The pitch used to cost four figures: a charismatic closer, a course, a community, a promise. Now you can hand a machine a folder of instructions and it behaves like the guru. Cheaper, quieter, no upsell.
Angus Sewell (Angus the Nontechnical) made this point with a video about “installing” a famous sales method into an AI as skill files, and his framing is the useful part: “The prompt is about 5% of the job.” The other 95% is context, structure and the files you feed the thing. Generic AI is hopeless here, he argues, because it averages a $200 trial and a $2M enterprise deal into mush.
He’s right, and the timing is almost too neat. In October 2025 Anthropic formalised exactly this idea as Agent Skills, folders of instructions and scripts that Claude loads on demand, and by December they had turned it into an open standard anyone can publish to. So the thing Angus is selling by hand is now a documented file format. Expertise as a downloadable directory is officially a category.
Here is where I’d lean on him a little. Saying the prompt is only 5% of the job is true, but it can make the other 95% sound like data entry. It isn’t. Assembling a good skill file is the expertise. A text file of a mediocre closer’s habits installs a mediocre closer, confidently. The bottleneck didn’t vanish, it moved, from writing clever prompts to having the judgement to know what is worth encoding and what is cargo-cult nonsense dressed up as a “system”.
And notice the class arbitrage hiding in here. The same operators who charged you $2,000 for a course are now selling $49 skill packs, and the ones who charged $49 are giving them away to sell you something else. When a method becomes a file, it becomes copyable, forkable and, frankly, auditable. That is good for you and bad for anyone whose whole business was making a fairly ordinary process feel like a secret.
So yes, install the guru. Just remember the guru was always a process, and a process you can read is a process you can improve, or bin. The winners here won’t be the people with the slickest prompt. They will be the people who can tell a genuinely good method from a well-branded one.
Did you know: Anthropic’s Skills started life as four humble office helpers for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF before anyone thought to pour a sales playbook into the same format.