Bonsai or Lego Blocks

Remember when Keanu Reeves in The Matrix learned kung fu by plugging a USB into his head? AI skills are kind of like that, except it's your ChatGPT/Claude that's Keanu Reeves and the kung fu is a simple guide that anyone can read.

Here's one of the more popular skills on Skills.sh, an open source library of downloadable skills: front-end design. You can see that it's simply a 500-word outline written in plain English explaining to an AI how to create aesthetically interesting websites.

Skills, creating them, installing them, and leveraging them were a major focus of last week's Show Me Something Cool With AI meetup, but I kept thinking about them after the Zoom ended. (PS. Join me for the next SMSCWAI on April 24th!)

And then, late at night, I had an epiphany: bonsai.

Let's make a little distinction here before I talk about minature trees.

CustomGPTs (Nov 2023) and Gems (Aug 2024) allowed everyday users to wrap an AI tool like Gemini with a set of custom instructions, resources, and examples. It marked a transition from everyone using general AI models to starting to customize their AI experience by giving it a persona and some background information.

However, this all happens at the start of a chat session, and as you keep nattering away to your Copywriter Gem, all that persona information fades into the background until your finely-tuned on-brand poetic AI Copywriter sounds more like...well, general AI slop.

In late 2025, Skills started to take off. This dovetailed with increasing agentic capabilities where instead of your AI just talking back to you, it could go out and do a thing. Order takeout. Turn on Netflix. Chill.

Agents needed to be able to do tasks effectively and consistently, but custom GPTs just couldn't remember detailed instructions without you having to start tons of fresh new chats (which gets pricey, front-loading hundreds of pages of your writing style just to bang out a single LinkedIn post that sounds 70% like you).

A Skill is only loaded in when it was summoned, which saves money and makes the instructions super fresh. It's like re-reading the back of your Tylenol bottle to figure out if you're supposed to take one or two: you kinda know both would be fine, but you want to follow the instructions every time just in case.

Here's a simple comparison between these two methods of AI personalization:

• CustomGPTs are the interns you hired for their specific personalities
• Skills are the instruction manuals they pull out only when they actually have to do the work.

Right now, Skills are the bleeding-edge talk of the town. There are some aggregator sites like Skills.sh where people share the Skills they created and AI companies are putting out samples of Skills they prepared:

• ​Here's OpenAI's tasting plate​
• ​Anthropic's pu pu platter
• For you rebels, ClawHub's Skills charcuterie​

Do you see what I see? The personalization trend?

1. You chat with an all-knowing chatbot, but it's the same for everyone.
2. Then, you make a Gemini Gem that puts a hat on the chatbot and then it talks like a pirate.
3. Then, you install the make-reservation Skill and ask your pirate AI to make your date night reservation at a local tiki bar.

This is very do-able today, but where will this go tomorrow? The people who love AI and are deciding the future direction of this technology all want our AI tools to better understand our own preferences, likes, dislikes, and behaviors. The AI companies are happily trying to make that possible.

Here's what I think will be possible within the next two years:

• Pirate AI makes a reservation at your favorite tiki bar.
• It sends an email to your hot date the details and asks what their favorite cocktail is.
• 15 minutes before your date, Pirate AI pre-orders your favorite type of Mai Tai and your date's cocktail preference so its waiting for you two when you arrive.

This is possible now, but you have to be pretty tech-y and crafty to make that work. However, it's gonna get easier, we will definitely see curated Skill packs become popular in the next few months, and more people are going to realize how easy it is to create a Skill, so this personalization ship ain't gonna stop here.

But bonsai. Why bonsai?

Step inside my head for one more moment.

Personalization is a funny thing. I dress myself in certain clothes, I pick certain foods from a menu, and I adjust my chair to a certain setting, all the while thinking that I've shaped the world to fit me and my desires.

However, everything I just listed were options created by companies. Discrete, transactional, "pick one of the four options" choices. Someone else, with zounds of market research, decided that this button down shirt would only be sold in four colors. If I wanted a slightly different color, I have to go to a different business or some expensive boutique that does custom shirts.

That's wayyy too much hassle for me, the blue one is fine.

This is where AI is completely different: creating the off-blue version, the teal version, or the red and orange version is incredibly easy, so easy that you can use a prompt to have the AI help you build the skill.

