Claude Code Converted Me (I'm Not a Developer)

Lord Code has converted me. Yes, it finally happened. And I am using it basically all day, every day to do most of my work. Now after how many months have you been telling me to use this for, Gil?

0:00

Like more than six months.

0:13

Yeah, more than six months. Well, for context, Gale is like the early adopter of the early adopters. Like he's the first person to use most things. And despite him. Yeah. Telling me to use this for so long, I don't always pay attention to everything he says. But as a non early adopter myself, I think we've hit that second wave now. And you're seeing kind of normal business people start to use this more. Why exactly is that, Gael?

0:14

Because the models got so good that the gain in productivity is undeniable at this point and that if you're using it all day, most day, you decided this is essentially better than what you were doing before and you're still doing it now. So you've, you either would have found value or you would have gone back to your old ways. Right. I think it's Opus 4.5. It's really Opus 4.5. That was kind of like that jump in capabilities and it made Claude Code more than just a coding thing.

0:43

Yeah. And I think you've mentioned this before, but because it's called Claude code, every non technical, non developer person thinks, oh, that's not for me, I shouldn't use it. And in the beginning those fears are almost feel justified in a way because it looks like a tool for developers, it sometimes feels a tool for developers. Yeah, yeah. But it's like it's, it's, it's difficult. There's that kind of like mental hurdle. I switched from PC to Mac a couple years ago and I felt like a complete idiot, like a beginner trying to do just basic stuff again. And like it's not a nice feeling. And it's like there's something similar in using a tool like VS Code with cloud code. And we'll show you how to use this later on.

1:13

How do you feel now though? Like, do you feel like you would go back? Do you think you're going to stick to it? Do you think like.

1:57

Yeah, I mean like it's, this is how I work now.

2:01

Could everyone do this? Like should everyone do this?

2:04

Every single person doing any kind of knowledge work, any kind of marketing, online marketing, running an online business. You know, if you use a computer for work, you should be using this. And I think this is the year when everyone who is using it will start to get ahead by Leaps and bands when everyone is not. It's like when computers came along or the Internet came along and people who started using that early on just destroyed everyone that was doing, you know, calculations by hand.

2:07

Yep, I agree. I think by the end of this year, if you haven't started using these tools, it's like. I see, I see that. It's like a lot of people now we talk to. For Accelerator, for example, everyone has used ChatGPT. You have no edge using a chatbot. Like everyone is using a chatbot. If you're on an edge, you need to jump out of the chatbot into these tools. And if you. This is the point of this adaptability that we always talk about. It's like you have to adjust with the market, et cetera. That's the adjustment. If you're not making that adjustment, you're fucked.

2:40

I will say it's difficult to know which adjustments to make because there have been plenty of tools come along.

3:09

It's solidifying though. It's.

3:14

But this is like the market really is. Yeah. Solidifying around Claude code specifically. But you know, Dex 2 I think there are other ways of. Yeah, there are. So let's just give some context here. Claude code is not the same as Claude. Claude being the desktop or the app.

3:16

But Claude code is inside the app, actually. So it's like if you really want to go that way, it's like you actually have. You have it inside the app now, but it's not as powerful. It's getting there, it's getting better. If I share my app now, for example, you see that this is a chat and I'll tell you why I said hi to Claude in a minute all the time. Then you have this cowork thing which is kind of an in between between CLAUDE code and the chat. And you have Claude code here that allows you to work. Like, for example, you see, I have this thing and you can do some stuff there. Like now they brought slash convo. You can see it's actually buggy. Like it doesn't even work anymore. So the point is like, you could do some of it, but this version is the shittiest version of Cloth code. And that's not how you should use it.

3:34

Essentially what it is. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong here, but it's like a very high thinking reasoning model. The same model, okay?

4:15

It's the same model as the chat. The only tools it can use, a terminal. And a terminal is the gateway to do anything on your computer. Actually, every time you click on an icon on your desktop. What happens really is there's a terminal command in the background that executes and. And does and opens the app he wanted to open. It's just a visual representation.

