No experience required. A guided, interactive skill — created by Paul Cheek, MIT Senior Lecturer on AI in Executive Education — teaches you what an agent is actually made of, asks you questions to shape your own, and hands you working code at the end. Then you run it.
This is not a fill-in-the-blanks generator. The skill installs into Claude and turns the conversation into a lesson. It introduces one concept at a time, checks your understanding, and uses your answers to assemble an agent that is genuinely yours.
Before you build anything, the skill walks you through what an AI agent is and the pieces that make one work — so you understand what you are assembling, not just copy it.
You are asked focused questions — what your agent is for, what it should be able to do, how it should behave. Your answers become the specification for your first agent.
At the end, the skill generates a working agent from your decisions and shows you exactly how to run it. You leave with something real, and the understanding to change it.
By the time you finish, these five ideas will feel obvious. The skill introduces them one by one, then shows how they fit together into a single working system.
What the agent is for — the job it exists to do and how you'll know it worked.
The agent's standing orders: how it should think, behave, and respond.
What the agent can actually do — the actions and data it can reach beyond text.
What the agent knows and remembers — the context it carries through a task.
How it ties together: reason, act, observe the result, and decide what's next.
Work top to bottom. Each step lights up when the one before it is done.
Grab the skill file and save it somewhere you can find it — your Downloads folder is perfect. It's a single .skill file.
Open the .skill file you just downloaded. How you install it depends on where you use Claude.
Just double-click the downloaded .skill file. The Claude desktop app opens and installs it automatically. That's it.
Open a new chat in Claude, copy the prompt below, and paste it in. The skill takes over from there and starts teaching.
I just installed Paul Cheek's "Build Your First Agent" skill, and this is my first time building an AI agent. Be my guide. Teach me as we go: explain each component of an agent — the goal, its instructions, its tools, its memory, and the loop that ties them together — and ask me one question at a time so the agent we design is genuinely mine. When we're done, give me code I can run, and tell me exactly how to run it. Let's start.
Building the agent is half of it. Naming what changed in your understanding is what makes it stick. Take a minute.
// unlocks once you've copied the kickstart prompt above