How to Automate Your Life & Work w/ Claude Code: Ultimate Beginner’s Guide

0:00You probably suck at using Claude code, or maybe you're not using it at all, which is even worse. But, in this video, I'm going to break down exactly how I use it as an AI founder. I run multiple different AI companies at this point. How I use it myself to automate certain parts of my roles, but that can also be taken to whether you're a student or an employee looking to just automate your whole degree or automating parts of your work so that you do a whole lot less. Or you're a business owner as well wanting to be able to use it for yourself or teach it to your teams. This is the

0:23exact training that I put all of my staff through so that they can use it and set these up to automate parts of their role as well. This is probably the best general purpose AI tool for productivity right now. When set up correctly and when used correctly, it can automate up to 90% of the stuff that you do. So, I'm going to be breaking down in this video the exact template that I use and give to my staff for them

0:39to start and create their own workspace. I'll be breaking down the four biggest mistakes that I see beginners make that stop them from getting the most out of it. And then, I'm going to be showing you step-by-step how you can get this set up on your machine as a beginner the right way using all the sort of shortcuts and commands to make this really fast to use. And then, show you a real and live example of me using the template to automate certain parts of my own workflows so you see how it works in action. I haven't seen anyone else on YouTube dropping this kind of sauce on

1:01Claude code, so let's get into it. So, we've got all this to get through, but we're just going to start with the first thing that you have to understand is that an agent, which is what Claude code is, acts as a digital employee for you. So, what does that mean? A digital employee will need to have some kind of tools or access or context or knowledge about what it's doing, right? And the first thing you need to understand with getting this set up and how to get the most out of it is like Claude code is going to be your digital employee or your assistant to do whatever you set it

1:26up to do. But, in order to do that correctly, it needs to have what I call a workspace. So, what is a workspace? It is one folder on your computer that contains other folders and contexts and files and scripts required to do a task or set of tasks that you want to be performed through Claude code. So, in this case, as you can see on screen here, this is what we'll be working with later, and this is VS Code. Don't worry, this is like it's not coding, it's nothing, it's just chatting away to a chatbot in here. And if you can't wrap your head around using one of these IDEs

1:53at this point, you're kind of cooked. So, this is for those of you who are extra intelligent and believe you can wrap your head around a basic tool like this. So, this is what a workspace looks like. And this is essentially one folder. You can see it's called Claude workspace here. This is Claude workspace template that you guys are going to get. But inside this folder, this is just any old folder on your machine, inside it, there are a bunch of other folders. So, we have the commands folder, which we'll go into in a second. We have the skills, we have the context, we have outputs, plans,

2:18reference scripts, and the Claude.md. So, when you are thinking about setting up Claude Code to be your personal assistant to automate parts of your work, need to create a workspace for it to operate within. And that means, okay, what context does it need to understand who I am, the stuff that I do, the priorities and

2:34strategies we're working on right now. Things like these command files, which take a workflow like looking up or researching a podcast guest, how you break that down into simple text, which we'll go through in a bit. But basically, a workspace is a folder with a bunch of folders and files in it that you can configure in a certain way. And this is by far the best setup and kind of template that I found for training my teams on this. Um it's just a great default starting point. Has all the key points that you need to really get the most out of it. And you can use Claude

2:58Code using these uh create plan things, which I'll show you in a bit, to very rapidly turn it into something that you can use for yourself and modify So, for a workspace, I find it's most helpful to split them by a a kind of key function. Uh at least for me as a founder, I've got multiple different businesses. So, for me, I have multiple workspaces, one for each function or area of my my work that I do. So, um I think of it as like a digital teammate or employee for each of these areas. For my personal brand and for the content I do, I have a workspace for that. I have

3:26a workspace for my agency, uh helping us with proposals and scoping. I have one for my uh education product, so it has full context of all of the course material that I've created so that I can create new stuff easily. And one for my SaaS as well, which is an engineering kind of prompt engineering workbench, which I'll actually show you guys a little bit later. But in my case, I've split it into different areas. I could try to ram it all into one, but I like to keep them a little bit clearer and more separate so that I can really tune the uh tune the content and context a

3:51little bit better. But, uh if you're just an employee or a a student and you're looking to automate parts of your work, you'll probably only need one and it's going to basically take all of the job functions that you do. Say you're a marketing person and you need to like do the weekly marketing report, you need to uh come up with a new campaign idea, or like do some brainstorming, or you analyze the last campaign and figure out what you can do next. All of these are are tasks that you do that can be turned into a a command or a list of instructions and put into a command file

4:21here and then you're able to call those very quickly and say like {slash} marketing report and it's going to do all of those things. So, it's kind of like any other kind of automation, but in this case you're doing it through just text files. From Claude Code having enough context about you, it can kind of just read these text files, have access to all of these bits of uh context and documents and folders and be able to do things for you like maybe pull information in from the web, which we're going to talk about a bit that falls into the scripts here. So, as a bit of a

4:44walk-through of uh this, we'll just break it down a little bit further here. We have firstly the commands folder and you can think of commands as reusable prompts to automate work functions or do things within the workspace. And like I said, these use natural language, just regular plain English or whatever language you speak, to guide Claude Code through a workflow or set of steps using the content and scripts and tools within the workspace. these are the main way we're going to be working, as you'll see in a bit, and these are the ways of baking in your workflow into a set of instructions that Claude can do uh on

