Claude can now do the thinking for you

Happy Wednesday,

This week I'm giving you the exact framework that separates people who are good at AI from everyone else, dropping a fun prompt that redesigns any room in your house in seconds, sharing five AI skills you can install today that instantly put you ahead of almost everyone, and breaking down the wild back and forth between OpenAI and Anthropic that's been playing out all week.

Let's get into it.

🧠 THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

Go From AI Beginner to AI Expert in 4 Steps

I'm going to say something a little controversial. Prompting the way people taught it two years ago is basically dead. Honestly, even the way I taught it six months ago is already becoming outdated. You don't need clever wording or magic phrases anymore. What actually separates the experts from everyone else now is something called outcome-first prompting, and once it clicks you can't unsee it.

Here's the idea. Instead of telling the AI every little step to take, you tell it the outcome you want and you trust it to find the best path there. Think about it like this. If you hired an employee with a 300 IQ, would you stand over their shoulder telling them exactly which button to click? Of course not. You'd tell them the goal and let them figure out the smartest way to get there. These models are that employee now. The people getting incredible results have stopped micromanaging and started delegating.

That said, there's still an anatomy to a great request, and it's four simple pieces. Give the AI all four and it understands exactly what you need. Here's the whole framework.

1. Give it the outcome. Tell it exactly where you're trying to end up and describe what that finished result actually looks like to you. If it knows the end goal, it works backwards to get you there.

2. Give it the task. Be specific. "Find me 50 leads who are ideal customers for my business" beats "help me get customers" every single time.

3. Give it context. This is the one everyone skips. Upload your docs, your brand voice, anything that explains your situation. The more context, the better the answer.

4. Give it the format. Tell it exactly how you want the answer back. A spreadsheet, a bulleted list, or even "explain it to me like I'm in seventh grade."

Do those four things and I promise your answers get about 200% better overnight.

I put together my full prompting framework with examples for every step, linked right below.

Get my full prompting framework →

🎨 PROMPT OF THE WEEK

Let ChatGPT Redesign Any Room in Your House

Okay, enough tech talk for a second, let's have some fun. This one is my favorite kind of prompt because it's actually useful. Take a photo of any room in your house, your living room, your bedroom, your kitchen, and ChatGPT will redesign the whole thing for you like a professional interior designer. Snap the photo, upload it, and paste this in.

You can swap in any style you want too, tell it modern, cozy, farmhouse, minimalist, whatever you're into. And here's the part that makes this genuinely useful. Once you've got a design you love, send this as a follow up.

Now it hands you an actual shopping list with links, so you can build the room instead of just dreaming about it. Run it and reply with your before and after, I want to see them.

🛠 SAVE THIS

5 AI Skills You Need to Install This Week

Quick explainer first, because this is one of the most underrated things in AI right now. The simplest way I can describe a skill is that it's an SOP for your AI. You know how a business writes up a standard operating procedure so a task gets done the exact same way every time, no matter who does it? A skill is that, except the AI runs it. You set it up once and then it does that job perfectly, the same way, forever.

Say there's something you do in ChatGPT or Claude almost every day, or a chat you keep going back to run the same task over and over. You can package that whole thing into a skill. Just type /skill-creator (it works in both) and it turns exactly what you've been doing into a saved command. From then on you run it with a single slash command instead of re-typing everything. It's like having all your SOPs as buttons you can press anytime.

And you don't even have to build your own. People all over the internet have made skills for their exact area of expertise, and you can just grab theirs and install them. There are over 100,000 of them out there. You can make your own or steal someone else's. Skills also used to be a Claude-only thing, but now they run in both Claude and ChatGPT, so everything below works no matter which one you use.

Here's how to install any of them. I could walk you through the complicated way, but the AI is too smart now to bother. Pick whichever skill below makes sense for you, copy the GitHub link underneath it, paste it into Claude or ChatGPT, and just say "install this for me." It'll go find the skill, download it off the internet, and set it up for you. And if you ever want to know how one works, just ask the AI to explain it. Here are the five I'd start with.

Get my full list of the best skills →

🚨 THE AI WARS

OpenAI vs Anthropic Is Getting Personal

If you've missed it, there has been a lot of back and forth between OpenAI and Anthropic this week, and it's honestly some of the most fun I've had watching this industry. Let me catch you up simply.

A couple weeks ago OpenAI came out swinging. They dropped their new GPT-5.6 model, rebuilt their whole desktop app, and launched ChatGPT Work. Big, big releases. And it was aimed directly at Anthropic's most powerful model, Fable 5. Two giants, going straight at each other.

Then came the drama. When Fable 5 first released, Anthropic said the free access was only good until a certain deadline. Then they pushed that deadline. Then they pushed it again. Then again, from July 7, to July 12, and now to July 19, and as of yesterday people were finally fed up. The reason they keep extending is pure competition. Fable 5 is the only publicly available model that can really go toe to toe with GPT-5.6, and they watched users start jumping ship, so they had to keep the free door open to hold onto them.

Here's why people got so annoyed. Everyone was burning through all their token usage racing to beat the deadline, and then Anthropic would just extend it anyway. It started to feel like the whole thing was a nudge to get everyone paying more for extra usage, and the constant back and forth left people with no idea what they'd actually be charged. Nobody likes moving goalposts, especially when there's a bill attached.

Meanwhile OpenAI has been doing the exact opposite, keeping their tools included on every plan and quietly scooping up all the frustrated users. It's working too. Their Codex and ChatGPT Work just crossed 8 million users, jumping from 6 to 8 million in about three days. Both companies have literally been resetting everyone's rate limits to one-up each other, OpenAI did it twice in a single day. This is what real competition looks like, and it is glorious to watch.

And on the topic of 5.6, I've been testing it out myself and I think it's genuinely excellent. Everyone should go give it a try. It also just scored a 136 on an AI IQ test, which is the first time any model has ever crossed 130, putting it smarter than 99% of humans on that particular test. Claude's Fable 5 is sitting right behind it at 130.

I'm not sure these IQ tests are a perfect measure of real intelligence. But you can't look at a chart like this and not wonder how close we actually are to AGI, and to the point where humans don't really need to think for themselves anymore. Genuinely wild to sit and think about.

Here's the thing to remember through all of this. When two giants fight this hard, we win. This is exactly what pushes prices down, speeds development up, and puts more powerful tools in our hands for less money. So grab your popcorn, because every punch these two throw means we get to offload even more of our work. I'm genuinely excited to see what comes next.

Go rewrite your next prompt using the four steps up top, install one skill, and run that room redesign prompt because it's genuinely worth doing. Do any of these and you're already ahead of almost everyone else reading about AI this week.

See you Sunday.

Maverick

P.S. Want your business to actually show up inside AI? The brands that rank are seeing up to 3x the conversions. Get your free AI visibility score and see exactly where you stand inside AI.

P.P.S. If you're new here or you ever skip one, I've got a newsletter archive of all my past emails you can catch up on anytime.