How To Install and Use Claude's New AI Agent

Matt Wolf walks through setting up Claude's new AI agent, which can control a desktop to browse the web, fill spreadsheets, and resize images. You install Docker, get an API key from console.anthropic.com, and run a container that opens a virtual desktop. The agent takes screenshots and executes commands: it pulled YouTube videos into a spreadsheet, fetched a weather forecast, and downloaded images, though complex GUI tasks sometimes failed.
Questions this video answers
October 23, 2024.
console.anthropic.com.
http://localhost:8080.
5 requests per minute.
50 requests per minute.
Chapters
Anthropic launched something amazing this week and we officially have low level AI agents that can go and do work on our behalf for us now. So check this out. I can give it a command like find the five most popular videos on Matt Wolf's YouTube channel and add the dates and title of each of them to a spreadsheet. Press Enter and watch as the tool opens Firefox for Me, navigates to YouTube for me, searches out Matt Wolf, clicks into my channel for me. It clicks on the videos tab, sorts it by most popular, opens up a spreadsheet for me, and then watch as one by one it adds each of the titles of my most popular videos and pulls in the time since it was released. It just scraped it straight from my YouTube channel and is creating the spreadsheet hands free. It just went through that whole process and just did each of the steps until I have the spreadsheet that you see on the screen. Right now I'm talking as it's doing it. I'm not doing anything. This is crazy that we're at this point with AI where it can go and use tools and do work for us on our behalf by giving it prompts. You want to know how I did this? Let's break it down. All right, so let's go ahead and set up this new computer use feature. Now, it's not the most intuitive process to set it up. Like you can't just use it inside of Claude right now. You have to install some stuff on your computer and set up your API key. It's really not that complicated, but it's not as simple as just going to a simple website and being able to use the tools. So the first thing you need to do in order to set this up is we're going to install Docker on our computer. So if we head over to docker.com here, click on Download Docker Desktop. I'm personally on a Windows machine here. Obviously download Docker for whatever operating system you're on. I will grab this one here. Once it's downloaded, we'll go ahead and run it. We'll go ahead and leave the configuration with the default setup and click okay. And after about a minute or so we have Docker installed. So I'll go ahead and close out of this. Now that Docker's installed, let's just go ahead and open it up in the setup process. We're just going to go ahead and use the recommended settings, click Finish. And now I've got Docker set up on my computer. So now that we've got Docker installed and running, we're going to click on this little terminal button here. This has a terminal directly in Docker Desktop. Click that. Go ahead and enable your terminal here. What we need now is a Claude API key. To get that, we're going to go to console.enthropic.com and you're going to need to log in. I logged in with my Google account. You're going to see a menu that looks like this. Go ahead and click Get API keys and create an API key for the name. I'm just going to put test key. You can name it whatever you want. It doesn't really matter. It's just so you know what you created that key for. I'm actually going to delete this key after the video, so not a big deal. And I'm going to save it to my default workspace and click Add. And we'll get this API key here. I'll go ahead and copy that. I have this little snippet of code here. I'm going to put this code in the description so you can easily copy and paste it on your computer. But we need to do something with this code first. So here you can see anthropic API key equals. And then dollar sign anthropic API key. We're going to go ahead and select this whole section where it says dollar sign anthropic API key. And we're going to paste in that API key that we just grabbed from the console here. Now we're going to copy this entire code that we just created again. It'll be in the description. And let's open up Docker again. I'm going to go ahead and click on this terminal button and then paste this code right into my terminal and hit Enter. And you can see it's firing up this whole thing for us. It takes less than a minute. And when it's done, you'll see this little call to action that says open local host 8080 in your browser. To begin, I just click on this. You'll see that it opens up localhost 8080. And it also has like a fake desktop over here on the right. And I can give it commands. So you can see we've got like Excel, we've got like a terminal Firefox, a PDF viewer, calculator, like a Paint app, and various things that it can use on this desktop. Now, I can't actually do anything on this desktop unless I click on Toggle Screen Control. If I click on this now I have access to actually use the desktop myself. But I don't want to use the desktop myself. I want the AI to use the desktop. Now over on the left, we can give it commands and it will do multi step processes and use the various tools that are available. So I can give it a command like find the weather for the next three days in San Diego and then create a