5:11your behalf. Then we have the skills folder here and so these are kind of like commands, they're kind of merging a little bit at the moment, uh but skills I like to think of as a as a bit more substantial in a lot of cases and they're kind of like installable plugins for your workspace. They're typically created by others and you can go on to like skills marketplaces and try to find ones made by other people. There's a few security risks inherent in that, which we'll touch on a little bit later. But, skills are like kind of plugins or packages that you can plug in uh from

5:36other people a lot of the time and it's going to enhance or will give more capabilities to your workspace. They're a little bit more advanced than I would like to go into within this uh within this tutorial, but I will be covering these two skills here cuz I think it's good to have it in part of the template. And then we have the context folder, and this is essential context on who you are, what you do, how you're doing it, and why. And Claude Code reads this every session to come up to speed on who you are and what you do. So, every time we spin up Claude Code, it's going to be

6:00reading all of that information, so it fully understands the the big picture. And this is something we'll be touching on in a bit, but it's really important that every time you spin up Claude Code, it knows exactly who you are and what you're working on, current state of the strategies, current data that that's

6:12come back from different platforms. Context is essential to give it sort of a a base for you to have an intelligent conversation on. And in this template, I've broken it down into the key different context docs that I've found to be most effective, and they all build on top of each other, which we'll go into in a second. Then we have scripts down here. And scripts are like I know, it might sound scary, but they're code snippets uh that are created by Claude Code. You don't have to write the code yourself. Claude Code can intelligently figure out when it needs to create some kind of code or

6:36write a script. And a script is just a bit of code that can sort of be triggered at a certain point. It might take in some inputs, do a certain couple things on the internet, uh process some data in a certain way, and then pass it back to Claude Code. So, it might be I write a script to fetch some information

6:50from my uh CRM or from some sort of API. Like, you want to get the real-time weather data, it can pull it from a weather API. So, scripts are a handy way, a bit more advanced tool, but it's something we're going to be jumping into as well. But, these are a key thing for pulling external data into your Claude Code instance. And then we have the claude.md, which is an essential document that describes the entire workspace to Claude Code every session it spins up. So, combined with the context folder, it basically means that every time we start up Claude Code, it fully understands the workspace it's

7:17operating in, reads all of these different context documents, and knows who you are, what you're doing within the business, what your strategies are right now, any current data, and it's like fully understands where it is, what it's doing, and it's ready to start taking action like an employee. So, just like when a new person comes into the company or you're hiring someone, you would need to give them all that context. And as you'll see when we're actually working with Claude Code in here, we're starting it up, we're starting a new version of Claude Code all the time. So, that we need to give it that onboarding every time it starts

7:42up. All right, so that brings us down to the next and probably most important thing you need to know about Claude Code, which is priming and context management. As you may or may not know, the latest Claude models only have 200,000 tokens available for us to play with. So, we want to essentially have Claude Code fully contextualized, understand who we are, what we do, what we're what it's able to do within the workspace with as minimal tokens used as possible. So, as you can see here, this is actually from Claude Code itself. You can run this command {slash} context and it'll tell you how much context is currently available,

8:10how much you've used up already, and basically we want to be sending and and like interacting with Claude Code with as many of those tokens available because there's an effect called context blow, which means the more tokens are used up out of that 200,000, like the more diluted your instructions are going to be. So, you want to have it fully dialed in, fully aware of who you are, what it's working within, and then you're just going to kind of drop your task on top of that. So, it's got all of this room, it's very clear on what it's working on, and you don't get any of the

8:34negative effects of context blow. So, this all ties into something that we're going to be covering here in a second, but first let's go over the uh the biggest mistakes that people face when it comes to priming and context management and just generally using Claude Code. And the first is using Claude Code like a chatbot. Means you're just sitting there kind of chatting away like you would with ChatGPT, and this is not really the best way to use it because you end up in these big long uh conversations, and here you can see the messages take up a significant amount. In this case, when I took the screenshot, my messages were

9:01taking up 26% of the context. So, the if you're chatting away and you've filled up that uh that chat history with messages and like 150,000 tokens have filled up with all of the messages you've had back and forth with Claude Code, then you're going to have this context blow. Your instructions and messages are going to be so diluted that the chance of it actually getting exactly what you want in the first go is going to be massively reduced. So, So, the first mistake is using it like a chatbot. We are not going to be doing that as you'll see in a bit. And the result is that you're going to get

9:25inconsistent and low-quality outputs due to lack of structured prompts and processes. So, we want to be baking our workflows or the task that you do into reusable prompts. You don't want to be like, "Uh hey, I want to do this today. Can you do this for me?" Because one, you're wasting a whole lot of time writing that out, and two, it's going to be different each time, right? You want to make standardized command files, which I'll show you in a second. Just a simple markdown file walking through the steps that you want Claude code to take, so that you have a structured and reusable prompt. It's going to save you

9:51tons of times and ensure that it's consistent. And so, yeah, the solution here is to create reusable prompts. And mistake number two is not contextualizing Claude code at the start of every new session. Like I was talking about before, if you have an employee, you need to give it context on who you are, what it's trying to do, uh what business environment it's we're operating in, what the goals are, what the values are of the business. All of this context that you have to give to someone in order for them to actually function. You don't give a new employee that context, how could you expect them

