Before You Download Anyone's AI Templates

I think most AI template packs are a waste of the download. A template pack is a bundle of ready-made prompts, the instructions you type into AI. The only packs worth having were made by someone who did your job with them first, and who kept using them after the post went up.

"100 prompts that will change how you work. Free. Link in bio." You've seen posts like that, and you may even have a folder of them.

Maybe you opened a pack once. The prompts were fine, but none of them fitted what you were doing, so you wrote your own, badly, and yours worked better.

That wasn't luck.

Tayla Burrell, who writes Dangerously Educated, puts it best. She builds her own Skills for her own work. A Skill is a saved set of instructions that AI follows each time you do a certain job. She says an off-the-shelf template is fast food. Fast food fills you up, but it's the same for everyone, and it was made by someone who's never seen your kitchen.

A Skill built from your own work is a meal kit. The recipe exists, but there's a step where you decide what goes in.

Her method starts with no template at all. You do the job with AI, by hand, a few times, and you notice what you keep having to tell the AI and what you keep fixing. Then you write all of that down.

A pack of a hundred skips the one step that matters. That step is the doing, and only you can do it.

One Skill from one real task

Allow about an hour, spread across a week, and pick something you do every week. For example, that could be the client update, the meeting summary or the reply to a quote. Once you've done the job with AI three times, this prompt turns your corrections into instructions.

Look at how I've asked you to do this job three times. List everything I had to tell you more than once. That means background, rules, preferences, and things you got wrong that I corrected. Then write a first draft of standing instructions, so the fourth time needs none of that. Write it in my words where you can. Mark anything you're guessing at.

1. Do the job in a chat, three separate times, from scratch. Don't try to be efficient, and notice where you have to step in.
2. Paste the three chats in and run the prompt above. Or run the prompt at the end of the third chat.
3. Edit the draft until it reads as yours. Cut what you don't recognise and add what the AI missed. Then add a line with a question the AI must always ask before it starts ("Who's this for and what's changed since last time?"). Add a second line with the thing it must never do ("Never send. Never invent a figure.").
4. Save the instructions, and use them for a month before you share them. In Claude, save them as a Skill or a Project. In ChatGPT, save them as a Project or as custom instructions. Both are places where AI keeps your instructions for next time. If you're still editing the output every time after a month, the Skill isn't finished, so go back to step 2 with what you've learned.

Never done the job with AI, and no idea where to begin? Let the AI interview you first. Try "Ask me ten questions about how I do [the job], one at a time, then draft the instructions."

Then do the four steps anyway, because the interview gets you a draft but the doing gets you a Skill.

"But I'm new, and a blank page is worse"

You're right. If you're starting out, "download, try, edit" is faster than "do it three times from nothing".

In that case, take the template and use it once, then run step 2 on your experience of using it. Within a month you'll have replaced most of the template, and what replaced it will be yours, with your own attempts behind every line.

And some templates aren't fast food. A template from someone who does your job, and still uses it, is a good starting point for step 3.

Does that mean you should never download one? No, but ask who made it, and whether they'd use it themselves tomorrow.

The first of your three times is the next weekly job on your list, so do that one with AI today.

Credit to Tayla Burrell. The ideas "fast food vs meal kit" and "build Skills from doing the work first" are hers, from Dangerously Educated. Read her for the full method.