Tme to dig Deep into AI and what is possible
George B. Thomas explains how he uses Claude's different modes and agent architectures to build complex outputs like an 18,000-word mini-book. He emphasizes storing knowledge in markdown files in Obsidian so AI can retrieve the right context without repetition.
Chapters
Good morning, LinkedIn friends. Value First Nation, welcome to another episode of Value First AI Daily, your collaborative intelligence report. It is Tuesday, March 24th, 2026. How are we doing, George B.?
Brother, I'm doing great. It's a good day. It's Tuesday. I've got some work that I need to get done. But today is the official day of my 25th anniversary. Wife is coming home later today from a trip that they've been on. Hopefully we'll go out to some type of anniversary dinner, but excited to see the fam, excited to see what's happening in the world of AI. How are you doing, brother?
I'm doing great. Uh, congrats, uh, no small feat. Thank you.
Yeah, 25 years of wedding bliss.
Yep. I've got 21 years to go, I guess, for me and Isabel.
There you go.
But yeah, it feels like it's gonna fly by at this point.
Yeah, it rolls, my man.
And what I need help with at this point is, oh, you get going, you get going with that daily habit. Uh, and AI keeps dropping new features, and I see Dispatch, and I see projects with Cloud Cowork. Yep. And I'm like, how do I get myself out of this, out of the command line at this point? I've been wanting to use the mobile phone for a while to be able to activate things easier. Um, But finding a moment or being intentional with any switches right now and making sure the context is coming with you and all that stuff is a little bit mentally overwhelming. But I just want to show what and why I feel the need to talk about this. As I share the screen here with volume. Right. So we've got delegate to Claude delight in the result. That's pretty accurate.
This is literally the— it can do it all for you.
How do we, oh man, what's my decision matrix for how I work this in? It helps that it's not available for PC yet.
Yeah, for a limited time that helps. Like, listen, I've been— so I've been dealing with what you're talking about this morning for a while. And I think that it comes down to there's a time and a place, right? So I'm not trying to leave the command line. I'm not trying to leave Terminal because I'm doing some powerful things. However, I know that I can tag in a partner desktop, right? Cloud Desktop to do some amazing things that I might not necessarily want to do. Inside of Terminal, or I might use Terminal and then switch to desktop. And, and what I mean by that is like, am I going to create an entire PDF visually inside of Terminal? No, I actually like to go over to desktop and I like to give it like granular information and say, turn this into a PDF or create this as a sheet. And Chris, I could literally pull up an entire like 12-week course that all of the material that we're delivering from like prompts and instructions like Cloud Desktop, right? But the foundation to get to the point to build those, Cloud Code Terminal. So, so like for me, and let's even talk about one of the other things that you talked about of like being able to pick up the phone and use your phone. Like, I've been able to do that for a while. Like, even before Claude introduced channels, I was doing that because of the whole surgence of like Claude, you know, what, Claw?
Open Claw.
Open Claw, Nemo Claw, all the claws. Good Lord, can somebody find a different word than claw for the thing that they want to talk— anyway.
Yeah, it's called agent, just so everybody knows. Yeah.
And so Uh, so been doing that, and honestly, I don't— even when Claude released Channels, like, I don't use it as much as I thought I would use it. And here's the thing, because there's a time and a place, and on my couch, the time and the place is to spend time with my freaking wife and my kids. In my office is the time to spend with my assistant. In focused thinking is time when I want to think, you know, work with my assistant. Now, do I have a way to jot down notes? For when I get there to actually then implement or do things? Yes, yes I do. But I don't, so I don't use that as much as one would think. Now, anyway, I'll stop there.
Did you set up Telegram for that? Yeah, yeah.
Okay, yeah, yeah.
I think this is, I mean, that's a great, perfect example because you did do some setup, but you didn't have to go do OpenClaw, right?
No, no.
When we talk about building with the base models, Like here, Claude is basically one by one knocking off all of the use cases that OpenClaw, you know, came up with. Yeah. And it's going to continue to do that. And, you know, in a safer way, in a, in a way that's already built into your existing process. So like at the same time, I'm thankful for maybe some of the patience I have. Related to the confidence I have in Anthropic. And we've talked about this many times. If you're product building right now, like the ability to outrun either the frontier labs or big, big platforms like HubSpot.
Yeah.