10:13to do well? It's the exact same thing with using an agent like this. So, the result of not giving context is going to be poor quality output. You know when you're like talking with Claude or ChatGPT and it's just like not quite got your tone of voice right, or it's just missing a bit of the picture. It's like, "No, well, I'm not doing that right now with the strategies because we've had a

10:28change or like this is the new quarter." And you always have to go like what's called in the loop and you're chatting back and forth just giving it nudges to get the final outcome you want. When you've fully contextualized it and you've used one of these reusable commands, it can nail it. Like get it right on the button the first time. And that's when you think about how much time you're wasting in chatting back and forth, the 70% completed one might take you half an hour to finish, whereas 95% one might take you two minutes. So, if you're going to do this stuff, you need to do it right because there's a massive

10:54difference in the amount of time spent. And so, the solution to mistake two is to always be running a slash prime command, which we're going to go into in a bit. But basically, whenever you start a new Claude code session, we're going to run slash prime. It's going to look at the context and the template like we

11:06have up here. It's going to basically read the claude.md. It's going to read the context here. And then basically, we have an intelligent base to have a conversation on, which we'll be getting into in a second. Mistake number three that I see noobs making is not utilizing planning and implementing loops. Now, this means using a Claude command to say, "Hey, I want to do this within the workspace. Can you write a

11:24plan for how we could create this?" Like, "Hey, if I have a a new function, say I'm a marketing person and I'm using this and I've want to add a new command or a new task that I want Claude to be able to do for me. Some people will try to do this all manually or just chat in the in the chat with Claude code to try and get it to do it, but that often means that it's not going to fully consider everything in the workspace, and when it sets it up, it's not going to be fully aligned with everything else. You start to get this janky

11:46workflow. When you have it set up the way that I'm going to show you in a second, it can fully analyze how everything else is set up, and when you say, "Hey, I want to add this in." It will go, "Hmm, okay, we can fit this in here. It'll relate to this and this and this, and I need to update and change this, this, this this to be aware of what we have in here. So, you always have this really fresh and aligned workspace that saves you tons of time ultimately. And so, that's what they {slash} create plan and {slash} implement commands, which come as part

12:09of the template. Mistake number four is not utilizing scripts. Like I said before, scripts are a little bit of code, might be a bit scary, but if you aren't able to wrap your head around this or get Claude code to do it for you, then your hands are tied and you won't be able to get real-time data brought in. You cannot take meaningful actions of like reaching out to do things for you in the digital world. And the solution to this again comes back down to using the {slash} create plan and {slash} implement commands. Because when you ask Claude to create a plan and figure out, "Hey, how how could I

12:34automate this part of my work?" It can think, "Hmm, okay, well, I could go search the web and figure out what different tools or what bits of code I could write." And then it can actually implement and create those scripts for you without you having to do it. So, the planning is really important so that you can kick over to Claude code the brain work of having to figure out, "Hey, what scripts should I plug into this particular workflow?" All right, so, those are the biggest mistakes, and like I said, all of these are kind of already factored into the template, so we'll see those in action in a bit. But, I want to

12:59give you this diagram here, which I think is really important. I have to teach this all the freaking time to my team. So, this is the most important diagram to not only Claude code, but basically any kind of AI usage these days. And it's all around context hacking and how you can get things brought up to speed so that it can have an intelligent conversation. That's what these guys are doing up there. They're having a an intelligent conversation, but they're doing that standing on top of all of this context. So, I think of it in layers. Like, we need to start with the claude.md file, which is just a

13:25text file, and it contains the purpose of this workspace and kind of gives it an orientation of like who it is, who you are, what the hell is going on within this workspace. Then on top of that, I layer information about the business, whether it's your own business or whether you're working for one, information about you, how you relate to the business and where you fit in, what your roles and responsibilities are. So,

13:44the what, the who, and the why. Then we have strategy. So, what is your latest like this quarter strategy? Without knowing that, it's going to not have the full context, maybe be misaligned with the the objectives that you have right now. And then I like to add on top of that, when possible, the current data that relates to that strategy, whether it's your website views or YouTube data or any kind of data that relates to what you're trying to do within that workspace. And the reason we have the {slash} prime command, which is going to be run every time we start forward code up, is so

14:11that it understands everything here and we can start to have an intelligent conversation on top. It's like, I'm going to bring you up to speed. Here's all the documents, but it's important that we have these set up correctly, which is what we're going to be doing in a second. And so, this is incredibly important to understand because this is the key key to getting the best results by having it fully contextualized about you and your business and the stuff that you do. Now, the thing is, we don't just have a conversation on top of this, we actually start to build workflows on top of it. So, that is where we get to what

14:35I call the workflow layer. Maybe let's bring one of these guys down here. So, what we have here is our pal Claude code here standing on top of all of that information, right? Every time we start a new session, we're going to be bringing Claude code up to speed and then we give it our buddy, or I mean, I'm not going to assume the bird's gender, but we're going to be giving him or her or it some tools to use. And these are in the form of markdown files, which is just text files. Example, we're going to be doing one in a second called analyzing competitors. So, if I want to

15:03like, for my own podcast, sometimes I want to pull a competitor's podcast and I want to dig into it, figure out hey, what are they doing, who have they recently who have they recently interviewed, and be able to figure out what sort of their positioning is, what are their links are, so that I can do a bit further research on my own. All we need to do to create these reusable tools is to create this markdown file, with file, give it a sequence of steps like create a competitor analysis report on X person, start by researching Y or using Y cuz

