Claude Code for Everyone: How to Get Started

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Welcome to the AI Explored podcast, helping you put AI to work. And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner.

Hello. Hello.

Hello.

Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. This is the podcast for marketers, creators, and business owners who want to know how to put AI to work. You don't need to be a coder to benefit from technical-sounding tools like Claude Code. You just need to know how to use these tools. My special guest is an AI educator who helps marketers, creators, and entrepreneurs simplify their lives with AI agents. His community is called The AI Agent. He's also an AI consultant. Tyler Reed, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

Good. How are you doing? Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

It's super awesome to have you here. I'd love to hear, before we get into Claude Code, I would love to hear a little bit of your journey. How in the world did you get into AI?

Yeah, yeah. So, um, about in 2020, you know, whenever COVID happened, I needed something to do, so I said, let's start a YouTube channel and have a CS, computer science degree. So I decided, let me just teach a bunch of topics about computer science to help others that are learning right now, uh, or trying to get an engineering job. So I got into that, did that for about a couple years, and took about a year break after that. And when I came back, I— late 2023, I saw a video from another YouTuber that was doing something about AI, and it was using something called ChatDev, which is kind of like a 2D world with all these characters and you kind of talk with them and they would respond and AI would respond with a, with an answer. And so from that I kind of got hooked. I wanted to learn, so I learned that as much as I could within a week and started making everything that I kind of had pitfalls with trying to learn that. I decided, let's, let me make, let me go back to YouTube, make a video about how people can use this and how great and amazing this is. And so basically from that one video that I had watched from another YouTuber that just kind of— I switched everything and kind of went all in on AI and realized that this is definitely going to be, uh, part of the future. And it has been. So it kind of— that's kind of where everything started.

Love it. So take us up to kind of today, like, what— where are you at now with everything?

Yeah, yeah. So the progression was kind of, uh, in 20— you know, whenever I got into it, people got into it earlier than that, but when I got into it, it was really like coding and, uh, developing with frameworks. So you kind of had to have some knowledge about developing and then coding these AI agents. But then you got to get into the no-code platforms where you had like these drag-and-drop, like AnyDesk, Make, and Zapier. You know, these are very popular, uh, for automations and then also using AI agents. And then now today, for some time now, I have been using Claude Code, which uses something called a terminal, but they also— Claude has an app that you can use and Generally, that is my main source of creating and automating everything.

So you have a background, I don't know, I would say as a developer or a software engineer or something along those lines, right? And along the way you decided to start to create YouTube videos on how to use other tools and it took off and then you started creating even more videos specifically. Is it for the developer community or who are you making most of these, these videos for?

Yeah. So when I got, when I got into it in 2023, I said, I was kind of learning also as a developer, like, like you kind of had some knowledge of coding, right? It was a little bit hard if you didn't have much to kind of get into that. But now the models have gotten much, much better, and so now you don't need to know how to code. You don't need a CS degree. You just kind of really need to have a desire to get into it, and it's amazing what you can do, and you don't need to have the background that I have. To get into it, which is what I think is why AI is so amazing today.

Love it. Well, let me ask you this. You obviously make lots of videos about AI coding and you probably hear from lots of people, including friends and people that you meet at events and such. What are some of the biggest kind of misconceptions people have when it comes to AI coding?

Yeah, well, now you don't need to actually know how to code anymore when it comes to AI coding. You don't need to have any background. I mean, there are some big YouTubers that have never coded before And they're teaching how to develop using AI automations, using these tools that create the code for you. And now people are making applications through like Bolt, Lovable, don't know how to code, but just using natural language, just speaking into existence sort of what you want and kind of iterating through that. You can create these applications now and you don't necessarily have to look at a single line of code to do that, which is great.

So the big misconception is that you have to be a coder to use AI coding tools. That is not true. Is that correct?

That is not true. No, no, no. You do not need that anymore.

What about the fact that it's difficult? Like most people think coding is difficult. Does AI coding, is it easy or is it hard?

Using AI to develop for you, if you have a background in developing, I feel like it's a little bit more difficult because you look at it from a different point of view whenever it is creating code that you're asking it to. Whereas if you're not a developer and you just kind of go through the process of having it create something for you, like I said, just using natural language, talking with the models, then I, I feel like, you know, it's like it's stuck on things that you have maybe have ran into before as an engineer or somebody has worked with these applications. Just, just had let it build, let's just let it go. So yeah, the biggest misconception is, is that you don't need to know how to code and they're so good at doing it for you now.

Love it. Okay, so we're here to talk about Cloud Code, and I'd love for you to tell everybody kind of what is the benefit of using a tool like Cloud Code. Said another way, if people pay attention to what we're going to be talking about today, what is the upside or advantages they will achieve if they were to utilize a tool like Cloud Code?

