{
  "video_id": "jsy3m7Emkr0",
  "channel_slug": "techwithtim",
  "channel_handle": "Tech With Tim",
  "title": "How to Setup AI Agent Skills for Better Code | TRAE SOLO",
  "duration_seconds": 1237,
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsy3m7Emkr0",
  "upload_date": "20260414",
  "transcript": "Most people using AI coding tools\nare just prompting and pray\nthey type something in.\nHope the output is good and when it's not,\nthey start over entirely.\nBut there's a feature that almost\nno one's using properly.\nThe completely changes how AI agents write\ncode for you, and it's called skills.\nAnd once you set these up,\nyour agent actually learns\nhow you want things built and can do this\nrepeatedly.\nLet me show you exactly how they work\nand how to set them up in this video.\nSo let's dive into AI agent skills.\nNow, you may have heard of this skill\nbefore, but effectively what this is,\nit's just a repeatable workflow\nthat your AI agent can use.\nNow you can go to an AI agent.\nYou can give it a normal prompt.\nYou can tell it to browse the internet\nor generate a daily report.\nAnd you can give it a really detailed\nprompt that explains what you want.\nHowever, a lot of times\nyou want to do these actions repeatedly.\nYou want to do it every day,\nor maybe you're going to run\nit multiple times in a session.\nOr maybe you want to share this workflow\nwith one of your teammates.\nNow, if that's the case, that makes\na really good candidate for a skill,\nbecause what a skill is,\nis essentially a set of instructions,\nalong with other potential files\nor scripts that your agent has access to.\nThey can look up when needed\nand used to perform some type of task.\nSo rather than copying\nand pasting a prompt, you can create\nsomething called a skill\nthat just wraps this repeatable workflow.\nYour agent will have access to that skill,\nand when you ask it to do something\nthat may require the skill.\nIt can look up the skill,\nfind the details of the skill,\nread through it, reference other files,\nand then execute it repeatedly.\nThis is going to give you\na lot more consistency.\nAnd also this is significantly better\nthan just writing massive prompts\nor having all of these files just sitting\nin random places in your repo,\nbecause the way that skills work\nand a lot of different tools\nis that they're looked up dynamically,\nso your agent will know the name\nof a skill and a short description, but\nthat's all it will have in its context.\nSo it doesn't need to load 500\ndifferent skills, you know, fully at once,\nwhich is going to take up a lot of tokens.\nIt will simply say, okay, you're asking me\nto generate a daily report.\nOh, I see a skill that says daily report.\nOkay.\nLet me look that up and then check it.\nAnd then if that's the right skill,\nit will go ahead and execute it.\nAnd for this video I'm going to show you\nhow to build skills inside of a platform\nor coding tool called Trey Solo.\nIt's super cool.\nI've used the tray editor for a long time,\nand they recently released their new solo\nedition, which we're going to dive into.\nBut if I scroll through their docs here,\nyou can see that skills typically\nlive in a skill folder.\nYou have a skill.md file,\nwhich is the required part\nof a skill that explains what it does\nthe instructions effectively.\nThe reusable prompt\nthe AI agent is going to read,\nand then you can have\nvarious other resources\ninside of that skill that your AI agent\ncan reference, that you can reference\ndirectly from this file.\nSo here's an example of what a skill\nlooks like.\nAnd this is typically the same across\nall of your major AI coding platforms.\nSo you have the name,\nyou have a brief description.\nAnd this is all that's\nloaded into the context.\nWhen the AI agent is kind of viewing\nthese skills before executing it.\nThen you have the description\nof the skill, and only if the agent thinks\nit needs to use this\nskill will read all of that.\nAnd then again reference the other funds.\nNow making skills is really simple.\nI'm going to show you\nexactly how to do it,\nbut by having multiple skills\nin your project,\nyou're going to make yourself\nmore productive.\nYou're going to get more\nconsistent responses,\nor you're going to have lower\ncontext bloat,\nand you're going to have workflows\nthat you can share with your team\nthat will ultimately\njust make the organization better.