15:29Claude Code has researching built in. Use the Z script. So, going back to our thing up here where we have scripts as well. So, we can reference the script that we have in here. So, hey, I want you to pull in some external data with the script. And then use the skill, which I'll show you in a bit as well, how we can pull in other people's skills that allow us to add things into these workflows like using the PowerPoint skill to be able to create a PowerPoint out of this data. So, you can see that automating your work is literally as simple as a sequence of instructions

15:57written in a natural language when your Claude Code agent has access to the right information and the right tools. We don't just give one. We can stack a whole bunch depending on any function that you have in your job or role or business. We can stack them. So, another one for me might be a market scan. Can you please scan my competitors? I can make a list of my competitors like 20

16:14people. It's going to read that competitors file. It's going to go out and scan all of these and then collect kind of a whole market scan. Say, hey, for this on the Sunday, I want to see where the state of the market is, what sort of trends are popping off. Do a scan of the market, come back and give me a presentation on it. And from here, the possibilities really are endless. You can get it to do basically anything you

16:32want. But, that is the model. All right? So, this is what we're working towards. A priming command that primes them on the context of who we are and what we do. And then we build tasks and workflows on top of that that come in the form of reusable prompts. And so, without further ado, let's jump into this Claude Workspace template that you guys will be able to get for free in the first link of the description. You better download that and then follow along or just watch this and then go have a play around with it after. That's probably a better way of doing it. And

16:55so, in order to open this up and start using it for Claude Code, you're going to want to go to your favorite browser and search up VS Code. You can come here and then come up here and click download whatever machine you're on, Mac or Windows, and follow the setup instructions that come with it. I'm sure you guys can figure that out. And then the next thing you want to do is go to Claude Code, click on Claude Code here, and then once you have VS Code open, you're going to want to go to file and open folder, and then you're going to want to click on the Claude workspace

17:18template folder that you just downloaded. So, it'll probably come in a zip. You want to unzip the zip, and then it should just be a folder, and then you'll go file, open folder, and then you'll see something that looks just like this. So, we've opened the folder, the root folder of our workspace, and in

17:30that there are all the other folders. The next thing we need to do is get Claude Code installed. What we can do is go to the terminal tab at the top here, click new terminal, and then we get this thing down the bottom here. And this is important that you get very familiar with what's on screen here. We have the side panel, which has all of our files and folders, and then up here is our editor. So, whenever I open up a file, it comes here. I can kind of like command W uh to close the tab, or I can click the X. If I've changed it, I can

17:52command S to save it, and then close it. I like to have my screen split 50/50 here, so I've got this up the top, and I've got these down the bottom. Now, this is your computer's terminal. We can run commands here to get it to do things for us. I won't have a complicated more than that, but what you want to do is head over to Claude Code, so just Google Claude Code. It'll come up with this website. We want to copy this, uh head back to VS Code, and then you can just paste it in here, and press enter. Now, it's going to take you to a setup

18:15wizard, and ask you to do a few things. Pretty damn straightforward to do. All you're going to need is either a Claude uh Pro or Max account. So, whether you have a a paid subscription for Claude already, uh if you have that, then you can just choose to use the Claude uh account that you already have. If you don't have one, and you don't want to get a Claude account, you can go to

18:31console.anthropic.com. You can sign up for a developer or a business account here. And once you've created your account, you can go to settings, set up your billing. You'll want to add a card on file here, and then add five bucks into your balance uh just so that it's showed that you've credited it, and your card is good. And then you'll be able to go to API keys down here, create an API key, copy that, and go back to VS Code, and select the API key option, and paste it in. Once it's all set up, then you should have something like this, and you'll be able to type in

18:57uh Claude. And actually, wait, I will not jump ahead there. If you want to clear this, so say I've written I've said a whole bunch of rubbish here. If I go command K, then it's going to clear it. That's a nice one to know. Just command K. Um you can right click, and go kill terminal if you want to start fresh, and just start a new terminal here. But, what you want to do now is type in Claude, which is a command to start Claude code, and it's going to get it running here. So, here we have it. I know it might not look like much, but this is your gateway to

19:21insane levels of productivity. And the first thing you need to set up with Claude code is something that I found to save so much time, cuz as I've said, we always want to be spinning up a new version of Claude code, so that we're starting with the minimal amount of context bloat possible. So, as you can see here, I've just asked Claude code to look up these commands that I already have set up, and it's going to write a little file for me here. Because, as you see here, it's asking me, like, "Hey, do I have permission to do all of this stuff?" Naturally, Claude code is quite

19:45hesitant, and it's always asking permission to do certain things. Now, you can say, "Yes, allow all edits during the session." But, it gets a bit repetitive, and honestly wastes a ton of time. So, what these two commands here are basically ways of starting Claude in what's called dangerously skip permissions mode, or Yolo mode, or whatever you want to call it. Basically, this means that Claude is not going to ask permission to do things. It may sound scary, but if you have it within a walled context like this, it is completely fine to use. I mean, I'm not taking any liability for that, but I've never had an issue. None of my team

20:12members have had an issue. Just don't put stupid stuff in here. Don't hook it up to a live production database, which you won't be doing anyway. So, you are good to do this. But, what this gives us is allows us to skip over all of these hey, yes, no, yes, no, like, yes, you can do that. But, because we're going to be spinning up Claude code so often, you want to be able to start it in that Yolo mode every time, and we also want to automatically run our {slash} prime command. So, as I explained before, our prime command is really important because we're going to

