Two weeks ago, a friend of mine who runs an HVAC company outside Austin showed me his entire AI process for writing service-call follow-up emails.
It was the same prompt. Rewritten four different times, four different weeks.
Every time he opened ChatGPT, he started from zero. Typed out the tone he wanted. The details that mattered. What not to say. All from memory, hoping he remembered it the same way he did last week.
He was hand-cutting the same board over and over, freehand, and wondering why the edges never matched.
Here's what woodworkers figured out long before any of us touched ChatGPT. When you need to make the same precise cut more than once, you don't trust your hand. You build a jig, a simple guide that holds the wood in place so the cut comes out identical every time, whether you're rested or rushed, whether it's cut number one or cut two hundred.
A design studio called Every ran into the same wall building an AI tool last year. Plain prompting was too sloppy for what they needed, so they built themselves a jig instead: a small control panel that locked in exactly how the AI should behave, every single time. Same quality output no matter who touched it or how tired they were.
This is the answer to the thing you've probably been chewing on. You've already half-built the system in your head. You know the exact tone your emails need, the five things every proposal has to hit, the way you want a follow-up to sound. You don't need ten more generic AI tips. You need to build the jig once.
For my HVAC client, that meant twenty minutes turning his best follow-up into an AI Employee that does exactly what he wants, every time, without relying on Chatgpt’s memory or his. When you do this, you’re creating an AI “jig” called a skill. You can do this on Claude, Chatgpt or wherever. It’s saving your repeated prompted so you never have to go searching through a mountain of chat threads for it.
Tone, must-hit details, the stuff to avoid, all baked in. Now his techs can just paste in job notes and get the same quality email every time, without him retyping his own process from scratch or hoping AI does it well this time.
🎁 Thirst Trap Thursday: The First Jig
Copy this into ChatGPT or Claude and turn your best one-off prompt into a jig:
"Here's a prompt I wrote that worked well, and the output it gave me: [paste your best prompt and its best result]. Turn this into a reusable skill for this exact task. Pull out the tone, structure, and rules that made it work, and write me a new prompt that locks those in permanently, and then walk me through how to turn that prompt into a reusable skill."
My client isn't rewriting that prompt a fifth time. He built the jig. His edges match now, every time.
Yours will too.
Your business AI guy,
Matthew Brenner
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