spreadsheet that contains each date and the high and low temperatures. Let's see if it can actually run this process. You can see it says running agent and it says I'll help you get the weather information in San Diego and create a spreadsheet tool. Use computer. Now it's opening up Firefox. I'm not doing any of this. It's opening up Firefox on its own. It took a screenshot to see that it was actually using Firefox. Then it typed in San Diego weather forecast for me, figured out the temperatures. Now it opened up an Excel spreadsheet again. I am not controlling the desktop at all. It's literally just taking screenshots every so often to figure out what it needs to do next. So now it's got a spreadsheet open and it ran into its first error. Here it says runtime error, number of request tokens has exceeded your per minute rate limit. So apparently it has some limitations where if it needs to go through too many steps to get you to your end result, it falls apart. But let's go ahead and see what happens. If I just type, please continue the process. See, it says running agent again and it seems like it's getting back on track. Now it just added the date column, the high temperature and the low temperature column. I'm not doing any of this. Added the date, the high temperature, now the low temperature for October 23rd. Now it's doing the same thing for October 24th. This is based on all of the information that it just found by searching the web. So it searched Firefox for weather in San Diego for the next three days, found that information, opened up a spreadsheet, created the spreadsheet for me, and then filled out all the details on the spreadsheet. Now it's actually saving the file as San Diego weather. If I scroll through, you can see each step tool use computer input action type text date. You can see it added the date in this first column here. And then what it does is it takes the action, takes a screenshot to see the current state of the computer, takes the next action. See, you can see here. Made the high temperature column, and then took a screenshot to kind of confirm it did everything right. Then it added the third column for low temperature, took a screenshot to make sure everything was looking good. And it went through the process of doing the thing, taking a screenshot, doing the thing, taking a screenshot to confirm that it's actually going through each of the steps properly. And our final result here is a spreadsheet that I can click around on and it's got the date, the high temperature and the low temperature. If I open up Firefox here, you can see this is where it grabbed the data from San Diego weather forecast. And it grabbed it for the next three days here. I'm going to go ahead and refresh and start over. So my chat window on the left is clean. And let's tell it to find a photo of Matt Wolf the YouTuber, download it, and then resize it so the height is 500 pixels. And let's go ahead and let it run that. Let's see if it will automatically do all these steps. My hands are off of it now. So it's looking at what's currently on the screen to figure out what it needs to do. It sees. We got Firefox with the web. It just did a search for Matt Wolf YouTuber. Now it's clicking on the Images tab to find some photos. And once again, it looks like I ran into that same error code. Rate limit error number of request tokens has exceeded your per minute rate limit. I can also contact sales at Anthropic to discuss my options for a rate limit increase. But let's go ahead and do what I did last time and just tell it to please continue. And it picks up where it left off. You can see it's saving the image here. It took a screenshot to see the current state of and now it won't even continue even when I type. Please continue. So apparently that's just too many steps for it to handle right now. But the big idea is we can see where this is all headed. I'm going to go ahead and refresh this again, get a whole new setup going. You can see if I go back to my Anthropic console here under my limits, you can see it's got five requests per minute on Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which is what it's actually using. So apparently it's just sort of moving through those steps too fast to where I'm hitting that limit. Okay, so what I just did was I entered some, some credit card details on the billing section. So that I'm no longer on what they called the free tier. Now I'm on tier one. And it looks like it upgraded my requests per minute to 50 instead of 5. So now I should be able to go back and use this agent feature without it sort of hitting those rate limits. So now let's try this again. Hopefully with an increased rate limit, I'm gonna use the prompt once again. Find an image of Matt Wolf, the YouTuber, download it and then resize it so that the height is 500 pixels. And let's let it do its thing. Thing. Hands off. I'm not doing anything. It took a picture of the screen. Says it's going to open up Firefox. Now it's opened up Firefox did a quick search for Matt Wolf. YouTuber. Found a bunch of images when it clicked to the images tab. Now, this is a little bit slower than what you're seeing. I'm cutting out some of the gaps in the video to make it feel like it's moving along. But there is a little bit of a delay between each of these steps because what it's doing is it's looking at a screenshot to see the current state of the screen. And then what it's doing