20:37be using this at the start of every Claude session. So, this is one of our commands over here. It's just a bunch of text, and Claude is going to read this and do what it says. So, it's going to basically look at all of the files in this project, get an idea of all the different files and where they're located. It's going to read our {slash}

20:50MD, which is our base level of context. It's going to read everything in the context folder here. So, {dot} {slash} means in the root directory. So, {dot} {slash} context means in the root, we're going to go {slash}, and then go into this context folder here. So, if you We them all down, we've got {slash} content, we've got slash outputs, and so on. So, this is just saying go into context and read everything that's inside it. And then after reading, come back to us giving a brief summary of who I am, what this workspace is for, and so on. And because the prime command is what we want to have run every time, we

21:19want a way of easily starting Claude in Yolo mode, and also ensuring that it always runs the prime command. So, if you see here, this will be included in uh the project file for you. So, you guys can just copy this and paste it into Claude code. I've already got it set up, but this sets up two aliases, CS and CR. CS is for Claude safety, which just runs the prime command. So, this is if you want to run it in that permissions mode where it's always asking for yes or no. I basically never run it in CS, but it is there if you want it. But, that's going to prime it,

21:45and you're ready to go in safe mode. And then I have CR, which is Claude risky, and that's running Claude uh skip permissions or Yolo mode, and then gets it to automatically run the prime command. So, what you guys want to do is to copy this and head to your power cord code down here and say, "Hey, can you set up this, please?" Paste it in. It might ask for permission a couple of times, but trust me, you can just say yes. And you'll have the ability to do this. So, if I kill this terminal, open up a new one, and I go CR, hell, I might even do two side by side

22:15so you can see. I can go CR and CR, and spin up two of them side by side. You can see bypass permissions is on, that means Yolo mode is on, and it's automatically running a slash prime. So, you can see it's going to read the workspace context. It's going through this prompt here. You can see that it's reading all of those context files, and then we get a summary back. So, it's really important to get Claude to send that information

22:36back to us and give us that summary. It's like, "Hey, this is a fresh Claude workspace. It has all of the placeholders. My role is to serve you as an agent assistant. Here's the workspace structure. Here is what is yet to be defined, and I'm ready to assist," and so on. So, that is just it repeating back to you, confirming that it understands the environment it's working in. And that's so important to make sure that we're standing on that on that base that allows us to have an intelligent conversation. And so, here we have two instances of Claude code side by side, primed and ready to go. And if you want

23:04to be able to create more, like when I'm doing development, I'll have even more of these up. This is just me pressing a command and then the button below delete, command backslash, and that allows you to very quickly open up a new terminal. So, command backslash and go CR. So, that's the workflow you're going to be using a lot because sometimes you want to kick off a create plan, sometimes you're going to

23:24going to want to kick off an implement. But, that is the basics of how to use this workspace. Now, let me walk you through a little bit more on each of these documents and why they've been set up in this template this way. So, we'll start with the context. Building from the base up, we have the claude.md file here. This is a template that's going to be changed around by you as you go. So, when you are making changes using the create plan command, it is instructed in here very clearly that uh the claude.md should always be kept up to date with what is in the in the project. So, that

23:49is already baked in, you don't need to worry about that. But, this gives Claude, every time it spins up, Claude is going to read this and also the context file. This is basically the overview of the whole workspace and what it's supposed to do. Then, we have the scripts, which are where of reference is a folder that you can kind of figure out what you want to put in it. It might be a outreach template that you want to have access to. It might be a list of your competitors. But, reference is just for any docs that don't fit into the other ones. Plans are for using the plan

24:12command. It will automatically put the completed plan into the plan folder, which you'll see in a second. We have the outputs. So, in this case, you're going to see me creating like competitor analysis reports, and they're going to be put into the outputs there. Then, we have the context, and each of these four documents have a purpose. So, the

24:25business context is kind of layer one. Uh I've got a bit of a kind of primer in here for you guys to fill out because you need to get this information really dialed in so you can fill these templates out yourself or with Claude's help. We've got the personal info, which is who you are and how you relate to the business. You've got the strategy document on like what sort of quarterly or yearly or project-based strategies

24:43are in play right now. And then you've got the current data. And for current data, you can either copy information off of your analytics or whatever it is, or you can connect it up using a script, do it in a more automated way, pull your latest data, and update this document. But, I'm not going to touch on that within this tutorial. And the last things we need to look at are these two commands here of create plan, which we're about to use in a second. This is your kind of workhorse uh command or prompt that allows you to do stuff within this workspace in a very, very efficient way. It basically

25:09says create a detailed implementation plan for changes to this workspace, and then when you run this command, as we will in a second, it takes the input that you put in and goes, "Okay, now I'm going to flesh this out into a big plan." It's going to read the whole workspace, understand what files are where. It's going to again refresh itself on the workspace. It's going to write a full plan, breaking down why it matters, the specific files that need to be changed. So, you can It really can comprehensively change the workspace without you having to chat back and

