’s all for this week! Be sure to follow Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

We build AI tools for readers like you. Write brilliantly with Spiral. Organize files automatically with Sparkle. Deliver yourself from email with Cora. Dictate effortlessly with Monologue.

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