Like not, not easy. Right. And like, how else— think about how else you can kind of create value with that idea that you have. But I am more, and I think you're probably right in like partitioning the how we spend our time and getting more focused on that and like disconnecting versus connecting, because I'm thinking about the moments where I'm on a walk and I'm like, oh, That's a good idea. If I could just tell Vee right now. No, it would be done by the time I get back.
If I can tell Apple Notes right now, if I can, if I can tell ClickUp right now, because by the way, oh, this is a great idea. 5 steps later, you think about something to go with the great idea. 20 steps later, you think of a third, fourth, fifth thing. And so if you just keep jotting your notes down, Now, when you get back to Vee in a focused environment, you can say, hey, I have these 17 thoughts over the last 20 minutes on my walk. That's a better foundation. Like, I think we got to be careful of the knee-jerk responses to like, oh, let me go build it. Oh, let me go see what it can— like, we have to, again, human in the loop. We have to listen. I'm going to be the guy. I'm going to share my screen. Son of a gun. Uh, I'm gonna be the guy that's gonna scream it from the mountaintops for like as long as I need to scream it from the mountaintops. Like, foundational basic principles are not a bad thing, okay? And when you pay attention to the foundations, this is when you can do some pretty amazing stuff. Now, Chris, we've said this in the behind the scenes, uh, a little bit. And what I mean by behind the scenes is like, um, we've asked our assistants or assistants, hey, um, this just came out, do we need to do anything? And our assistant's, uh, bro, I've been doing that for a while. Or like, no, we've got that but this and it's better. And so I want to set this up for a second because I'm talking about foundations being important to get to magical places. And on my screen, basically what you're seeing is yesterday I had this idea and I was like, hey, you know what? In the Superhuman Framework for faith-driven leaders, one of the things that people are connecting with is this steward versus owner. Like I'm a steward of my business versus the owner of my business. And I was like, what if we wrote a mini book? Not a whole book, but a mini book. And so I went to Claude Code in Terminal and I said, hey, here's what I want you to do. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I'm gonna use some very important keywords words that I want you to pay attention to. I said to Claude Code in Terminal, I said, hey, I want to create a mini book. I want to make sure that you're using the book skill that we have, the writer skill that we have, the editor skill that we have, and I want you to look at the entire code base at your fingertips of Spiritual Side of Leadership. And the concept is this steward versus owner and go ahead and come up with a plan that we can write this. Now, during the plan, or in those instructions, I said, make sure you invoke agent teams. Let's make sure that we use subagents, and let's have a subagent for each chapter that we decide to write. But you, Echo, orchestrate the overarching look of it once we get to writing. So I built a plan. What I'm showing you now is we got to the point where This is all written, okay? Um, Not Yours to Save: How Stewardship Thinking Transforms Faith-Driven Leaders. Uh, 6 chapters, front, back matter, all marked edited. Uh, 18,000 plus, you know, 716 words. Agent teams and sub-agents and skills were the words that I used there. And I've done a couple drafts of this because I've added in some things. And here's where I want to talk about foundations. Okay. Because by the way, this is what you see in terminal. But if I bring up my Obsidian, what it actually built— by the way, this is Steward mini book— what it actually built was a writer context MD file, which critical what this book is not. Voice rules, absolute rules, how George opens chapters, how George introduces scriptures. It did a stories used, so it picked my stories to put into the book and even created like cross-references and signature metaphors. Uh, it has a progress file where it lets me know what is it writing, how is it writing, uh, the actual outline, the whole manuscript. The front matter. Like, oh, you can see, like, here's every one of the individual chapters, so I can dig in. So it has the entire set of things that it needs, okay? So the foundations to be able to create the whole thing. Now, what I want you to know is when we got to the first point of this The next lens that I gave it is I came in and I said, hey, I need you to look at this directory. And I came and I copied this system root path. And I said, what I need you to understand is exactly who George is from a holistic view. And by the way, this is George B. Thomas, start here, who I am. The Superhuman Framework, the 10H Pillars, my philosophy, Seeds Over 2x4s, borrowed time perspective, beyond your default, my daily practices, key stories, how I show up, transformation, purpose and significance, ownership and stewardship, voice and tone guide, uh, what I believe. Okay, and so I said, look at this entire directory And what I want you to do is I want you to take a pass and I want you to do two things. One, uh, write this as now knowing who the whole-ass human is and anything that you would add, remove, or modify to. Look for any places that we sound repetitive so that we don't— repetitive. Three, make