🦾 Agents Are Just Text Files
Everyone's gatekeeping a word. Here's what a skill actually is, and how to write your first one today.
Agents are just text files.
To build an agent, you just need to be able to explain what you want to get done, and then that will become an agent or a skill or a cron or a task. It's all just information placed in a certain order, given to something else that uses that information to do something that you want done.
Let's demystify all of this stuff, which is confusing for most, into the foundational ones and zeros.
ALL AN AGENT OR AN LLM OR ANYTHING IS…. is just information in a certain order.
Everything is information at the end of the day. Everything is code, even the universe…. just 1’s and 0’s.
Realize this, and you realize that you can build anything.
When you realize this as it relates to agents, you realize you can program agents, you can design agents, you can create agents, you can code agents. Doesn't matter what you call it.
You just need to be able to explain what you want done, answer a few questions, make a few tweaks, and then the thing, which is called a thing, will then do what you want it to do.
The simplest way to get started is with a Morning Briefing.
Get a Morning Briefing going, and then you start realizing how powerful simple skills/crons/agents like this are.
One skill, one agent, one new workflow, one new block at a time.
This is the way.
🤖 Today's issue says a skill is just a text file. This is that file, already written → The Morning Briefing:
You just read that an agent skill is a plain text file. Here is what it looks like when the file is already written, tested, and running for you.
My AI assistant reads my calendar, my inbox, my crm, and my open tasks and sends me a daily Morning Briefing.
I stopped managing follow-ups. I stopped checking my calendar completely.
And my email is also down to 15 mins a day (that skill is also included below).
I can reply to my agent in chat, and it will take actions like:
Move that cal invite to 4pm and send them an email
Push that follow-up back 3 days.
Add this task to my task DB, remind me in 7 days
So and so forth.
I packed the whole thing into a 5-minute install. It works in Claude or ChatGPT.
You get the Morning Briefing skill plus the database it runs on, and you can build anything you want on top of that foundation.
You could write this yourself. That is the entire point of today's issue. Or you can start from mine and skip the trial and error.
The Morning Briefing Agent Skill + DB → $27
👀 You're on a screen 10 hours a day building your moat
Every skill you write, every agent you wire up, every dashboard you check. It is all screen time, and it is all blue light going straight into your eyes.
The LITEZ All-Day 3-Lens system blocks up to 99% of it. Yellow for daytime, orange and red for night. I rotate all three.
Less eye strain, fewer headaches, easier sleep. The work that is making you dangerous should not wreck your body.
BH readers get 10% off with code BHNL.
📰 Links
AOL: The White House says China's Moonshot distilled Anthropic's Fable to build Kimi K3
OpenAI: Presence launches, its enterprise platform for deploying AI agents
Axios: OpenAI announces Project Camellia, a Georgia data center topping 30 billion dollars
The Register: OpenAI takes the consulting path, charging enterprises to deploy agents
Bloomberg: Texas Instruments guides above estimates on AI and auto chip demand
Yahoo Finance: Nasdaq slides as Wall Street waits on Tesla and Alphabet earnings
Tech Startups: The day's biggest moves from Apple, Anthropic, Google, Nvidia, and Tesla
🛠️ One Build — The Notepad Agent
Pick one task you do the same way every week: your weekly review, a client onboarding, formatting a report the same way every time.
Open a blank text file. Write, in plain English, the exact steps you would hand a new hire. Inputs, steps, what "done" looks like.
No jargon, no code. If you can write a checklist, you are writing a skill. That is the entire trick.
Paste it into Claude with the real inputs and tell it: follow this file exactly. Watch it run your process.
Fix the file wherever the output missed. That edited text file is now a reusable skill you own. Save it and build one a week.
🎯 Skill — WRITE ONE SKILL FILE
Spend 60 minutes on the one task you explain to people over and over. Write it down as plain-English instructions: the inputs, the steps, and what a finished job looks like. Then hand that file to your AI and make it run the job start to finish.
The "agent skill" everyone is gatekeeping is a text file you just wrote. No code, no course, no permission needed.
One hour. One file. Your first real agent. That's the way.