\nWhen it comes to developing\nand using AI tools.\nSo with that said,\nI want to hop into Trey solo master shows.\nThen, by the way,\nfor sponsoring today's video,\nI'm going to show you how to set up\nvarious different skills\nand how to do a genetic coding with this\nnew skills pattern.\nAll right, so I'm inside of the new Trey\nSolo desktop application.\nNow, right now\nI'm just using a beta release, hence why\nyou don't see any projects or anything.\nHowever, if you'd like to get access\nto this now for free.\nTrey gave me a few unique invite codes,\nwhich I'll leave the description\nthat you can use.\nNow, you may remember that\na few months ago\nI actually made a video giving\na full tutorial on the original Trey\nCode editor, which is one of the best free\nI coding editors\nbecause a lot of them are very heavily\npaid.\nTrey has always had a really generous free\nplan and same thing with the solo app.\nYou can use it for free\nand I'm going to give you a quick\nlay of the land,\nand then I want to go directly\ninto building skills and focus\non something agnostic that you could use\nin any tool that you want.\nNow, if you do want to mess around\nin this editor,\nyou can download the desktop app.\nYou can also use it fully from the web.\nI'll leave a link to that below. Now,\nwhat you're going to notice right away\nis that let me zoom in a little bit.\nWe have these two modes.\nWe have this MTC mode which I'm\nin right now, which is more than coding,\nwhich gives you access to kind of\njust like a general AI agent\nthat can utilize skills that you build,\nsearch the web, do research, etc.\nand then you have a full code mode.\nAnd this is what I want to focus on\nin this video,\nbecause obviously a lot of you watching\nthis are developers,\nbut this is designed for building\nfull scale\napplications using natural language\nand to give you kind of an easier,\nyou know, learning\ncurve compared to a full blown coding IDE.\nThis is meant to really just be prompting\nand then building everything,\nseeing the preview in real time,\nall of that kind of stuff.\nSo what I'm going to do for now\nis just go to select a project,\nand I'm going to make\na new folder on my desktop,\nand I'm just going to call this web app,\nbecause I just want to build\na simple web app for this tutorial\nso I can show you the various skills.\nSo now that I've done that\nand I've allowed access to tray,\nwe can see that we're working\ndirectly inside of this project.\nAnd I'm going to just start\ngiving this some prompts\nto build out some various skills.\nAnd then we're going to build and craft\na full web application.\nSo you can see how this skills tie in.\nSo like I mentioned before,\nthe skill is a repeatable workflow\nor something\nthat this editor should know to use\nwhenever you want to perform\na particular task.\nI know that sounds kind of big,\nbut you can create\na whole bunch of different skills.\nAnd if you go to the skills tab here,\nyou'll see there's actually a bunch\nfrom the skills\nmarketplace\nthat you can install by default.\nFor example,\nUI design, brand guidelines, all of this.\nSo I'm going to start by actually\nbringing this front end skill in here.\nAnd if we just quickly have a look\nwe can see what this skill looks like.\nSo we can see it says go ship interfaces\nthe field deliberate premium and current\ndefault towards award level composition.\nOne big idea strong imagery okay working\nmodel before building you know right.\nThese three things\nvisual content interactions.\nAnd it goes through in detail and explains\nhow it should work on the front.\nSo let's install that\njust from the marketplace.\nThis is by open AI.\nAnd now we'll have that\nin our skills list.\nAnd we'll be able to toggle that on\nand use that directly from our web app.\nSo now if we go back here to our projects,\nlet's go to task\nand make sure we're in this project.\nYou can see that if we type slash here,\nyou'll notice that the skill pops up\nimmediately.\nSo slash front end skill.\nAnd we could utilize this skill by\njust giving it some context and saying,\nhey, build me a front end\nfor whatever it is that we want built.\nSo that's how\nwe just bring in a pre-built skill.\nVery straightforward.\nBut of course we can build our own now\nto build our own, we have a few options.