sure using, um, uh, looking forward and calling back whenever you do need to talk about the same story so it feels like it's on purpose. Okay, so the base, the structure to have the whole ass human inside of a place where you can give it to AI. By the way, you'll look here too, is I have the whole ass businesses. Like, here's the Spiritual Side of Leadership identity docs, the Sidekick Strategy identity docs. So at any point in time when I get a wild crazy idea of creating content. I'm like, here's the human, here's the business, here's the idea, let's create it. And I don't think people, Chris, are paying attention to the foundations at that level to reach the magic places where all of a sudden you can have a mini book of 18,000 words that doesn't suck, that is able to be published and produced By the way, maybe self-published, maybe it's just a PDF. I haven't decided how I'm gonna launch this to the world. I might give it as a gift. This might be something that I just go to LinkedIn and every Christian person that I run into, I'll be like, hey, I wanna give you this free gift. It's a mini book that I wrote. I think you'll dig it. It's how you should be the steward of your business, not the owner. Or it might be a page where people can pay $9.99. I don't know, is $9.99 worth not stressing the frick out over your business? Maybe. Anyway, like, these are things that people need to start to like, should I hook it to terminal? Should it know who the frick you are? Anyway, I'm sorry.
I'll calm down. So lots of things I could dig into there. Since Obsidian came up in a conversation last night as we build out the collective, Yep. Erin Weggers is doing something really cool, which we'll be showing soon as a place for humans to talk to agents and collaborate. She said I needed a knowledge base or something, and Obsidian was suggested. So I'm curious, is all that— is that like a visual context management layer?
Yeah, bro, show the screen. The coolest crap ever. This is Echo's brain.
Oh wow.
Okay, so like if I hover over something, right, it gives me the actual thing. So like this is Echo's brain that I can dig into and look at just different things. But what it allows me to do is it allows me just to like search, uh, interact. Like what— but now Like, all of these are MD files, and historically MD files are hard to visualize. Also, if you're in here, I can't be like, um, oh, I want to edit this right here. But what I can do is I can come in here and be like, hey, George's identity, who I am, uh, right now. Okay, and I can hit save. Guess what? I just updated Echo's brain. To this right now because it's looking at this MD file. So not only is it just an easy way, because by the way, notice when I'm selecting it, I get the markdown. But when I, when I don't select it, it's actually readable like, like a human would read it. So it is MD files, markdown files, but it's easy to read. It's easy to update. So if you want to have a window into your assistant's brain that you don't have to manage or add everything from here, you can also add it here. Because by the way, I used, uh, time and a place for everything, right, Chris? I use ChatGPT that I've been using for almost, well, 2 years, maybe over. I went and said, hey, based on everything you know about me, I want you to give me all my signature phrases, words that you've been told never to use, um, you know, like this, like basically guardrails and goalposts of like how I've interacted or taught it to be voice and tone for me. And I brought the— give me a downloadable MD file. And then I just dragged the MD file into the actual folder and it showed up in my Obsidian and was in Echo's brain. Because that's the thing, like, you need to think about now this folder structure that you can interact with Terminal and now you can interact with Obsidian and you can drag any type of files into it. MD files makes sense because then it works how I'm showing. And it just gives you a new perspective of like how flexible and transformational your assistant's brain and the information that it provides and just giving you the ability to be like, oh yeah, I need to go to projects and books and here's that mini book. Or if I went to, you know, content and went to Hub Heroes, here's this thing. Or I need to go look at, you know, I don't know, whatever courses and AI content system and the actual like output for the scripts that I need. It's just, it's at your fingertips to see, edit, all those good things. Again, foundations, organization, like then, then you can create really cool stuff because you have the right stuff in place to do the things that you're trying to do.
Yeah. And that's where— this is where the challenge we started with comes up, right? Because that definitely— well, I definitely see Obsidian serving a specific gap. That I've been wanting to experience some of the visual nature of Cloud Desktop. When I'm on the command line and miss all that, this is in an IDE where this is the similar folder structure and it's like, This has always been meant for like code, code repositories, right? So all the visuals are built in. So as I choose to use it as also a documentation, like source of truth, then I lose the part that Obsidian's offering in terms of the visual ease of moving through. Yes. And yes, because I can drag and like throw stuff in, but yes. I'm often just like throwing stuff in and then it's like, okay, where's that? Uh, right. The structure and the organization. I'm completely reliant on AI.