📈 Markets
🤖 AI
🟢 NVDA +2.4%. Nvidia led the S&P 500 gainers as chip demand held up.
🟢 SMCI +17% (premarket). Super Micro flagged 60 billion dollars in Q4 orders and a SpaceX AI data center build.
🔴 GOOGL −5% (after hours). Alphabet fell post-close after raising its capex forecast.
🔴 TSLA lower (after hours). Tesla missed earnings estimates after the bell.
💻 Tech
🟢 TXN flat. Texas Instruments beat on revenue and guided Q3 above estimates, but the stock drew a lukewarm reaction.
🟢 Thin field. The rest of big-cap tech leaned red into Tesla and Alphabet earnings, so clean winners were scarce.
🔴 CRM −4.0%. Salesforce was the S&P 500 biggest decliner.
🔴 IBM −2.2%. IBM slid after cutting its full-year sales outlook; MSFT fell 1.8%.
🏦 Finance
🟢 Quiet tape. The big US banks reported back on July 14, so July 22 brought no standout financial gainer.
🔴 No clean loser. Money-center and regional names drifted with the market; none printed a real move.
🌎 Other
🟢 JNJ +2.0%. Johnson & Johnson rose after its earnings beat.
🟢 Energy names climbed as Brent crude jumped 3.4% to 94 dollars, a one-month high.
🔴 KO −1%. Coca-Cola slipped despite beating on revenue and earnings.
🔴 GM lower. General Motors whipsawed after earnings and finished red on cautious guidance.
The tape keeps paying for picks and shovels (chips, power, real orders) while the flashy software names get sold. Same lesson as today's build: the boring plumbing is where the money actually is.
🐦 Tweet
Because intelligence isn't the moat anymore.
Agency is the moat.
📊 Stats
Prescribed burns cut the odds of giant sequoia death by 77% across 26,400 trees in 19 groves, and treated trees were four times likelier to survive. Wildfire resilience. Source: Numlock
Fossil evidence shows animals first colonized shells only in the Middle Ordovician, about 460 million years ago. Deep time. Source: Numlock
The 2026 World Cup final drew an average of 38.94 million viewers on Fox, before another 23.9 million on Spanish-language coverage. Live sport still rules. Source: Numlock
🔥 Useful Sh!t Corner 🔥
🗓️ On this day in 1972 → NASA launched Landsat 1, the first satellite built to study Earth from space. We have been watching the planet from orbit ever since.
🦾 How to be dangerous → Write down one process you keep in your head and hand it to your AI. Undocumented knowledge dies with you; written knowledge compounds.
🌞 Health → Get 10 minutes of morning sun in your eyes before your first screen. It sets your circadian clock better than any supplement.
🍳 Cooking → Salt your eggs a couple minutes before they hit the pan, not after. You get softer, more evenly seasoned scrambles.
💬 Quote → "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." —Leonardo da Vinci
🤖 AI reality check → A model that tops a coding leaderboard still has no idea who you are. The instructions you write are the whole edge.
🧰 Tools
🤖 While everyone’s watching tutorials, the winners are installing systems like this: My AI Agent Operating System → full memory, setup, and database needed to get an agent working for you in minutes. Get the basics down, then customize it for your exact work and life routine → Only $76 → Personal AI Agent System: A Work + Life OS
👓 Starting at screens for hours each day started giving me headaches and blurry vision at night. Blue light-induced eye strain was the culprit. And it’s why I now wear these daily: LITEZ Screen Glasses. BH readers get 10% off using code BHNL
🛠️ The tools I actually run my business on → My Apps Stack (click here)
🛍️ Fav Products
🪴 Better Human Goods → Nontoxic essentials for health and home. Products that work without the junk. Use code BNL for 10% off.
🛒 My favorite products, with subscriber discounts → My Favorite Products
👋 I’m Colin → Father, AI builder, founder, investor. X-IG-TT → Free Stuff
🧠 Become irreplaceable: Build Your Personal AI Moat. Get 50% off the year and support so I can keep dropping free stuff here and here.
Use AI. Stay Human. This is the way.