When the cost of producing anything is stupid low, the market gets flooded. Today, April 3rd of 2026, there are 91,478 Skills on the most popular Skill directory, Skills.sh. That's only going to go up as more people learn, and it's only going to go deeper as the Skill-building craft becomes more nuanced. All while that is happening, AI companies are going to make personalization even easier, more granular, more automatic, and more interconnected.

Now we can talk about bonsai. Growing a bonsai is slow, but you can deftly shape it into almost any configuration. These configurations aren't simply for the plant health, but for aesthetics. My bonsai jade plant is an expression of me and my taste, just like your bonsai Japenses maple is a reflection of what you find beautiful.

Our personal AI is our personal bonsai.

How we prompt, Custom GPTs, and Skills are the only clumsy tools I have right now to shape my AI experience into something that uniquely serves me. I'm getting better and better at using them, though: I'm learning how other people have wired up their OpenClaw bots. I might download a particular Skill to do a repetitive task. I definitely have crafted some Skills which felt eerily like I was writing a knowledge base article on how to make toast.

Here's the biggest prediction of this newsletter, and it's something I'm stealing from Amy Webb's SXSW talk a month ago:

The truly AI-fluent, in a year, will have shaped their AI agents to know their favorite Mai Tai and have it waiting for them on date night. They'll know you struggle with email clarity and will give thoughtful feedback before you hit send. They'll find an almost identical button down shirt style in an unusual color from a local business that delights you more (style-wise and ethically) than whatever the Gap is selling.

Businesses, in turn, will strive to make it as easy as possible for your personal agent to do business with them. Less friction during the sale, more sales. I hate having to put my shipping address in so I will absolutely outsource that to my Skill-ed up AI assistant.

To reach this level of personalization, you will have to learn how to personalize your AI. Not only technically through GPTs and Skills, but you will have to understand what you want. You need to be able to self-reflect, answer a metacognitive question, and articulate that yes, the teal color IS what sparks joy for you.

This level of self-awareness and self-regulation is emotional intelligence, baby. It's a learnable thing, being honest with yourself, but it's not something you're going to be able to do by simply following influencers and adopting their opinions. Your AI bonsai won't be truly you if you simply import what a Skills leaderboard tells you to install.

Sadly, the only way to figure out who you are is to talk to yourself.

Happily, this is totally do-able and I vibe coded an easy way to get started.

Longtime TL;DR readers may remember the 30-Day Question Challenge that Accountabilibuddy Alycia and I created. Back then, you had to read a question, open up your own voice memo app, excoriate your soul, and then relisten to yourself (horrifying!) and meditate on why you keep mentioning your mom.

Now, thanks to vibe coding, I've made this self-reflection challenge a simple app, 30Questions. Open it up and you get a prompt of the day, an easy way to record your ramblings, a quick AI analysis of your thoughts, and an optional deeper dive through five perspectives. It tracks your progress, and now also has a way to collab with a friend (just like Alycia and I did years ago).

It's free. It's not bug-free. I'm loving it. You might love it too.

The AI companies will continue to make personalization easier, yes, but your ability to define and shape your taste is fully on you. I promise that as you practice self-reflection, you'll start to see the shape of your unique bonsai; what you actually want, not just what the algorithm thinks you should want.

A TL;DR from the CRO

My snoozing personalization preferences, in order of priority: soft and fuzzy, cool and hard, and with my best friend.

-Roman Noodles, Chief Ruff Officer

In the span of a week, I attended a conference about the future of marketing and spoke to a Generative AI in Marketing undergraduate class.

Guess which group was more "with it" with AI? The career marketers, running high-powered agencies trying to squeeze margins out of everything, or some college sophomores who could barely show up to class on time?

Yeah, it was the college students who were curious about the risks of setting up an OpenClaw agent on their laptops and thought performance marketing was a dying career direction. It was the business owners of multi-million dollar agencies who didn't know what vibe coding was and were fully aware that they were paying exorbitant prices for software that did AI stuff kinda crappy.

What both groups had in common is that they LOVED my tarot cards.

Just trying to read the future,

Dan from Learn to Scale​

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​PS. While you're reflecting on the 30Questions app, put some lo-fi squid on in the background.​