Yeah, so I think in my opinion, the biggest thing is you can go from idea to even a prototype pretty quickly depending on what your idea is. You can have Cloud Code build that for you and have a running prototype that you can physically see and test and test out in no time at all.

So like, just for those of us that aren't developers, like, give us some context of what is it— what would it have taken before and what does it take now just to help people understand kind of the big advantage here?

Yeah, so without AI models, I mean, you would have to have coding knowledge and you had some developing experience, and this would mean going through documentation, doing some research, testing things out little by little, and eventually, you know, in a much— take more time depending on what it was, but even something simple can still— would still take some time, and you would maybe some popular websites back in the day like Stack Overflow to help you figure out what the problems are with your code. But now with the, with these tools that we have available, such as Claude Code, it does all the research. It has knowledge, general knowledge already, and it can do some research if it needs to and create that for you in no time, in like a fraction of the time that it would have taken before.

So give me an example, like, uh, maybe something you've created that just so people can understand, like how long it took you and how long it would've taken you without the tool, just so people can really wrap their head around something like this.

Uh, yeah. Yeah. So for instance, I have a thumbnail creator that can take images from other niches in the YouTube community. It can make videos that have done well. I can take that thumbnail, kind of take a snapshot of it. And before, uh, I would've had to look at documentation, use some other libraries. If you don't even know what that means, that's fine. It's just I would've had to really understand what I could've done with that. It would've taken, more knowledge, whereas now the AI models, especially the visual models, can take a look at that, understand it, and recreate something else. And now there are these, you know, there's these other companies that I use, one called KIE.AI, K-I-E.AI, and I basically have Cloud Code understand what needs to connect to that. It connects to it, I give it a thumbnail, and it can use some of the better Google models now to create. A version of that for that I want. So if I wanted to create this whole process of understanding these thumbnails, doing research on them, and then have it produce a different one with AI, it can do all of that for me very well and much, much faster than I would've been able to before.

So are we talking about like hours versus days or what are we talking about as far as a time comparison?

It could have taken hours and hours, like tens of hours. Yes. Whereas now, I ask it to connect to that. It understands the API, the code that is needed to connect, and then it takes minutes now. I mean, it took me minutes to create this.

Interesting. I love this. So I really want to unlock what you've done here because I feel like this is really important. So what I'm hearing you say is utilizing Claude code, you created, for lack of better words, a custom application just for you. It sounds like that will go out on the web. Do some research, or you give it a screenshot and it will connect in with another tool, KIE.AI, and that other tool will do the work and then send it back. And it's all done effectively kind of on the fly. Is that what I'm hearing you say?

Yeah. Yeah, basically that's, that's, that's, that's pretty much it. Yeah. It's the only thing you maybe had to do is like know that the tool exists. That's not the only way. There are other ways that you can do this also, but that's just the way that I choose and that I like. But yeah, even if we took a simpler example, let's say I wanted to connect to my Google Calendar or my Gmail. Well, before you have to look at the API documentation that, that Google has to get your credentials. You have to have these keys, these secret keys and all that. And then you have to look at the documentation, how to connect, get your previous emails and all that, right? That would take a little bit of time. I mean, this is a simpler example, so maybe it wouldn't take too much time, but it could take— it would definitely take some time to take care of all of that. But now with AI, you can just do a simple connection and like an OAuth sign-in through Cloud Code or some other, even with N8N, right? Uh, no-code automation. You can just connect, takes a minute, and then it, it'll take care of all that for you to retrieve emails, send emails, draft emails. Uh, I mean, it's just so much simpler nowadays.

I want to ask some clarifying questions cuz we have had a number of people on the show to talk about N8N automation, to talk about Zapier and Make. And all these kind of middle tools, for lack of better words. Does Cloud Code actually sit in between those tools? Does it replace those tools? Just help me understand kind of what its role is.

Yeah, so there's good— that's a good question because you can ask questions like this, and the thing that we have to remember is these are all tools, right? Just with like any tool, some can make your life easier, uh, while you can use other tools, many tools to do the same thing. Some will be easier to make that happen than like, for instance, if you're trying to, you have a nail and you wanna hammer it in. Oh, I just said it. You would typically just use a hammer. Of course, there's other tools you could use to bash the nail in, but the hammer would be specifically designed for that. Whereas if you are just doing an automation, and especially if you don't know how to develop, which is perfectly fine, you don't need to, you can have n8n just drag and drop the nodes that you need to maybe read emails, you can filter them out, and then based on those, you can send notifications to Slack. You can even send yourself an email summarizing the last bit of emails that you got from the previous day. That would be a very simple use case that I would use that for. But you also can do with Claude Code, right? You can connect to your Gmail with Claude Code, connect to your calendar, you know, any of those, um, any applications you can connect to and do as well. So it just kind of depends on what you're doing, what you like, and these are all just tools to use.