\nWe could go to skills,\nwe can go to upload skill, and then we can\njust drag in a skill deemed file,\nor we can just go back to our task here,\nand then we can ask trade\nto make one for us.\nNow in terms of creating the skills,\nlike I said,\nyou can upload the local skills,\nyou can install them\nfrom the skill marketplace.\nOr we can actually just ask trade\nto generate it itself.\nSo what I'm going to do\nis I'm just going to copy a link\nto this documentation,\nI'm going to paste it in this new task,\nand I'm going to quickly ask it\nto generate a new skill in this project.\nHey, look at the documentation\nthat I just provided to you and create\na local, project based skill\nfor working with back end development\nand specifically creating a fast\nAPI, application.\nI want this skill to be used\nany time any backend work is done.\nAnd generally what I want it to say\nis that when we're working with fast API,\nwe need to separate all of our different\nAPI routes based on the category.\nSo for example, off has its own router.\nYou know, database has its own router,\nuser routes, whatever.\nRight.\nAnything based on this section or\nthe category of API needs to be separated.\nI also don't want you to write\nlong docstrings or comments.\nWe want to leave comments to a minimum.\nAlways keep them short and concise,\nand for docstrings make the maximum\none sentence and only when required.\nOkay, so I'm just giving some standard\ncoding conventions for working with fast\nAPI that I want to use.\nObviously, in a real app\nyou can make this more detailed\nand I'm going to hit enter.\nAnd what this should be able to do for us\nis now create a new skill\nin our local directory.\nAnd just quickly guys,\nbecause you always asked me this,\nthe way that I'm talking into my computer\nand getting it to transcribe\nreally quickly is using a tool called\nWhisper Flow.\nThey've been a long term partner of mine.\nI actually have a unique discount code\nin the description,\nin case you guys want to try it out,\nit is free to use.\nAnd then obviously you can upgrade to\nlike a paid plan,\nbut it's the best dictation\nand the only dictation that I use\nfor all of my AI coding, all of my\njust anything that requires\ntyping on the computer.\nAt this point, it's\nalso available on mobile,\nand it's really, really good and much\nbetter than the built in dictation,\nbecause it actually uses AI models in the\nbackground to transcribe it in real time.\nFirst of all, faster,\nbut also just a lot more accurate\nand with various\nlike bullet points and stuff.\nSo you'll see when I'm talking, sometimes\nit like automatically formats it.\nI just figured I'd check that out because\nyou guys always ask me how I'm using it.\nAnd yes, the tool is whisper flow.\nAll right.\nSo it's just created this skill for us.\nYou can see the directory that it created.\nWe have the skills MD file.\nAnd now we can open it up\nand we can directly read it.\nOr we can ask the AI to modify it.\nSo we can see that the name of\nthe skill is fast API back end.\nThe description is used\nany time back end work is done.\nAnd then this is exactly what it's\nwritten out, which is what we asked for.\nNow, what\nI would recommend with your skills\nis that, let me get out of this here,\nthat you iterate on them over time\nand you keep using the\nskill and improving it until eventually\nit's at a place where you want it to be.\nNow notice again when we open it up right\nthat it explains what it needs\nto do and gives examples.\nNow these examples can be directly\ninside of the skill,\nor we can put them in separate files\nthat are inside of this skill folder,\nand then have it reference those files\nso you can create, you\nknow, reusable scripts,\nwhich is where skills get very useful.\nOkay.\nSo now in order to use this skill,\nwhat we could do is just type slash right\nand then go slash fast\nAPI back end and tell it to do something.\nHowever we don't even need to do that.\nTrain will automatically\nlook up the skills\njust like many other tools will do,\nand use them\nwhen it infers that it needs to do that.\nSo if I say something like, hey,\nI want you to scaffold a Crud backend API\nfor a simple library\napplication in fast API.\nAnd then later\nwe're going to work on the front end.\nFor now, just build the back end, okay.\nIf I do that and then hit enter,\nit should know to now reference this skill\nbecause we've talked about fast API\nand it has that skill in its context.