25:34forth and do all of this messing around. And once it's created that plan, we then pass it into this implement command, where it's going to take that plan file and then ask Claude Code to fully implement it and give us an update at the end of it when it's done. So, that might not seem super clear, but let's just jump into having a play around with it, and I think things will start to make a lot more sense. So, here we have Claude Code, and we're ready to start giving it some input. So, to use any of our commands, you just go {slash} and then type in the command. So, create

25:57plan, I'm going to press tab to fill that out. And then I can type into it what I want it to create a plan for. So, in my case, I'm going to talk into it. I highly recommend if you guys aren't already using something like WhisperFlow here. Uh WhisperFlow is something that allows you to very quickly uh talk into your computer. It's going to transcribe your voice and immediately dump stuff in. And when you're working in this kind of AI workflow workspace uh environment, being able to talk into it and dump a lot of information onto Claude Code um or any of your AI tools and let it kind of

26:25figure it out from there is a very It's not super precise workflow, but it's definitely a lot faster than typing. So, here we go. So, in this case for me, I want to turn this workspace into one that I can use to manage my podcast. I have a podcast where we have guests on talking about their success with their business, what's working, what's not, new tools that came out, and so on. And part of running that podcast is doing computer analysis. So, I'm actually going to swap out a few of these files here and just delete these because uh you need to go and change those and

26:48update them to be uh related to you. In this case, I can pretend like I've already done it because I have. I'm going to put these in as context. Then actually, because I've added that context and things have changed around, I'm going to kill these terminals because they've been primed with the wrong information. I'm going to start up

27:03a new terminal. I'm going to go CR. And so while that's priming, I have two documents in here. One is the about Liam and about me and my businesses. And then I have our podcast strategy and a bit of context on that. So what I actually want to do is the first step to set this up is to write a plan that's going to analyze these two documents and then update the Claude.md and anything else that it thinks is relevant to be aligned with this purpose of the workspace. So this is the first step that you guys are going to have to do. So I can go {slash}

27:29create plan. Okay, I want to set up this workspace as a podcasting workspace to help do things for my podcast. I have provided context files about me and about my podcast. And what I want you to do is put together a plan to update the Claude.md and any other parts of this workspace to properly reflect the purpose of this as being a hub where Claude is going to assist me in doing all the key functions of running my podcast. Things like computer analysis and market scans. All of these are things that I'm going to build in

28:00future. Um so probably don't include those just yet because I'll get you to plan those later. But can you please make a plan to figure out how how we can update this workspace to be fully aligned with this podcasting purpose. It's probably just going to start with the Claude.md file. So basically, I'm just saying this needs to be fully aligned around this new function and we're going to see what it says. And if you want to get the cool icons like I have here on my folders, you can come in and find different themes. I think uh material theme is what I have or icons. I don't know if

28:27it's VS Code icons or material theme icons, but it makes them look a little bit cooler. It's kind of nice. Okay, so here you can see it has created the plan for us. If you press command and click, it's going to open it up. And here it has written a plan. This was definitely overkill for just changing the MD file here, if I'm honest, but it shows you the workflow that we're going to go through for these changes. So as you can see here, the planning is extremely thorough and it it absolutely overkill for what we're trying to do here, but it shows you just how detailed

28:51it is. It's about These are the new files to create, these are the files to modify, the the key decisions made, gives all the context needed, and then what we're able to do is we're able to then use the {slash} implement command, and then actually implement this plan. So, I copy this, paste it in here, and then if you run this, it's going to make all of those changes for you all in one go. And it's going to make a big list for Claude to do, and it's going to tick tick tick tick tick until it's all fully reshaped. But, in this case, I'm just going to say that was overkill. Can you

29:15please just update the claude.md file? But, you get the idea. If you're making major changes, you're always going to want to use a plan step, take that plan, pass it into the implement command, and then it's going to fully implement it throughout the workspace, making sure everything is fully aligned and changed at the same time. Now, if we go to the claude.md file here,

29:31we can see that it's changed. This is the command center for running AI for the rest of us, Liam's interview podcast focused on AI from bootstrap business perspective, and it's given context around what this workspace is, and the commands that are in it as it currently stands. All right, so now that our claude.md everything about this workspace is fully aligned around what we're trying to do here, I'm going to command S to save that, and you can see the plans end up in the plans folder here if you ever need to go back to them. I'm going to save that, too. And now we get into the fun bit of

29:55actually taking a workflow and sort of putting the cherry on top out of all of the stuff that we've done, we've fully contextualized the workspace, we've added in our context documents. Now, we get to go into the fun part of actually creating our custom commands to do things for us. So, the example I'm going to use here is an analyze competitor command, which is going to take in a podcast name or any other information about a podcast, might be a person's name, and then I'm going to get Claude code to research the person using an external API like Appify to pull more information in about real-time data on

30:21the channel's videos, and then use a PowerPoint skill to be able to turn that into a PowerPoint presentation for me. So, we're going to do a lot in this all in one go. You could and probably should as a beginner chop this into baby steps and say, "Hey, I just want to start off with just searching the web, and then I'm going to add in the external data, and then I'm going to add in the PowerPoint." But, we're going to just YOLO it and try to get all four done at once. So, what I'm going to do is spin up a new Claude code, command backslash

30:43there, CR, get a fresh one going. Then I'm going to start writing this up, actually. So, create plan. I want to All right, so here's the plan. I've already done a bit of thinking on this, but if you're a bit more of a beginner and you don't really know that these things exist, as I'm going to go through and and point some of them out, you can kind