Got it. So, so far everything we've talked about is using Claude Code as a kind of middleman, for lack of better words, between other applications, right? And in the case of Kai and in the case of N8N Automation, it is, you know, like N8N is typically, you know, my understanding of it at least is you've got all these other systems that you're tapping into it, right? Like you got your Gmail or whatever, like you talked about, and it kind of is the plumbing. But it sounds like Cloud Code could also do that. Is that what I'm hearing you say? Or is Claude Code kind of, um, able to do even more sophisticated things?

Okay, so that's a two-parted question. So to answer the first question, it can do that. Yes. Um, it can also do many more sophisticated things. So n8n is used for automation and you can also have agent AI agents in there, but I wouldn't necessarily use n8n to develop an application for me, right? That's not necessarily the tool that's useful, whereas Claude Code is very suited for creating really anything you want. And even now there was a, uh, update not long ago where you can create the full any— you can connect your Anyden instance to Claude Code. Using natural language, your voice, talk to Cloud Code, and it will actually create and upload the full workflow into your instance for you. So you don't even have to do the drag and drop anymore. It can develop that and put it up there for you, make it, make it even easier.

What, what are some of the more sophisticated things you could do with Cloud Code, just so people understand it? Like, it could do almost anything, it sounds like, but like, what's some of the stuff you've seen, or you've seen other people do? Are like legitimately people developing applications for sale? Using like something like Cloud Code?

Yeah, I mean, I, I would say maybe the biggest thing that people have seen so far is Open Claw was developed using Cloud Code.

Ah, okay, there you go.

So that's like, that's a huge thing. Yeah, not taking— not going to talk about Open Claw much more, but it was developed. So that's like, you know, you can develop anything you want with it. Um, and then once you have— even if you have like your own website, you develop your own consulting website Once it's done that, then you just need to have it hosted somewhere and you're basically good to go. So Claude has basically— can do all of that for you. Claude can do more. It has something like called skills. So it's something that like these reusable components.

That's cool.

You know, it, it's kind of really up to you what you want to, uh, what you need, right? And what makes sense for what you would like to build.

For those that have been listening to the podcast for a little while, we did have someone on to talk about Claude Co-Work. We also had someone on to talk about Open Claw. So there, if they've been listening, are familiar with these tools. And maybe you could just distinguish a little bit before we get into how to do this, the difference between Co-Work and Code. What's the big difference?

Yeah, so Cloud Code does make it— makes it very easy to connect to anything you have locally on your machine. So you open up Cloud Code on your machine and it can have access to, to the files that you have, right? It makes it very— it makes it pretty easy to do that. Um, you just basically give permissions make sure it's doing what it needs to, uh, and not doing anything extra. I would say the thing about Cloud Code is you do use it with a terminal.

Yeah, explain what that is for people that don't know what that is.

Uh, so you might, you might hear or see the acronym CLI, which just stands for command line interface. If you don't know what it is, doesn't matter. It's basically just a screen that'll pop up on— if you open up what's called— the application is called Terminal on the Mac. So if you open that up, it's basically just extra screen or you can just text, you, you can just type text on it, right? But you can type a lot of commands. So you would type Claude, it would open up once you had it installed, right? That's a separate process to install it. But once you had it installed, you would type Claude and basically just using natural language, you would, it has voice mode, so you can either talk to it with your voice, which is much quicker than, than typing. Um, you just have these conversations with it on to do whatever it is that you're trying to do.

And Claude Cowork, I think, is more of a, a genetic tool that kind of takes over. But it sounds like from— I don't know if you mess with Cowork at all, but I, the person I interviewed on the show said it, it's kind of like a, a light version of Cloud Code. It's more designed to work with the existing applications and browser on your computer, where Cloud Code is more working kind of behind the scenes via the API. Would that be a fair assessment?

Yeah, and I would say Cowork, um, you know, it makes it— it can make it very easy to connect to outside things. So for instance, you want to connect to any of your Google like Gmail, Calendar. If you wanted to connect to— I don't know if it has it, but let's say for instance has like some like Typeform where people fill out a form, or, or Google Forms, they fill out a form. Well, I get connected to that, then you can do something with it after that form has been filled out, right? Then you can kind of set up these processes and you can talk to that data. So if you talk to Gmail, say, hey, give me the last X number of emails Okay, summarize this for me, you know, things like that. It does make it very user-friendly. It is— Cowork is much more user-friendly as well than I would say to Claude Code.

Okay, so, so far here's what we know, uh, Claude Code uses the terminal, which I would imagine there's a terminal on Windows and a terminal on Mac. I would imagine it's not just a Mac thing, right? Even though we're both on Macs. They also have an application called Claude which has, has this built into it. Have you messed around with the Mac app, or are you mostly just using terminal?

