Turn Your AI Chat Into an App for Reliable Execution
AI chat instructions (called "skills") can eliminate grunt work but these have important limitations. The way to solve bigger problems is to convert the AI Chat → into an App.
AI Chats Boost Productivity
Claude Cowork, ChatGPT and Gemini are huge time-savers. Take any task and load your documents, spreadsheets and data files into the chat session, and instruct AI what needs to get done.
After a few rounds of explanation, the AI "learns" how to do the work correctly, and does the grunt for you in seconds. It's amazing and this is why enterprise AI is here to stay. It's an instant productivity gain.
However, there's a problem with AI chat instructions (aka "skills"): they tend to be unreliable for a number of reasons:
Where AI Chats Fall Short
AI introduces a new set of problems:
- AI chat sessions are hard to share with others
- Mostly it works but sometimes it fails
- AI chat runs up token usage costs quickly
- When the AI vendor "upgrades", it breaks things
Turn Chat Instructions into Apps
To overcome these shortcomings, a tactic that applies to many scenarios is to convert the AI chat instructions (called "skills") → into an App. It's a different way to use AI.
- Instead of this: Hey Claude, do this work on these files
- Rather say: Hey Claude, write me an App that can do this work
What that produces is not a "skills.md" file (instructions for an AI to follow), rather it produces an application that runs reliably and is easy to share with others. This approach turns your know-how into custom software. Because you (the business person) know what needs to happen, you describe to the AI, and the AI produces an App which is an asset that you own.
The AI takes your requirements and writes the software for you. That software runs all by itself – it no longer needs AI – because most tasks simply manipulate data in files (like spreadsheets, CSV or Word), make calculations and apply business rules to generate new results, and then format it the ways you need.
What is a task?
Converting chat instructions into an app requires describing the tasks to be completed:
- read input data
- apply rules, calculations, mappings
- write the output
- format and present it nicely
All of this can be done as "an app". In the past, your only option was to buy an app off the shelf. Now you can build an app and own it yourself.
Today AI grants you the "Super Power" to write and deploy your own apps the encode your unique knowledge to complete work on your behalf or for any user you give access to the app.