30:59of just say, "Hey, I want to do this. Can you figure out how?" Like, and it say, "Search the web to figure out the best way to do XYZ." Or, "I want to connect to this and pull the data in. Can you figure out the best ways or the best options?" In this case, I'm saying I want to create a new command called {slash} analyze competitor, which will do the following. It will take in the name of a person or a podcast. It'll use one Claude code deep research agent, which is a thing where it can prompt it to say, "Go into background research mode." That's much more powerful way of

31:24searching. It's kind of like deep research, but for Claude code. Um so, I want to trigger one of these background research agents, which will go on the web to find all the links of the podcast, background information, positioning of the pod, information on the host, etc. Then I want to use the MTP integration skill up here. So, this basically is a skill that shows our Claude code, when it needs to, how to use MCPs. MCPs in this case is just allowing us to easily connect to Appify, which is a a platform which we'll go into in a second, that has uh tons and tons of of of scrapers. So, I can

31:52connect to Appify, I can use one of the scrapers to pull in this case YouTube data. So, it's going to take the URL that it found in that first step of research, it's going to go on to a Appify YouTube scraper, and it's going to allow me to pull the real-time data from that channel on the on the YouTube views of the 20 most recent videos. And then I want it to take all this information, write me a research report in markdown or MD that provides a full competitor analysis breakdown. And then finally, I want to install the PowerPoint or PPTX Claude skill and use that as the final step to turn that

32:21research report into a presentation for me to scan visually. So, doing tons and tons of work here. That's the point of creating a plan, is that we can get Claude code to go and do all this thinking and come back to us with a plan on how to implement it. So, as you can see, Claude code is going away and doing all the research for me on how to create this or how to automate this part of my workflow. Now, here it is downloading the Claude PowerPoint skill and also the MCP required for the YouTube scraping. And here we go. It has created our plan here, so we can skim

32:46through it. It wants to do this. It's got a good summary. But, it's made of these key decisions about the background agent, the MCP integration, Claude skills for PPTX. And then it's got step-by-step task for it to take action to actually do this. So, we are going to take this now and go There we go. If we just press tab, it would have already had it filled in for us. And we can send that off to do the work for us. So, we can just kick back

33:12and wait. So, here it's asking us a few questions for the Apify API token. I'm going to hit to Apify and grab an API key for this. So, Apify is a great one for you guys to have a play around with. Very easy to sign up. Very low cost as well. But, it gives you access to tons and tons of scraping abilities. Very easy to integrate through MCP, which is

33:28what we're using for this. So, create an account on Apify if you want to. While we're waiting for that, I'm going to go to the Claude skills marketplace. Uh, this one here. skills.mp.com. So, this is like a marketplace for Claude skills. If you want to pull some functionality in, in this case I want to find a PowerPoint one. It doesn't look like Claude Cobra is able to find the one that I like to use. So, we can come over to this marketplace here. Great thing for you guys to do is just come

33:49and have a have a look around on this. I'm going to go back to home. Then I'm going to go PPTX. And here, this is the one from Anthropic. I'm going to download this as a zip. While that's doing its thing, we can come back to Apify here. You'll need to set up your billing. In my case, I'm just going to go to settings. Going

34:06to go to API and integrations. And our skill has successfully downloaded. I'm going to create a new one. Set an expiration date so you guys don't steal it. And then I'm going to copy this. Hit back over here and say, "Here is my API key for Apify." And then I'm going to unzip this agent skill. And I'm going to move it into my skills folder. Then I say, "Also, I just added

34:35this." So, read that, understand it, and get it integrated into the build. To pause it, as you saw me pause it there, it's just pressing escape and it will stop Claude code. You can give us some more information, then it will continue on. So, I'm just going to continue with this implement command here. Just now that I've got a bit more information that I've given it. All right, so here we can see it is going through and doing all the steps as laid out in the plan. So, it has created the MCP configuration to connect us into Appify. It has created the output directory. So, if we go into

34:59outputs here, here we have competitor analysis. It's made a new folder inside of our outputs, which has made sense cuz that's where we want them put. And now up here we should see any second the command that it's writing is going to pop up here. We'll be able to skim over that before we actually put it into into

35:13action. So, we go analyze competitor. It's written the whole command for us to use. Perform a deep competitor analysis. It's going to take in some information that we provide it about who we want it to research. Prerequisites around setting up the Appify correctly. Then it breaks down the workflow. First step is deep research, second is Appify scrape, then

35:30report and then PowerPoint presentation. Then it walks it through exactly what it should be doing at each of these steps, which is great. So, this is really comprehensive prompt to breaking out everything it needs to do. And as you can see, it's also updating our Claude.md. And here I'm a bit confused as to why it's made a script. So, we can

35:44say, "Why did you make a script?" So, this is when we do actually use it as kind of a chatbot if we want for some more information. But in the meantime, I'm going to spin up a another CR here. So, that I'm ready to run the actual commands for doing a competitor analysis. And we can let that do it and that'll be kind of the it pulling everything together that we've talked

36:03about here and seeing this in action. Oh, and look, it's even gone and updated the plan with a breakdown of the implementation that I've done. So, it's very nice in keeping everything in shape here. So, why did you make a script? Can you just do it for me? So, you need to get used to just chucking everything back at Claude code and it will base cuz it can run these commands for you. It doesn't need me to go and do it myself. Boom, there you go. And so, we have new one primed and ready to go