So for me, as an engineer and developer, I essentially, I really just go through the terminal myself. But I have used the, I've used Claude on the web. I've used Claude, I've downloaded the app, the app for my Mac and use that there as well. It's a lot of it is preference. I will say that I've tried to use Cowork to have it do things like work with local files on my computer. And it's much easier to do that with Claude Code than it is with Cowork.

Got it. Okay. Um, what about the paid? How much does it cost to use Claude Code? And talk about that a little bit.

Yeah. So I guess before you really can use this, they do have a free tier that is not very generous. You can use it up in minutes before you have to wait, uh, some number of hours, or maybe it's the next day on the free tier. But they have a $20 paid version which is the Pro subscription. And if you were just getting started, that's what I would recommend, just to kind of familiarize yourself with it. And then they do have the next tier up, which goes up to $100. So it's a little bit of a price increase from $20 to $100. But then they have another one after that at $200. But I really would only recommend that if you're like a user of that daily for hours, you know, then to actually get your money's worth.

Well, and for people that have Claude already, a regular Claude account, it's the same exact account, right? So if you already have a Claude paid account, like pro account or whatever they call it for $20 a month, you could start using Claude Code and it's gonna use the same account. Is that correct?

Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, it's, you would use it on your subscription. Yeah. So if your subscription is $20, you would just, once you load up Claude for the first time, Claude Code for the first time, you would just kind of use a login command and then it would direct you to the browser to log in with your subscription account, like whatever email account that is tied to the subscription.

I talked to a lot of people on the ground at AI Business World last month, and what I heard over and over again is people are having a hard time keeping up with the change and figuring out exactly where they should focus. And it's true that that is hard to keep up with, but my keynote I think could help. It was called The Future of Marketing: How to Thrive When AI Changes Everything, and in it I share research real AI applications and a clear framework for yielding AI as your most powerful ally, making you irreplaceable. And here's the thing, you can still watch it. And not just that keynote, but every keynote and session and workshop from both AI Business World and Social Media Marketing World is available to you right now with your virtual ticket. We're talking dozens of quality sessions focusing on AI workflows, content, Instagram, Facebook ads, and a whole lot more. And you have 18 months to consume it all. Right now, tickets are on sale for $200 off, but only until May 15th. Head over to aibusinessworld.live. That's aibusinessworld.live to get your tickets today. Let's talk about kind of the basic beginnings of utilizing, uh, Claude Code. So, so far we know that we have a paid account with Claude, um, and we know that we want to use the terminal. and there's an app called Terminal, at least on a Mac there is, and you just see a flashing cursor, which kind of hearkens back to the old days of computers. Um, what, how do we actually install this darn thing and get it up and running? Like, what are some of the things we need to be kind of just aware of?

Yeah, so they have, I will say they have pretty good documentation. If you were to type like Claude Code installation on Google search, you know, the AI would probably give you the commands, but they, I would imagine that one of the first links on the search would be to their, their website, their one of their documentation websites, and you just kind of copy and paste the commands that they give you depending on the machine you have. So if you're on Windows or if you're on Mac or Linux, they would tell you what to copy and paste. And then once you kind of have done that, then it would tell you, show you how to— you just type in Claude, it'll start running, and then for the first time you'll log in, which it would also tell you. And you just kind of go from there. And then once you log in, you have access to Claude Code and start asking away whatever it is that you You want to talk about—

okay, so this terminal, I'm going to kind of describe it to people that haven't seen it. You're kind of in a little window, almost like you're logging into another computer, right? So you put in the special code and everything is text. You know, you don't use your mouse or anything, like it's just text. And once you've logged in and successfully set it up, talk to me about things like, um, you know, permissions and models and web search and all that kind of stuff. Like, because there's stuff we have to enable to make it all work.

Yes. So, okay, that's a fair point to talk about. When you do it for the first time, you do have to enable web search. So there would be a command that we want to search for to enable web search. And then I think after we enable web search, I think we are pretty good at that because you'll be using that a lot. It will also ask you for permission for anything that you do for web searching or if it's going to manipulate anything when you're computer, what it's going to, you know, you want to write files, you want to create documents, uh, PDFs, anything like that, it will ask you permission. So that's by default, although you can have it skip that. Um, I wouldn't recommend doing that unless you kind of know more what you're doing and more comfortable with it. But yes, so there are permissions. There's a command to edit that, but I wouldn't worry about that. But generally, it's going to ask you before it does anything. It will say, hey, do you want to allow this? And you either allow it or deny it, or you can say no do something else.

Do you have to give it access to a certain folder or something like that on your computer, or how does that work?

