How to Draft an Excellent AI Skill or Prompt

The best prompts are not written — they are distilled. This is the process for building a world-class system prompt or AI skill from first principles.

The Method: Expert Distillation

Step 1 — Identify the Top Experts

Ask: “Who are the top 10–20 people in history who are considered the best at [the skill this AI needs to perform]?”

Cast wide. Include:

• Historical masters (deceased counts)
• Living practitioners at the apex of the field
• Adjacent thinkers whose frameworks transferred into the domain
• People known for taste and judgment, not just output

The goal is to build a reference canon — not a list of names to drop, but a set of minds whose accumulated judgment will inform the system’s defaults.

Step 2 — Extract Their Best Thinking

For each expert on the list, ask: “What are the most important quotes, rules, views, and thoughts this person ever expressed about the craft?”

Capture:

• Their strongest one-liners and principles
• The distinctions they made that others missed
• The things they warned against
• The standards they held themselves and others to
• Their mental models and heuristics

Do this for every name on the list. Let the outputs accumulate without editing yet.

Step 3 — Extract Principles, Methodologies, and Frameworks

Ask: “What key principles, methodologies, or frameworks did these people develop or live by?”

Look for:

• Recurring themes across multiple experts (signal)
• Sharp disagreements between them (tension = important tradeoff)
• Frameworks that survived decades or cross-domain application
• Process steps that the best practitioners share regardless of style

This is where the raw quotes become structured knowledge.

Step 4 — Distill Into a Peer Briefing

The final step is compression. Ask:

“If one of these experts had to brief a peer — someone already skilled, walking into the room — in the most token-efficient format possible, what would they say? No padding. No explanation of basics. Just the rules that matter.”

This output is your prompt.

The briefing format forces:

• Elimination of anything obvious or derivable
• Maximum signal density
• Confident defaults (not hedged suggestions)
• The voice of mastery, not instruction

Why It Works

Most prompts tell the AI what to do. This method tells the AI how to think — by loading it with the accumulated judgment of the best people who ever thought about that problem.

The result is a system that:

• Has taste, not just rules
• Has defaults that reflect excellence, not mediocrity
• Knows what to avoid without being told in the moment
• Can make judgment calls the way a skilled practitioner would

Reference Example

The First Team Logo Designer prompt was built exactly this way:

1. Asked for the top logo and brand identity designers in history (Rand, Bass, Vignelli, Chermayeff, Geismar, Haviv, Fletcher, Aicher, Lubalin, Wyman, Müller-Brockmann, Crouwel, and others)
2. Extracted their strongest quotes, standards, and distinctions about what makes a great logo
3. Extracted their process logic, reduction principles, and system-building frameworks
4. Compressed it all into a peer-level briefing — what a master designer would say to another designer walking in the door

The final prompt doesn’t explain what a logo is. It tells the AI to think like Paul Rand, move like Sagi Haviv, and build systems like Vignelli — and it benchmarks every output against that panel.

That is the bar.

The Compact Rule Set for This Method

• Experts first, content second
• Extract quotes before principles — quotes preserve tone
• Principles before process — frameworks outlast steps
• Compress last — distillation is the final move, not the first
• Write for a peer, not a beginner — the AI already knows the basics
• Defaults over instructions — encode what to do by default, not just what to avoid
• One strong voice — the final prompt should sound like a single expert, not a committee
• Benchmark explicitly — name the standard the output will be held to