Yeah.
And if it doesn't put it in the right spot, so I'm loving that as like, let's go full circle. The visual of Echo's brain there. I mean, come on. That's, I'm just going to go activate Obsidian like right now.
Like, but let's go full circle. Now you're back on your walk. Now you have Obsidian. Now you've created a folder in Obsidian that is ideas. Now when you're on your walk, you drop your ideas into Obsidian. Now when you get back to your workspace, you have a folder that you can say, look at this directory.
Yep.
Can we start to build a thing?
You see, I've not been able to access it from my phone.
Yep.
Right. And instead it's usually a conversation I start with Cloud Desktop and say, help me think through this. And then there's a handoff doc that's built and then bring it over into the repo when I get home.
Yep.
Right. So this is a part of that gap. And that's where what we showed at the jump, like Cloud Cowork and projects for Cloud Cowork looks like like a repo style, like, because you can manage folders like all the projects is doing for Cloud Cowork. This is where it's— I wish it wasn't so challenging, but it's like projects for Cloud Desktop. You know, we've been waiting for this moment where they start to bring this stuff together. Yeah, they're doing that right now, but the way it's being done, um, It's just interesting to watch that. I'm sure it's the way it has to be done, but like the importance of context structure as it relates to each of the different, each of the 3 different modes of Claude, you know, chat, Claude Cowork, and Claude Code, right? It's interesting and it's helping me understand why they're not just like, okay, super app ready. It's like, all right, you get some of this and we'll figure it out. And you get some of this and we'll figure it out. And you get some of this and we'll figure it out. And maybe, maybe they'll come together at times. Maybe they won't. At the end, they will definitely be together. But I guess for the same reasons, we can't just jump around and use whichever mode we feel like and know that the context is going to go exactly— that's why they can't just smush everything together.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, I wish I had more time because, by the way, here's— I want to say this because I love to give people threads to pull on. So I'm, I'm sharing. So here, let me just go back to this real quick. So I'm going to share my screen before you close and then we can close. I'm, I'm sitting at— I think I was in the recliner, maybe I was at the table last night. I'm sitting there and I'm thinking about foundations. I'm thinking about this identity. I'm thinking about the, the book that we're writing. And one thing that I want to do with this mini book, uh, that we're, that we're writing is I, I— there's a couple little things as I'm listening to it. I was in my recliner because I was listening to the book, uh, for natural reader. Um, the, the timeline isn't quite there, meaning when it was talking about the, the moment when I was being pulled out in my, um, like stretcher to an ambulance, like that story, it was telling it like I owned my business at that point. But at that point, I, I was like working for the sales line And so I was sitting there and I'm listening to this and I'm like, you know what? I've got this base of this identity and it's dope, but it's missing one thing. And so tomorrow when I wake up and I get client work done and I get some time, I'm gonna fix this. And Chris, what I'm gonna be able to do is I'm gonna be able to talk to my assistant, right? And I'm gonna be able to come over here and I'm gonna be able to say, hey, look at this page right here. And your sole job is to understand the timeline of where I've worked and what has happened. And just pay attention to this because I want you to start to create a document about when things happen in my life. And as we work together, I want you to ask the question of where does this fall in line of our timeline document for George B. Thomas's identity. So now it'll not only know who I am, but it'll know when and where I've been to create me as who I am. And then when we go into the actual book and it starts to tell the stories, it'll know the timeline and context of owner or employee or place in which that story is actually happening. This is the pieces of the puzzle that we have to put together One piece at a time. And doing this and having something like Obsidian, working with Cloud Code in Terminal, understanding the whole brain is a folder and file structure. This is how we get there.
It is. Uh, I think we'll— let's dig into some of that timeline stuff. Uh, I've been running into that too lately, and, uh, I think we'll dive in later in the week. It's like another layer of the context infrastructure.
Yep.
The timing of it all. Well, thank you for giving me another tool to add to the toolbox.
There you go.
Excited to get that going, and I hope it was helpful for, for you folks out there. Until next time, we'll see everybody tomorrow. Thanks, George.
Peace.