\nYou can see that it's launching the skill\nfast API back end loading it right.\nAnd it's only loading it when needed.\nAnd now if we look at the context\nwe can see\nthe skill.md file has been loaded. Right.\nAnd we can see the web\nsearch was loaded here previously.\nSo it says okay\nit's reading through the skill.\nIt's developing the back end.\nAnd now we'll start building this out\nfor us.\nNow while this is executing\nI'll just show you that\nif you're inside this editor\nyou can actually view the files.\nIf you just click on the session\nthat you're inside of here\nand go to file management.\nAnd also you can run\nmultiple tasks at the same time.\nSo this can run in the background.\nAnd then I can start making a new skill\nor asking it to update something.\nRight. And you can see that\nit's going to use the solo auto model.\nAnd we can select the project\nwe want to work inside.\nSo notice\nactually just gave me the pop up here\nthat this is now done\nor at least waiting for my approval.\nSo I'm going to go delete\nbecause we're going to delete this test\nAPI file that we don't need.\nAnd it's\ngoing to continue walking through this\nusing the skill building at the app.\nAnd again you can view it\nfrom directly inside of here.\nSo we can see the skill.\nWe can see our router.\nSo following that convention\nthat I mentioned Main.py requirements\nall of that kind of stuff.\nAnd then we can manually add files\nand obviously click into these,\nedit them you know mess with them etc..\nAnd we can even click this button and then\nview them inside of one of the editor.\nSo I guess it's still building this out.\nWe can see authors.\nAnd then if we wanted to actually start\nwriting the code\nfor this or modifying it manually,\nwe can open it in tray cursor, PyCharm,\nwhatever it is that you prefer,\nbecause this is designed to be used for\njust like natural language,\nnot writing the code in this editor.\nAll right. So this is pretty good.\nAnd it's actually mentioned to us\nthat it's running the back end\nand this end point.\nSo I'm just going to go to my browser.\nLet's just open up a new window\nand just type this in.\nAnd it says welcome to the library API.\nSo at least the API is running.\nAnd it has this background process\ngoing with that which is good.\nHowever what I want to do\nnow is add another skill so I can show you\nhow these compound that's going\nto automatically test the API for us,\nbecause I don't want to have to manually\ntest it every single time.\nI'm going to say, okay, this is good.\nNow following the documentation\nthat I referenced previously,\nI would like you to create a new skill\ncalled test API.\nAny time you develop a new API endpoint,\nI would like you to run\nthis skill that sends network requests\nusing Curl to this endpoint.\nTo test that all of the different cases\nwork, I want you to then create a report\nthat explains to me\nall of the requests that you sent,\nall of the responses that you got back,\nanything that's working and anything\nthat's not working, and a small suggestion\nfor where changes need to be made.\nOverall, we need to have full coverage\nof all of the endpoints and anytime\nany endpoint is changed or modified,\nwe need to retest that.\nOkay.\nSo I'm just creating this kind of more\ndetailed skill so that I can just run hey,\ntest endpoint goes test\nall the endpoints for me.\nAnd I don't need to do that manually okay.\nSo it looks like it's made this skill\nhere.\nJust quickly having a look at this\ngiving me a report example okay cool.\nAnd now let's just close this\nand let's just run this.\nLet's go slash\nand then go here to test API.\nAnd let's just run and have a test the API\nokay. Sweet.\nSo it just ran this\nwe can see this giving me the full report\nhere of all of the different requests\nthat it's sent out.\nIt says everything's working.\nIt says nothing is explicitly broken\nand everything seems to be fine.\nAnd then it gave us a suggestion on\nsome bug which we could then go and fix.\nSo I think last thing I want to do\nhere is now just create\na simple front end for this.\nSo I'm going to go slash and let's\ngo to the front end skill.\nAnd I'm going to say generate a simple\nfront end for this project that allows me\nto utilize the full Crud API, keep it\nbasic, clean, simple and minimalist.\nOkay.