Doesn't necessarily matter where you load up Claude code. Like, if you are more familiar with it, you have a project that you're working on, right, and you're inside of that folder, before it really does— like I said, before it does a lot of things with it, adding, removing, editing files within somewhere on your computer within some other folder location, it will generally ask you if— to make sure that that's what you want to do first. It will never really do anything that could potentially hurt your computer from its point of view without you allowing it to do that.

Okay, so for, um, Claude users like you and me, there's lots of different versions of Claude. You got Opus, you got Haiku, you got Sonnet. Does it just default to the most expensive model? Like, talk to me a little bit about models and tokens and stuff like that, because I'd imagine if you're not aware of what you're doing, you're going to blow through your account limits pretty quickly, right?

Yeah. Okay, so yes, so Claude, Anthropic— Anthropic is the company that owns the Claude family of models. There are generally three, three models. It go, uh, what's it, Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku. Opus kind of being the best one as far as like thinking and planning things out, uh, Sonnet being kind of the best, like the middle, like the best of both worlds, and then Haiku being the fastest but necessarily maybe not the best for planning or thinking, planning or thinking something that you would like to really have done. So if you really want to come up with a plan of an app that you want to make, or, you know, come up with some document that you're trying to plan out, Haiku can do it fast, but it may not come up with the results that you would like. So generally, so we'll get to tokens here in a second. Yeah, so generally Sonnet is a general use one that you can use all the time and it won't consume all the tokens that you have. Okay, so segueing into tokens, um, there's something called a context window with the, with the subscription, subscription that you have. Let's say you have the $20 paid version, you basically every— you have weekly, I believe it's weekly now, and every 5 hours you have so many that you can use. And if you use like haiku, like let's say if we rank them by the usage, so it'd be opus used the most, then sonnet, then haiku is the least. Then you can use Haiku. You can do more with it, right? Because you could use it more often because it would consume less or use less tokens, but also wouldn't give you the best results depending on what you're doing, right? If you're just summarizing something for code, for coding, does it really matter?

I mean, like, it sounds like coding isn't really that complicated because it's kind of a no— I mean, maybe it is, I don't know. Do you really— what do you normally recommend, and how do you even choose between the models when you're in the terminal?

Yeah, so there is a— so something that you have to get familiar with is they're called slash commands. Okay. So if you have never used that before, basically if you type on the keyboard where Jen thinks where the same key where the question mark is, there's a slash there. You would type that and then you can have a list of commands. One of them you would type model and you can switch your model that you wanna, that you wanna use generally. I believe for new users, this could be different now. They're constantly updating Claude Code, but I believe it uses Sonnet. It wouldn't use, give you the best one to use by default. Um, but you can switch it there if you would like. But as far as the coding goes, one thing that I would like to do, one thing I like to do is when I wanna plan out what I'm doing, I use Opus. So I would switch to the Opus model 'cause it has the biggest, uh, context window. And by the way, reference context window just means that it has so much it can store in memory based off the conversation you're having with it before it could forget. And what it does now is it summarizes. If you reach that point to where it's like, okay, we've talked about so much, I cannot remember anything else, then it'll summarize what it's done before. It'll summarize what you've already talked about so that you would then have room to talk more.

Yeah, and this is important because for active users of Claude like me, at a certain point I run out of kind of like context window and I have to start a new thread, you know, is how I do it when I'm using regular Claude. And it's in a project, so it kind of has this overall memory for the project, you know, and every new thread, it can reference the old threads and stuff.

Is—

do you need to do that when it comes to coding too, or is that not necessarily how it works?

Yes. So whenever I come to coding, I would use Opus to kind of plan out what you're trying to build, and then I would switch to Asana to do the actual coding. Of course, you're going to get preferences from everybody, kind of has— everybody has differing opinions, uh, about this. But in my opinion, just my personal opinion and what I've used, Sonnet has been the best. Now, when I say this, there's also versions of these models. So you can see Sonnet 4.5, 4.6. There's older versions like 4.1 for these as well. You can generally just use the latest versions, the like higher numbered versions of these models, and you'll be okay. But yeah, you generally, for coding anything, just use Sonnet, the latest Sonnet model.

Yeah, the question was specifically on the context window. If you're developing something and you hit like the, the limit of your context window, or, you know, I don't know. I mean, like, I know it compresses it in regular Claude, maybe it does it in Claude Code too, but I would imagine at a certain point, like in Claude, if you ever hit the limit, you just open up a new thread inside of a project. But I don't even think there are projects inside of Claude Code, but maybe there is. Are there projects inside of Claude Code?

If you were to create a project using Claude Code, and let's say you reach this— you're in the middle of developing your app and you all of a sudden you reach this, it says At the bottom right, it'll tell— give you a percentage until you've reached this context window we're talking about. So say you have like 5% usage left. Well, now what you can do is you can have it compact your conversation. So it kind of stores a memory, a summary of everything we talked about so far, and then you can continue within the same context to keep coding. Or if you want to get a little bit more advanced, you could actually spawn different sessions so you can open up more than one terminal. You can have more than one agent that has their own context that is developing either simultaneously or together in some way. Your application.