after it looks at the screenshot is it decides the next action. Like right now, it sees that it's on a file naming section. So it named the file, it downloaded it as untitled.jpg and now we can see it's using a command down here to try to resize the image that it just downloaded. So this is actually pretty insane. I want to test one last thing because there's like a little paint program here. Let's tell it to open, paint and draw a stick figure. Let's see if it can dry. Don't even know what's going to happen here. Okay, so it opened up a tool called Color Paint here. Now let's draw a stick figure ahead, a circle, vertical line for the body, arms, horizontal lines, legs, two diagonal lines. So now it's looking at the screen. And let's see. Does it actually draw this stuff or is it stuck in a loop? Seems to be stuck on the drawing step. Doesn't quite seem to be figuring out how to draw an actual picture right now. There theoretically should be a circle already here, but we're not seeing it. I'm gonna go ahead and stop this one. It doesn't seem to be getting the point. Doesn't seem to be able to actually draw what it's supposed to be drawing. But we can get the concept, we can see what Anthropic is going for with this. We give it a command of what we want it to do, and it will actually go browse Firefox for us. It will open up a spreadsheet and enter data for us. It will do research for us. It will download files for us, it will save files for us. It will run commands in the terminal for us. Now, this is running inside of a virtual computer. This isn't actually running on my computer. This is all virtual here. So anything that actually happens on this fake computer here isn't really affecting my real computer. But we can see all of the tools that they're demonstrating it can use now. Pretty wild stuff. We're getting this much closer to actual AI agents. Now, this is technically an AI agent, but we've seen in this demo that it still leaves a little bit to be desired. It still runs into like rate limit issues. Even when I upgraded and have a limit of 50 requests per minute, it actually still hit my rate limit when I was trying some of my things. Also, it was trying to draw like a stick figure by going left click drag on these coordinates. But for whatever reason, nothing was actually happening inside of our paint program. But it did manage to complete my command where I asked it to look up the weather for me and then open up a spreadsheet and then enter all the details of the weather in the spreadsheet. It did manage to do a search for my face and downloaded an image and then resize that image. When I asked it to draw a stick figure, it did go and actually install a new paint program to use, but then couldn't quite figure out how to draw the stick figure. It's pretty dang impressive where this is all headed. Again, still a little bit to be desired. There's still still some bugs. This is still a really early demo, but nonetheless really fun to play with. Really cool to put it through its motions and see what it's capable of. I'm excited to dig in even more and play with it some more and figure out what sort of agentic tasks I can get it to do. But I wanted to make a super quick video for you, show off what it's capable of, what it's not quite good at yet from my own testing, and ideally make it super easy for you to go follow these exact instructions and install this agent on your computer and put it through its motion, see what it can do. It's really fun. It's really cool to see a tool actually take actions for us now and use these various tools. Really excited to see this improve over time. Hopefully you enjoyed this video. Hopefully you learned something at the very least. Hopefully you could go and play around and run with your own AI agent yourself. If you're curious about the cost, I've been playing with it for a couple minutes here. I did add $25 to it just to sort of increase my rate limit there. All of my messing around that I did just for this video. It cost me about a buck fifty. So it's still fairly inexpensive. If you were to build this into like a software app and it was using it a lot, it would add up quickly. But just playing around with it, you're going to spend, you know, a couple bucks maybe. If you want to find out about a whole bunch of other cool AI tools, check out Future Tools IO where I curate all of the cool tools I come across. Also check out the AI News page. Any new big breaking AI news that comes out gets listed on this page pretty quickly after it happens. And there's a free newsletter where I'll send the coolest tools and the most important news directly your inbox. I'll also hook you up with the AI Income database, which is a sort of list of cool ways to make money using various AI tools. Just kind of a fun thing that I put together. But that's free for you if you join the newsletter. Again, all free over at FutureTools IO. And that's what I got for you today. Hopefully you enjoyed this. If you like videos like this, you want to stay in the loop with the latest AI news, you want the latest AI tutorials, you want to know how to use all these cool AI softwares that are coming out. Make sure you like this video and you subscribe to this channel and I'll make sure more videos like this show up in your YouTube feed. Thank you once again for nerding out with me today. Really, really appreciate you. See you in the next one. Bye Bye.