\nAnd then we're using the front end skill\nwhich we installed from the marketplace.\nSo now it should go ahead and start\nwriting all of that front end code.\nOkay.\nSo it looks like it built all of this out\nusing the front end skill.\nWe can see that\nI'm inside the UI right now.\nIt actually just open this for me.\nI didn't even do anything here.\nAnd actually,\nI just noticed\nyou can actually select elements\ndirectly on the UI,\nand I think you can reference them\nin the chat, which is kind of cool.\nI didn't know\nthat they had that as a feature.\nBut what I'm going to do\nis just add a new author.\nSo I'll just go, you know, Tim Persico,\nlet's just make sure that works. Okay?\nLooks like we have an author.\nLet's add a new book.\nI don't know, Tim.\nOne author ID one year\n2000 create the book.\nLooks like we have a new book\nand then we could go from there.\nI know it's super simple, right?\nBecause I just wanted to create something\nbasic\njust to show you how to do the skills.\nSo now let's just do one more prompt.\nThis is good.\nNow I want you to create\na really beautiful, pretty version of this\nwhere we have like animated graphics,\nanimations, transitions,\nand it shows like a full catalog.\nI also want you to see the database\nso that we have a ton of different books\nand authors already there.\nCool.\nAnd I just\nwant to see what that's going to give me.\nAll right. So just created this.\nNow interestingly it actually\nis like previewing the web page itself.\nSo it's like opening it viewing it.\nAnd then making changes if there's like\nany errors, which is kind of cool.\nWe can see. Anyways,\nthis is what it looks like.\nSo we have a bunch of like books\nthat are generated.\nWe can go to the workspace,\nwe can see the books that are here,\nand then of course\nwe can create them, delete them, etc.\nand that was made\nusing the front end skill,\nwhich I think is really clean actually.\nAnd it looks like pretty good, based on\nwhat I asked it to do now, of course\nwe could go, you know, a lot crazier here,\nbut generally\nthat's kind of the usefulness of skills\nand how to create them.\nNow, what I do want to mention here\nis that while skills\nare particularly useful for coding tasks,\nthey're also useful\nfor just general tasks.\nSo with tray, I just switched over\nto the MTC mode here more than coding,\nwhich lets you handle, as it says\nhere, like office tasks for example.\nAnd here we can create skills as well\nto again automate repetitive workflows.\nAnd actually when we talk about\nproductivity and like office level tasks,\na lot of times things that you're doing\nare really, really repetitive.\nAnd if you just spend a little bit of time\ncrafting the perfect skill,\nthen you can just trigger the skill\nand it just does what you need it to do.\nFor example, I have skills and other\nAI coding tools that are automatically\nlike doing accounting for me.\nThey go read my email,\npick up any receipts,\nadd them to a custom\npiece of software that I have.\nBut what I'll do here is I'll just build\na quick skill to demonstrate\nhow we can do, for example, research\nand how we can run that every single day.\nSo I'm going to say, hey,\nI want you to create a new research skill.\nWhat I would like you to do\nis every single morning\nor whenever I trigger this skill,\nI want you to go and search\nfor all of the trending AI topics,\ntools, editors, etc.\nnews, whatever investment.\nAnd I would like you to create\na really concise summary\nthat would fit in less than 250 words.\nThat's bullet point format.\nThat tells me exactly what I need to know,\nand then gives me one\nclear video title idea\nthat I could post on YouTube.\nI am tech with Tim.\nI run a large coding AI YouTube channel.\nSo keep that in mind as context.\nWrap this in a skill, create it for me.\nNow tell me\nI got to connect this to a project.\nSo let me just put it in this web\napp one here,\nand we'll just put it in that,\nproject for now.\nBut anyways,\nI wanted to create this skill.\nSo I'm going to go tell it, hey, make this\nskill, this is what I want you to do.\nAnd then after I run this skill,\nof course I can enhanced and improve it.\nAnd it's going to actually start\nasking me some questions here.\nSo how should the skill deliver\nthe daily output?\nLet's put it in markdown text.\nLet's just search for all of these okay.\nNext, where should\nthe skill be allowed to pull sources from.