Oh, that's really important. So let me ask this.

Yes.

Let's say you started a— I'm just going to call it a conversation. I don't know what else to call it in the development world or a thread. And you're working on this over a matter of weeks, can you give it a name and save it so you can come back to it? Or do you just have to keep that window open at all times? Like, how does that work exactly?

Yeah. So there's— let me say, I don't want to say basic, but something that you should know when you're developing with or using Claude code, especially if you're developing an app or you're just developing anything, you can create something called a Claude markdown file. So this is a Claude.md. That's just the extension. Like, it's basically a text file. Just imagine you're just creating a text file and what you can do with it is you can ask it to create this and there's a command called /init if you're in that folder. But anyways, it will, it can give a brief summary of what you're working on and then it'll reference that. My computer completely shut down. Next day I come back, I wanna work on the same thing. It can look at that to have a reference Is that like a skill or is that more like a project?

I'm just curious, like using the Cloud vernacular.

So it's more like project-based, so you can have multiple. So depending if you have different projects you're working on, I'd recommend creating a Cloud Markdown file for each project so that whenever you're kind of going through them— and I think actually what you said brings up another point— is you, when you were working with Cloud Code and you have— they, they call it a session. So we have a terminal open, you're working on something, just work on that thing with Claude Code. If you want to work on a different project, open up another terminal as a different session to work on that project. You— I would not recommend working on multiple projects within the same session.

That's kind of like the equivalent of a thread inside of regular, uh, any kind of AI model, right? It's kind of like that, kind of.

Yeah.

And if you tell it to create a Markdown file out of it, presumably you can name it and save it on your computer and then reference it in the future. Is that kind of what we're talking about here?

Yeah, that's correct. Yes. So it'll always have some reference point to understand what this thing you're working on is.

All right, I love it. Uh, this has been really helpful, and I, I know I've been asking a lot of pointed questions, but I'm sure they're the kind of questions everybody wants to know.

Yeah, no, I love it.

Anything else we need to understand before we get into an example? Because you and I talked about an example that we were going to share about connecting Telegram and your Google Calendar together. But is there any other kind of fundamentals we need to understand? Like, do we need to talk about skills at all? Before we get into that, or do you want to just go right to the example?

Maybe just a quick review. So as you understand, the Claude code is in a terminal.

Yep.

And you, you open up a session with it. When you start creating something, you are slowly filling up, or maybe quickly filling up, a context window. You— this context window is the amount that it can store in memory and understand the conversation. Once it reaches the capacity of what it can understand, it'll compact it so you can continue. Or you— and I would recommend, like we said, creating that Cloud Markdown file so it kind of always has some frame of reference of what you're working on for that specific project. So with that, I think that skills coming in is a little bit more advanced. I don't say more advanced topic because I think I use them every day. I literally use them every day, especially if I'm doing YouTube research. Um, but skills are basically you can, you still tell Claude, like I told Claude, hey, I wanna, I wanna research what other channels are doing, their top videos, what they've done in the last 2 weeks. Um, I wanna know what descriptions are. I wanna grab their, uh, the MP4, their file, then maybe transcribe that later to see this, to analyze the structure of their video, to see why it did so well. Um, so I talked to Claude, said, hey, I wanna research YouTube skill. I wanna research YouTube competitors. See why they're doing so well so that we can maybe replicate that and be part of what I'm doing. So what I did is went through this process. It created something for me. It created what's called— I just asked it, create this skill. It created what's called a skill, which is essentially just another text file that you can reference for later, and it becomes a slash command. So I have one called /youtube-research. Ah. When I create the skill, that's what it named it. So when I open up Claude Code, I, at any point in time, I can say I type /youtube research and then I can do like somebody in the AI field.

Yeah.

Research their last 2 weeks of videos and it'll go out and do that for me.

So this is a creative question. You can do everything you just said inside of the Claude proper. Is there any reason why you couldn't use regular Claude and then have it create the skill and then move it into code just because it might be a more easy interface? Because Claude, Claude itself can do everything you talked about as far as doing the research, but it might not be able to do everything. But would it make sense to potentially create some of these skills inside of the Claude interface and then move 'em over to code? Or do you generally not advise that? Because I know I have skills, I, I have skills inside of my regular Claude that I've created, you know what I mean? And I think that's—

gotcha. Yeah.

They're probably the same kind of thing. It's a markdown file, you know what I mean?

You can, yes. Um, Mark, that's kind of like basic skills.

Yeah.