4:28

All Claude code is opus, or whichever model you select with more access, with, like, root access to your computer and.

4:47

Then smart enough to use it properly and to know what to do. Like, it knows all the commands by hand, etc. So it knows what to do and that's it.

4:55

But like, for example, when I'm using Claude code and we'll show you some things we've built with it and what you can do. Just a second. But like, when I'm using it, it often kind of thinks to itself back and forth and goes through like, you know, 5, 10, 15, sometimes 20 minutes before it finishes something. But when I'm using like, the Claude desktop app with the same model, it's not like, it might take like 30 seconds a minute or something, but it's faster.

5:03

So still the same model. The difference is when you run Claude code, it has access to a file system. So now when you run it, you have a lot of essentially, knowledge and context scattered across files inside your system. So you have a brief summary of what the company does. You have a description of what makes a good podcast episode. You have all this kind of documentation that it has access to. It has access to tools as well. So it can call Notion, it can call Google Drive, it can call all that. And so it's utilizing the context it has when you're in the chat, it only has the past discussion that is automatically sent, and it has the search tool.

5:30

That's not strictly true. If you're in a project, it has all the context.

6:05

Sure, but it's kind of loaded as it send your message.

6:09

Yeah, but you still have, like, McKeys.

6:11

The point is, like, when you send a message in a chatbot, it gets basically all the context at once. When you load cloud code, it has no context and it has to pick where it's going to go, get context. So it uses search and it's like, oh, is there a document about the podcast? He's talking about the podcast. It's going to run a search. There's going to be a line that says, I'm searching for documents about the podcast. It's like, oh, I found three documents. Let me read them.

6:15

But to come back to the point where I guess I misspoke when I say it uses the same model, but like, it's fundamentally there is something like there's Some extra coding.

6:34

It's what you call agentic. When people say agentic, et cetera. Basically, that's what it means. It means using tools to build its own context. Instead of you building the context in the chatbot, it just figures out. Figures it out, figures out what it has access to. It's like, oh, I need more information to do this task. Let me spend some time gathering information. That's why you'll see it kind of go for a while and be like, oh, let me search that. Oh, I read this in this document. Maybe I should also search for that. He mentioned that, et cetera. And. And so it has none of that in your chatbot. What it has is if you have a project, sure it has the document, but it kind of like loads them in the first prompt. It just destroys your context window and just loads all of it in the prompt, whereas it doesn't do that in float code. It will go and read it if it thinks it needs it. And that means it takes extra time.

6:46

Fine, fine. So let's talk about some practical examples of this. So last week on Friday morning, I built a dashboard. And, you know, whoopty doo.

7:28

Can you see it?

7:39

Yeah.

7:40

What does this dashboard do?

7:41

So last week, I built this dashboard using Claude code, and it connects to our stripe API and pulls in all of the sales. Actually connects to two stripe APIs because we had two accounts over the last six months. And it pulls in all our sales data. It breaks it down by planning. It works out all our fees, our processing costs, our taxes, our VAT costs. I'll get into that in a second.

7:43

Okay, you have a map as well.

8:10

A map of where a member is.

8:12

Who drew that map. Okay.

8:14

We've got kind of like breakdowns of where our revenue comes from, member counts, subscribers churn, things like that.

8:20

Cool.

8:28

And, you know, very, very simple. Like, you. You make a. You ask it to make a dashboard, showing you basic information, and it can do that. Okay, fine. It's not only. It takes and it's not crazy complicated, but. So I. I spent three or four hours, okay, doing this, but 90 of that. Like, I had a working dashboard in 10 minutes. I think after it ironed out a couple bucks, I spent most of the time working on two things. First is I wanted to get a clear picture of all our processing fees to understand how much we're being charged. And second, I wanted to get a clear picture of our VAT because we collect vat, which is like a sales tax, and for some European customers. And it's very Complex who has to get charged and how much they get charged. But it figured out all of that and it figured out how much we needed to be setting aside to pay our next VAT bills. So there was no like surprise, oh, you have to pay $10,000 tomorrow.

