Your Best Prompts Are Hiding in Your Chats

Every productive AI session is a potential skill or reusable instruction. You just gotta save it.

I’m trying this new short-and-snappy post format with a problem + solution angle. Let me know what you think of it in the poll at the end.

TL;DR

If AI gave you a great result after a long chat, you can instantly turn that into a clean and reusable skill (or prompt) by just asking for it.

The friction

“Prompt engineering” and other hacky prompt techniques are largely a thing of the past, but people still chase elaborate off-the-shelf prompts written by others.

You may think you don’t know how to write good AI instructions.

The thing is, you almost certainly already have.

I bet your chat history is full of conversations where AI eventually did what you needed…even if you had to yell at it a few times:

No. I am not proud of myself.

But did you know that every time you corrected the chatbot, gave it new input, or asked for a different approach, you were also writing your instructions in the process?

All that’s left is for you to turn those long chats into something you can reuse.

The fix

Whenever you end a successful AI session, tell your AI chatbot or agent this:

"Turn this conversation into a [skill / customizable instruction] that I can apply to similar tasks."

• Use “skill” for agentic tools like Claude Code or ChatGPT Work (formerly “Codex”)

• Use “customizable instruction”¹ for simple chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.

The agent will simply build the reusable skill for you.

The chatbot will hand you an instruction with customizable [placeholders] that you can save for later. (You can also use it to create a custom GPT or something similar).

My chat about Intelino tracks in Denmark turned into a reusable instruction.

Do this now

1. Open your go-to AI chatbot or agent

2. Find a conversation that gave you the result you wanted

3. Paste in the above line

4. Profit

The best candidates are conversations about tasks that:

• You have worked on at least 3 times

• You expect to keep doing

• Are complex enough to call for detailed instructions

Go try it and let me know how it works for you!

Know someone who’d like this? Share it!

Share your thoughts

I’d love to know your take on this kind of shorter “Quick Fix” post.

1. Or “prompt” if you really, really insist.