Basic structure of a skill is just a markdown file or text file essentially for people. But if you wanna do some things that are more advanced, like the thumbnail creator skill that I use, uh-huh, for whenever I'm doing my videos or social media, it does need to create code and you need to store keys, right? There you need to store some secret, you know, secret keys or something like that to connect to the outside world. So if I want to connect to what I mentioned, ki.ai, which has all of the image models there, I have a key that I have to get— has to give it access to. And so I store that on my computer, locally on my computer. And in my, my opinion, it's easier to do that whenever you're using Claude Code, although you can do many things with CodeWorks. So I don't want to say it's not possible.

Yeah, um, well, and if you're doing very basic things, you could start with Claude Code if you're already using Claude, if you're already using it, and then you could bring it over probably into, uh, Code, and you could make it more advanced, I would imagine, right, if you wanted to?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

So let's talk about this cool example that I already alluded to a little bit of, uh, something maybe everyone could use, which is this Google Calendar Telegram thing. Kind of talk about the use case a little bit and explain, like, explain what it does, and then we'll talk about how to do it.

Yeah, so I think that a use case for many people, especially if you have a small business, you're an entrepreneur, or even a content creator, right, in anything like that, then something that you would do is you have like an end of day prep for tomorrow. So, uh, let's say you you know, store everything on your calendar, what you're doing. Then what you could do is you could use Telegram, Discord, and even now you can use— if you have Apple phone, you can use iMessage. They just came out with— so you can have it message you. It can grab what you're doing for the next day, it can summarize that concisely, and then send you a message in some format such as what I just mentioned. And then now you'll know the next day without actually either visiting that. It's just, hey, Here's a summary of everything you're doing, and then you can have it maybe, oh, what, even though you have times for it, it can maybe optimize the times for you as well. Like, hey, you said you had this at 4, but maybe we can get this done earlier based on what you're doing already. You know, that's—

oh, very interesting.

I think it's a basic example that people can really— that can use.

So let's talk about that. Let's talk about fundamentally how that would actually work, like help people understand, because hopefully some of you are listening are going to do exactly what— this will be the first thing you do inside of Cloud Code. So let's walk people through like how, how something like this might work.

Yeah. So, you load up Cloud Code. And what you would want to do first is you need to be able to connect to your Google Cloud. You need to be able to connect your Google Calendar. Okay. What you could do also is you say, hey, Cloud Code, I want to have access to my Google Calendar. Tell me how to do this.

Oh, it will tell you. Okay. I like that.

And it will give you the steps on what you need to do And even if you're using, depending on how you're using n8n, it would, it would basically be the same steps.

And, but you don't need a, you don't need n8n in this case, right? At all, do you?

You don't. No, no, no, no. Yeah. I just mean that no matter what you're doing.

Yeah.

When you're doing something with Google, that generally the same steps no matter what platform you're doing.

Okay. So you say, tell me how to connect to my Google Calendar and then typically what it'll probably tell you how to log in and get your API key or something like that.

Yeah. It basically, it'll give you the steps. Uh, if something that you can do is, is say ELI5, so explain like I'm 5. So it gives you the exact steps. And I do it, right? I do that all the time because it's something I don't know. And like, explain like I'm 5, because I really don't know what I'm doing. I need this to be written out explicitly what to do. And do that, and you just follow the steps, and then you will have that. You have the information that you need for it to connect. It'll create the code to do the connection. And then once you have that, you know, you can just, you basically just talk to it like, hey, What do I have tomorrow? I want you to add—

Wait, wait, hold on a second. Let's make the connection to the Telegram side of things too. Like, just—

Oh, yes, yes. I'm jumping ahead.

Yeah.

So now what you would do is you could type /telegram and you go through this configuration process if you want to use Telegram and—

Kind of explain the advantages of Telegram because everybody in the development world seems to be using Telegram for some reason.

I don't know if I have the answer for everybody, but I think that it's the ease of setup. And if you don't have Telegram, like I didn't have Telegram before, like a year and a half ago, I never used it. But also not everybody was using it like we, like we had just mentioned. And it was easy to set up and it's basically just creating a bot inside of Telegram that you're connecting to, like that you're messaging back and forth with. Yeah.

And for folks that don't know, Telegram is a lot like Messenger, you know, probably is the best example. It allows you to text, it allows you to have groups of people in there, all sorts of cool stuff. And my understanding is you can create lots of sub little accounts underneath your free account so you can have like a Telegram for this and for that and they can have their own identity. Is that kind of true?

Yeah. Yeah. So if you want one specifically to talk to just for your calendar every day, you can schedule it, then yeah, that's by all means you can do that.

And it's a two-way communication path, right? It goes back into Claude Code, or is it just a one-way path?

Yeah, so it's a two-way communication. With that said, you know, your Claude Code session on your computer has to be open.

Okay.