8:28

How did you do this before? Like before you built this?

9:32

I didn't, I just guessed it because it was like, it's really difficult to calculate.

9:34

So that's the unlock.

9:38

I would have like, yeah, I would have like floating funds of money just in case we had a big bill come in.

9:38

So were you keeping more money aside.

9:44

And being less money, you know, less, less of that was being invested or spent on the business or whatever. Whereas now I know this is our position, like I know on the 20th of April we owe this amount and on the 7th of May we owe this amount and when that's paid, I can simply check that it's paid and it'll reduce.

9:46

Does it remember when you restart your server?

10:04

Yeah, it does. Okay, so this is fantastic. Like a really, really helpful. The other thing it did and I know you're mocking me for the map. So we do like a weekly group coaching call with our plus and Max members. And you know the time zone for that, you can see right here most of our customers are in Europe or North America. So we optimize for, you know, a time zone that work for both those folks. Occasionally we have people in Asia or sometimes even Australia ask us about it. And I think twice in the last few weeks we've had someone say, you know, oh, do you have anyone else in Australia or anyone else in Singapore or Asia on there as well? And now I can just pull this up and say, well, yeah, we do. We have three in Australia or we have three folks in Singapore, one in Thailand, one Hong Kong and you know, they can see, they can show you in the map. And that, that was like a five minute job to do that. Very niche thing. It's a very niche thing that's like it's hardly ever going to be come up and you would never like hire a developer, pay a developer to do that. But the fact that it's so abundant and cheap to code anything these days means you can do all these little annoying niggly things that you wish you could do but couldn't justify it previously because of the cost. Right.

10:06

Do you understand the tech behind it? Like do you know what it's built on, for example?

11:21

I don't have a clue.

11:26

Yeah, it's built on xjs, for example, like the Little N at the bottom. And the localhost 3000 gives it away. But essentially cloud code figured it out for you, right?

11:27

Do you need to know what is built on.

11:36

No, no, I'm just asking. It's interesting because it's like some people want to know. It's like, how much do I need to know to create something like this? And it's like, apparently not a lot, because you don't.

11:38

When I started building the dashboard, it mapped out this. Oh, you know, I'll look for some hosting and I'll do this. No, no, no, I don't need to do any of that. Just fire up on my local machine when I need to access it. And then it's like, all right, okay, cool. I'll do the quick and dirty approach here. Here you go. And it was like pulling. I saw there was some tailwind CSS at some point in there, but again, I don't particularly know exactly what that does, but it used it.

11:48

And so you put it in plan mode. You put it in plan mode, you told it what you wanted, and then you said, go. And then you got 90% of this.

12:13

Yep.

12:21

Yeah. So that's powerful. And it's like you can connect to your. So, for example, I don't have the dashboard yet, but, like, I have a skill that connects to analytics, et cetera. Like, if a lot of the apps we use, they have data. I think the main problem with small businesses is we don't use that data for knowledge, for example. So one thing that I realized, for example, doing something similar with cloud code, is I pulled like, our email ISP data into cloud code, and then we used to email the podcast, and I was like, oh, look at the broadcast and just tell me what's interesting. Literally, just like, go figure it out. And I figured out that basically almost nobody clicked on the links for the podcast, and so we stopped emailing it because of that. And so that's the point. We have all that data and we were making mistakes, but because we had no time or even sometimes not the skill to essentially put it together and. Or it wouldn't be worth the time, it wasn't very important. But now you can connect your APIs to these things either through a dashboard or through a skill. And we'll talk about skills in a bit, I'm sure. And you can have Claude be your data analyst and translate that data into actions, for example. The action was stop emailing the podcast. People don't click on it. But when you email short videos loom style, you get 20 times more clicks. So do that. Great. And I love that it translates all this complicated data and all these complicated software into just fucking do this. Which is essentially my job. My job when I create processes is basically that it's like, just fucking do this, this. People love that. And Claude is awesome at this. And so now I'm like obsessed with collecting as much data as we can everywhere for everything, and then plug it into LLMs and have it figure out what's the best course of action based on the data, basically.

