You Are the Most Expensive Model
Mike Taylor
AI can save time and money, but your attention is the most valuable resource. Use a simple four-step process to make tasks easier and cheaper with AI skills, tests, and scripts. Focus on automating routine work so you can spend time on what only you can do.
28 Apr 2026
Once you’re done with the normal back and forth of giving the AI the necessary data and context for the presentation, ask it, “What information would have been useful to know at the start of this task that would have eliminated several steps or mistakes?” Claude knows what it is capable of, so you can ask it to turn its response into a PowerPoint deck creation skill to use next time. Anthropic has been releasing plugins (collections of skills) for various industries to serve as a starting point. They even provide a “skill-creator” skill that teaches Claude how to guide you through making one when you ask.
Once you have a skill, test it. Ask Claude to test the efficacy of the skill with the following prompt: “Run the task using subagents, one with the skill, one without, and compare the results.” If the skill is doing its job, you should see an improvement in quality, cost, and speed. Now try running it with a cheaper model—“Run this test again with Sonnet/Haiku”*—*and compare the results. If you’re happy with the output, ask Claude to “Use a subagent with Sonnet/Haiku when calling this skill.” You are using a subagent because you don’t want the model that you are using for your main session—the more expensive one—to be the model executing the task, so the separate, cheaper subagent does the work. You just decreased the cost of running that task by 10 to 100 times.