\nLet's just go. Literally. Everything okay?\nAnd is there any additional information?\nNo. And then just are building that.\nAll right.\nSo it made this skill for me\nin the markdown file\nhowever didn't\nsave it in the proper format.\nSo I'm just going to tell it, hey,\nrewrite it using these docs.\nBecause I need to give it the context\nso it knows how to save this specifically\nfor training.\nOkay.\nSo we can see us now adjusted\nthe scale it's created for of these files.\nAnd this is one of the more advanced ones\nthat I'm talking about where if we go\nlook at dog training, we look at skills,\nwe look at the Daily Brief.\nYou can see that\nit also has examples right\ndirectly in the folder\nas well as resources.\nAnd then the main skills MD file.\nSo now what I would do is just use this.\nSo I'm just going to go slash\nand let's find the skills.\nThis is tech with Tim Daily Brief.\nAnd just run it\nand let's see what it gives us.\nAnd then again\nif I was actually going to use this\nI would enhance it into the skills\nat the level that I want.\nThen I can share with other people\nand just have my workflow\ncompletely automated.\nThis also gets really useful when you\nconnect it to various other tools.\nSo for example, you might connect\nto an MXGp server here, right?\nOr you might add some other rules\nor configuration.\nAnd then you can build a skill\nthat tells the AI agent\nexactly how to use those tools.\nSo if you connect this to something\nlike compose you for example, or Zapier,\nMXGp or custom MCP, a lot of times\nthose MSPs, rely on the agent\nkind of doing some trial and error\nor they're not well documented.\nSo you could build a skill that says, hey,\nany time you use the MCP server, follow\nthis set of instructions,\nand then you just get a much better, more\naccurate, faster response from the model.\nAnd effectively,\nanytime you find yourself doing something\nmore than one, two, three\ntimes, just build it into a skill.\nAnd the beauty is you can get the AI agent\nto create this skill\nbecause of how good\nthe models currently are.\nSo you can see building\ndesigned to code in VSCode.\nFigma, MCP plus GitHub copilot GPT 5.4.\nI guess it just found some videos\nor some examples of that.\nI guess performing\nwell or popping up and you get the idea.\nOkay, so the last thing that I want to do\nis just quickly talk about skills versus\nsome other features that you're going\nto see in these AI coding tools.\nNow we have rules.\nRules are different than skills.\nRules are going to be loaded\nin full once at the start of the chat.\nSo if you have really strict things\nthat you want the model to always be\nfollowing, it's better that you put those\nin a rule rather than a skill,\nbecause a skill is going to be\ndynamically looked up\nand just used when it's needed.\nWhereas a rule is kind of a hard fact\nthat the model should always follow\nand it's immediately\nloaded in the context.\nSo that's kind of the main difference.\nAnd then MXGp servers,\nI just discussed this MXGp servers\nexpose various tools to the model to use.\nIt's different than a skill\nbecause a skill may include multiple tools\ninside it.\nFor example, for my accounting skill\nthat I have set up, I say\ngo to Gmail using this MXGp server.\nLook through all of the receipts,\ndownload them, then use this other tool\nto upload them to this\nyou know, accounting software\nthat I have used this other MXGp server.\nSo that's kind of\nthe main difference there.\nAnd you should just keep that in mind.\nAnd then of course\nthere's a bunch of other stuff\nyou can do here instead of Trey\nand these coding tools\nto make yourself more productive.\nBut this was mostly\njust meant to focus on skills.\nSo generally speaking,\nskills are going to make you\njust a lot better and more productive\nwhen you're using AI agents\nspecifically for coding this new trace.\nAll the application\nthat I'm in is super cool.\nAgain, you can use it for free.\nYou can try it out, see if you like it.\nI really do\nlike the fact that they have this.\nMTC tab as well as the code tab,\nso I can just stay in the one editor.\nAnd it is a lot more cost effective than\na lot of the other competitors out there.\nLet me know what you thought of this video\nin the comments down below, and I\nlook forward to seeing you in another one.",
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