36:27here. It should have full understanding of I'm primed and ready to go. Let's go {slash} analyze competitor Lenny's podcast. So since our command here is already to use, I'm going to right click and close out of that. And now we just sit here and wait as it does all of our work for us. So we've just automated, well, we'll see

36:44how it goes, but I'm pretty confident. Well, it's going to go and follow all of the steps in this analyze competitor file and we should get back in this outputs folder and computer analysis, probably a folder for Lenny's podcast. It's going to do a research Oh, there you can see it's started a background agent, so I can go control O to see that. So the deep research

37:03agent is cooking away. All right, people, I had internet issues finishing that off last night, but we are back and I'm here to show you the output that we got from this. So we ran the prime. It started the deep research agent. We're searching the web for any information about Lenny and his podcast. Deep research agent came back. Then it's going to prepare the MCP integration, making sure everything's all good. The MCP and Apify is ready to go. I did have to play around with the Apify API key, so I highly recommend I'll leave it in the templates for you guys, but here in a dot ENV file is where you can put your

37:34tokens. And this is going to be a sort of persistent place for you to store all your API keys so that your Claude code agent can grab the information from there when it needs it. So once I've got that working properly, then it used the Apify MCP to pull a whole bunch of information about the channel using the scraper. We have this YouTube scraper that we're using that Claude code figured out that this is the best one for us. It's able to do a whole bunch of things, but for us it is taking the YouTube URL of Lenny's podcast and pulling back all the information on that

38:00as latest 20 videos. Then it pulled a whole bunch of information back, got the 20 videos, let me examine the data structure. And then it put together the computer analysis markdown report, which we can look at here. Remember click holding command and then clicking is what opens those up. And we have our report here. What you can do with the markdown file is right click up here and go open preview. And then you get it nice and pretty and and proper markdown formatting. So, massive reach and product manager space, Silicon Valley bubble, um premium monetization, he's got a newsletter. Here's the name, his background, his handles, positioning, the go-to

38:33resource for product managers, etc. So, all of this is great, bringing me up to speed on what this guy's podcast is about and how often he posts, episode lengths, 1 to 2 hours, frequency, 1 to 2 episodes per week, high polish, well edited, and so on. So, this is great for me to just come up to speed very quickly. And then, we have the final outcome, which is what we're really looking for here, which is it then taking that markdown report that we have here and all the context it has and turning it into a presentation. So, then instead of me having to read that big document, I can just pull up the

39:00presentation and we have that uh here. It's created a couple folders on the left-hand side here in our outputs folder. I'm just going to command click on this. I'm going to drop this down. And here we go. Overview, great. Average views, posting frequency, engagement rate, top performing videos. So, all of this is real data that's taken from YouTube at the time of running this. Content strategy, competitive analysis, doing a SWOT

39:25analysis of them, which is great. Strategic recommendations, positioning moves, and so on. So, this is a full breakdown of a competitor analysis in a spreadsheet that's been able to be done through this analyze competitor command. And this is really just the start of what I do with this workspace. If I turn it into a podcast hub for me, I can do market scans, I can do uh guest research. Hey, I want to research guests. Apify even has scrapers on here

39:47if I try to find them. YouTube channel email extractors. So, I could integrate this Apify app there through MCP, and that's going to then be able to take a guest, say I scan Lenny's podcast, figure out what guests were popping off, or maybe I do a market scan and figure out that, "Hey, these certain guests keep getting high views." Then I

40:03could say, "Okay, research this guest." And it'll kick off a similar research process to what we just did here. And then, I can say, "Great, can you go like {slash} reach out to?" Then it could look at an outreach template that I give it from the emails. Then it can use the uh YouTube channel email scraper here, pull the email from their channel, and then send them an email or at least draft it for me before I'm able to tell it to send it. So, I hope you guys can see just how crazy this can get, how much you can build into this. But, these workflows are really the key thing that

40:29I wanted to get like baked into your brain here. The importance of the priming, right? Remember, we need to be priming our session every single time when we spin it up. We want to be using new sessions of Claude Code as often as possible rather than chatting away non-stop. We want to be able to say {slash} do this. It's as fresh as

40:43possible, minimal context. Remember, we've only got 200,000 and then we have the tools on top of it and we're going to be using those to fire off the actions. And this is our task layer. So, I hope that's been eye-opening for you guys on how I'm using Claude Code, how I'm teaching my teams to use it. This setup has completely transformed productivity within our organization. So, I highly recommend you guys give it a go. The first link in the description down there will be a link to get this template and just follow the steps that I've showed

41:07you in this video on how to set it up. Remember that we have the shells alias here, which you need to copy and paste to Claude Code when you're just getting things set up. So, that you'll have quick access to the sort of YOLO mode and priming setup here so that you can spin this Claude Code up as quickly as possible. So, yeah guys, that's about all for this video. I think I'm going to leave it there. There's a ton more I could show you, but this will give you the sort of starting skills to and the starting template to have a crack at this yourself. And yeah, like I said, I

41:29highly recommend you actually give it a go cuz this is one of what everyone who's been super productive using right now. And if you can't figure it out now, you're probably going to get left behind a little bit this year. So guys, thank you so much for watching. Leave a like, subscribe if you enjoyed it, you want to see more of this stuff. And check out up here if you want to watch another video from me that's just as good if not

41:44better than this one.