# How to Draft an Excellent AI Skill or Prompt Published: 2026-05-08 Updated: 2026-05-08 Source: https://docs.oppy.pro/n/how-to-draft-an-excellent-ai-skill-or-prompt Account: Oppy Inc --- # 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