AI 302 Bootcamp in Video: Agentic Skills and Memory
The same agent that drafts your memos can run a project, plan your learning, even coach your career.
Note: The link to the full bootcamp is available for subscribers in the Substack email of this post or my welcome letter. It’s free.
If a new legal hire showed up tomorrow and asked what to take off your plate, what would you hand over?
AI 302 is about building the colleague who can take it on: one agent, taught a few skills and given a place to remember.
The first 301 bootcamp was your AI agent’s orientation. In 302 it reports for its first day of work, and a first day means real assignments.
I recorded the whole session as a free video for subscribers. It is hands-on, not a lecture. You will learn to build working skills and a hardened memory system of your own.
You also get to make AI your chief of staff to manage a side project, curate a learning plan, even advise on your career strategy.
I finally preview how to work across different labs’ AI models, cutting AI vendor lock-in while getting more points of view. Two associates reading a brief is better than one.
The link to the full bootcamp is available for subscribers in the Substack email of this post or my welcome letter.
If this is useful, pass it to a lawyer who is curious about AI!
The 302 syllabus
1. Your AI Agent’s First Day
301 was setting up your agent. 302 is the first real day on the job. Today we’ll build skills for repeatable tasks and give the agent a durable memory system that scales.
2. AI Is a People Skill
If you have good people skills, you will do well with AI. Think about a good leader: you plan ahead, make clear asks, give feedback and train up your team. Use the same mental model as you build your AI skills.
3. Why the Terminal Builds AI Intuition
The terminal shows everything: you watch the agent read files, write them and run commands in the open. The AI tools will eventually change. The AI intuition you build here carries over to every AI product you touch later.
4. The Four Skill Types AI Does Best
AI skills tend to fall into four buckets: drafting, review, translation and extraction. Look at the work you do every week and find which bucket it lands in. That’s where a skill is worth building.
5. Build a Skill, End to End
Our first task: turn a long, messy legal memo into a tight summary a busy VP would actually read. We open plan mode (shift + tab) to think it through first, then let the agent write the skill and run /summarize.
6. Seeing the Skill’s Primary Source
A skill isn’t hidden machinery. We open the skill.md file the agent just wrote, and it’s plain English you can read and change yourself. It’s the same kind of file as the CLAUDE.md from 301.
7. Debug and Revise the Skill
We imagine the VP wanted more detail, so we revise the skill to fit the audience better. Same loop you’d run with a new associate: tell it what to change, and it adjusts.
8. A Second AI Model, A Second Opinion
We bring in a second model, OpenAI’s Codex, to review Claude’s work. One AI drafts, the other critiques. They’re trained differently, so Codex catches what Claude missed. Feed Codex’s critique back into Claude and run it again.
9. Skill Two: Automate Slide Decks
Now the second skill: turn that same memo into a slide deck: /presentation. Build it once, and turning any memo into a deck becomes a single command.
10. Deep Sea Detour (Experiment Gone Awry?)
We run the new skill and out comes a deck about the deep sea, nothing to do with our memo. A fun experiment, and I left it in to see where AI works and sometimes strays.
11. Inside the Slide-Deck Skill
We open the presentation skill’s files to see how it works. Same lesson as the first skill: it’s readable instructions, no black box. Once you can see it, you can change it.
12. Fixed: Build the Real Deck
Now we point the skill at our memo, and it builds a polished, presentation-ready deck. From a wall of legal text to slides you could actually put in front of a room, in one pass.
13. Forgot the Skill Names? Just Ask
You won’t remember all your skill names, and you don’t need to. Just describe what you want in plain words, and the agent picks the right skill and runs it.
14. Why AI’s Memory Is a Mess
An agent keeps its memory in a loose running log, if it keeps one at all. It’s unorganized, and you can’t really count on it. The key to real agentic memory is simple: write things down to files and stay organized.
15. Build Your Own Memory System
We build the memory system in a single prompt. We borrow PARA: four folders, Projects, Areas, Resources and Archives, that keep your files in a shape the agent can read every session. People call this a second brain (very fancy branding for keeping organized files and folders).
16. Inside Your Memory System
Memory is just layered CLAUDE.md files, from the root down to a single matter. The agent loads only the layer it needs, which preserves its context for the task in front of it. The same shape works whether you’re tracking one career plan or a whole practice.
17. Recap and Homework
A quick recap of what we built: two skills and a memory system. Then it’s over to you, with homework to put it into practice.
Let me know how it goes and what you build!