So, and, and as long as you have your Claude session open on your computer, it's a two-way connection. Talk to it. So you don't have to be at your computer, right? So you can be driving, say, hey, go fetch me what I need for tomorrow, or on your bed, fetch me what I need for tomorrow. Like, it doesn't matter. Like, it, it's, you can just talk to it and it'll respond back to you.

This is really cool because now all of a sudden, not only is this, um, a special application, for lack of a better word, you just created that has access to your calendar and has a communication layer built into Telegram and it can go back and forth. Now all of a sudden, my guess is you could develop this thing to do a little research for you too. Like, hey, I've got a sales meeting tomorrow with Tyler. Um, do a little web research and give me a summary. I would imagine you could easily do that kind of thing with a tool like this, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So if you need to, even with like, let's say you have leads, for example, and I believe the term is they enrich data. So basically enriching just means they're just going out searching more information about this person or thing and then coming back with all and like summarizing it for you. And if we have a minute, I can give you recently have a real world example of somebody that's used Claude Code that I've taught that never used it before.

Yeah, let's hear it.

And how it's helped them. So there was a mother of two. She's also in the YouTube world, but the problem was she also has a day job. So she tries to publish her— she does Reels. So she tries to publish her Reels on all these different platforms. That takes time. And then also coming up with the captions for each of those Reels after she makes them for each different, you know, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, all those, you know, different rules and all that. Well, I had introduced her to Claude Code. I just kind of taught her a little bit on a call how to do it. And what I set up was where She just basically gives her reel, she puts her reel on a Google Drive. So we connected her Google Drive to Cloudcode and she would say, okay, I need this for 7 different platforms. I want you to put out for 7 different platforms. I want scheduled 2 days, 2 times a day, or like, I want to, I'm sorry, I want to schedule for this time each day. She had multiple, she could schedule all of these at the same time for the whole week and it would create a caption specifically for each platform. And instead of her spending all this time trying to upload it at that specific time each day, she could be busy, she could miss something, right? It's kind of a headache. Instead, she spends 2 minutes, she has all the reels in her Google Drive, and she says, do schedule this for these times. And it creates all the captions, schedules it, and she doesn't think about it for the rest of the week. Wow.

I mean, that's, that's crazy because there are people that pay a lot of money for tools that do the exact same thing. And effectively what you're saying is she developed with your guidance an ability to just— she already batches the videos to just get them into a folder and then have Claude Code take, take over the scheduling of it. Um, that's effectively what I'm hearing you say, is that correct?

Yep. So once she, she just creates the short-form, uh, videos, puts them on a drive, and then once they're there, she just logs into Claude Code and says— in her specific case, she she will do 14, 2 per day of the week. So on Saturday night, they're all there in her Drive, and she says, hey, I want them for these times each day. It goes out each video, creates the caption for each platform, and goes through all of them. And the process might take 10-15 minutes in total to schedule all those videos out for the rest of the week. But she leaves the computer. She says that, and it does it for her. She leaves the computer, and then by the time it's done and she doesn't worry about it at all for the rest of the week. It's just done.

Tyler Reed, first of all, thank you for answering all of my questions. This has been a really interesting and eye-opening discussion. It seems achievable. Yeah, it seems really achievable. And I have had so many people on the show where we've talked about cloud code and it just kind of flew right over my head. I mean, even my team uses cloud code to develop our software, But I know that— I know that this is so now achievable. And I know that you have a bunch of YouTube videos and, and stuff. So what I want to ask you is, if people are interested in discovering more about you, what's the best platform for them to maybe connect with you or watch your content? And then if they're interested in working with you, where do you want to send them?

Yeah. So YouTube is my primary social media platform, but I have a free school community that anybody can join. It's actually The AI Agency.

Oh, agency. Okay, got it.

My face will be on there. Um, and so let's say join that. I have classrooms on there of how to do many different things actually and using different platforms as well. But specifically for Claude Code, I keep, you know, every week I'm putting more and more stuff up there. So you just reach out to me there.

So what's your YouTube channel? How do they, how do they find your YouTube channel?

You can search for Tyler AI or Tyler Reed AI. I think both will work. You'll see my, you'll see my face on there everywhere. But, uh, but yeah, so just Tyler Reed AI or Tyler AI.

And then the school is called AI Agency, CY, like, like an agency? Is that what you're saying?

Like CY? Yeah, D-A-I, D-A-I Agency, CY.

Okay, well, Tyler, listen, thank you so much again for sharing your insights with us.

Yes, no, thank you so much for having me, Michael. I really, I really appreciate it.

Hey, if you missed anything, we took the notes for you over at socialmediaexaminer.com/a104. Be sure to follow this show on your favorite podcasting app and do check out my other show, the Social Media Marketing Podcast. This brings us to the end of the AI Explored Podcast. I am your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may AI help you become more successful.

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