How I turn a nonfiction book into a Claude skill instead of a summary
I have a habit that predates this site, and it's actually the reason the site exists. When I read a business or nonfiction book, I don't want it to fade into "yeah, good book, can't remember much." I turn it into a skill for Claude — a small file of instructions the assistant loads automatically when the topic comes up, so I can go back and consult the book's actual decision-making process the way you'd call an expert, instead of trying to remember what they once told you.
This is not the same as asking AI to condense a book into bullet points. A summary tells you what the book says, and it's nearly useless six months later because you don't remember which bullet applies to the situation in front of you. What I extract instead is what decision procedure the book teaches — the steps someone actually following that method would take facing a real situation, plus the judgment calls and trade-offs the book flags along the way. The test is whether you could hand it to a new hire who never read the book and have them apply it.
When I went looking for other people doing this kind of thing with their own workflows — not "here's a cool prompt" but "here's exactly what I did and here's where it fell apart" — I found nothing worth reading. General AI forums bury this kind of post under news and memes. Prompt catalogs don't tell you what didn't work. And the communities built around this are paid, sitting behind a subscription wall. So I built this one.
Below is the actual five-step process, and the file I feed to Claude at the step where the real extraction happens.
Steps
- 1
Read the book normally first, no AI involved
You cannot extract a decision procedure from a book you don't understand yourself. This step is just reading.
- 2
Go back and mark only the "how to decide" passages
Highlight frameworks, checklists, sequences of questions, rules of thumb. Skip the anecdotes and the chapters explaining why this matters — they don't contain a procedure.
- 3
Feed the marked passages to Claude with an explicit extraction instruction
Ask for the decision procedure as numbered steps, plus the conditions under which each step applies, written as if briefing a new hire who has to apply it without having read the book.
- 4
Turn the output into a Claude skill file
A short markdown file the assistant loads automatically whenever the topic comes up, so it's available any time you need it, not just inside one conversation.
- 5
Test it immediately on a real, current decision
Never a made-up example. If the skill produces generic advice you'd get from Claude with no skill at all, the extraction failed — go back and redo step 2 and 3 with sharper markers on what counts as a decision passage.
STEP 3 — the extraction prompt I paste into Claude, right after pasting in the marked passages:
---
Below are passages I marked from [BOOK TITLE] because they describe how to decide something — a framework, a checklist, a sequence of questions, or a rule of thumb. I am not asking for a summary of the book.
Extract the decision procedure these passages teach, written as numbered steps. For each step, give me:
1. What to actually do at that step.
2. The condition under which that step applies — not every step applies in every situation, so tell me when to use it and when to skip it.
3. Any judgment call or trade-off the book flags at that step.
Write it as if you're briefing a new hire who has to apply this method to a real situation and has never read the book. Do not add advice, examples, or clarifications that aren't in the passages below — if a step in the book is vague or incomplete, say so instead of filling the gap yourself.
[PASTE MARKED PASSAGES HERE]
---
STEP 4 — the skill file template I turn that output into:
---
name: [skill-name, e.g. pricing-decisions]
description: "Use when [the specific situation this applies to — be concrete, not 'when making decisions']"
---
# Decision procedure: [Book title / topic]
Source: [Book title, Author]
## When this applies
[The condition under which this whole skill is relevant — what kind of situation should trigger it]
## Steps
1. [Step] — applies when [condition]. Judgment call / trade-off: [if the book flags one]
2. [Step] — applies when [condition]. Judgment call / trade-off: [if the book flags one]
3. ...
## Known gaps
[Anything the book left vague or didn't fully specify — noted honestly, not papered over]
---Where this breaks
This only works on books that actually teach a decision procedure. A narrative business book, a memoir, or a "one big idea stretched over 250 pages" book doesn't have a procedure to extract. You get a skill that's really just a fancy summary — and that's worse than no skill at all, because it sounds authoritative when it isn't.
The extraction step is also where a bad output turns dangerous instead of just useless. Skip checking the extracted steps against the actual book pages, and you can end up with a skill that confidently states something the book never said. That's why I always spot-check the extracted steps against the source pages before I trust the skill.
And a skill you build once and never revisit goes stale. If your own thinking or the market has moved on, the skill doesn't know that — it just keeps handing you the old answer with the same confidence it had on day one.
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