12:22

And you can even have it. So, for example, with this dashboard stuff, we're pulling information from one source, which is stripe, very well documented API. It's very easy for it to get everything it needs to. But, you know, in future, when we expand this to look at like our sales funnel, we might want to look at, you know, how our YouTube videos are doing or how, you know, our marketing performance is. And we might have to go to, like, different places to get the data. And there's not necessarily an API for it, but you can go indirectly through something like apify to get social media metric data if you want to pull that.

14:00

If you do links, and if you do GTM on your links, like GTM parameters, which I've done, I've plugged analytics into it as well. It's like awesome.

14:35

I think, you know, when Google Analytics 4 came out, everyone wants to use it. This sucks. I don't know how to use it. I don't know what it means. But you don't need to anymore. You just use AI to interpret it for you.

14:42

That's actually a skill that's coming out into Accelerator really soon. It's one of the ones on my list. It's like literally just plug your analytics API, put your GTM on your links, set up your conversion tracking. By the way, also help me fix conversion tracking. Because I had the code of the website and I had analytics. It was like, oh, you have this newsletter thing, but conversion is not tracking. Do you want me to do it? And it just went and edited the website, set up conversion tracking. I pushed the code, boom, done. Conversion tracking was done. And now I can analyze what's happening.

14:53

Can we talk just very briefly about skills? Because I'm sure there's at least one person who heard that and doesn't understand what you mean by skill and think it's more like a traditional, you know, skill issue. A skill issue or knowledge?

15:26

It's not a skill issue, but it's.

15:39

Like, let me try and explain this because I'm Very newie at this. A skill is a file and sometimes set of files in markdown format. So it's like a text file which explains how to do something. And one of the benefits of having it in this way is you can say like, okay, here's step one, do this. Step two, do this. Step three, do this. As a business process, it will remember how to do that. So whenever you ask AI to do that thing, it will do it for you. But within that file you can also say access. Use this MCP to pull the data from notion or use this script to edit the image or whatever it might be. So it's really just like an sop.

15:41

But for AI, there's a bit more to it. I think the thing with Skills is like okay, these are basically pre written prompts that you break down into chunks and an AI kind of open the chunk it needs. Like you make one main file that kills the workflow and then you kind of have different sub sops basically that explain the sub process. And sometimes it's a conditional thing. If this happens, then do this, then go read that document. If not, don't.

16:26

Essentially what you're saying is the skill file, the Skill MD file is like, here are the five steps and just a few lines about each one. Yeah, and it needs to be short because it's optimized for minimal context. So it's not like overflowing your context with the entire script. Progressive disclosure, basically when it doesn't need to access it at that point, when it does, it'll go and access the more detailed file about how to do step one or step two.

16:52

There's still more to skills. That's the one part, but the other part is it can contain scripts, Python scripts. And so it's very useful for MCPs are good, but they're very token hungry. You need to kind of load all the tool definitions and the model needs to operate it. So let's say you want to extract 10,000 keywords and then you can only extract 100 keywords per API call. For example, you need to do 100 API calls that would destroy your context window. And then you run out of context. On cloud you can make a python script that will do these API calls for you and save everything into a file and it just runs outside. It's just like a piece of software that runs and then the model just has to press the button to run it. Basically maybe just put a variable which is like the main keyword or whatever you want and it will just run. And the point is that you, you can essentially get more done outside of the limit of the token windows of these LLMs through that. So for example, an example of a skill that we use that has a script is the thumbnail one. So it's like if you see the thumbnail for this podcast, probably created by that, it basically creates the background with nanobanana and then it overlays one of our photos on top and edits it onto it. And to edit it onto it is a python script. It's not the LLM doing some magic or whatever. It has a script that it uses. It can just grab a photo and say, I want it at this position on top of this image. And then essentially it just plays with the x and Y of where the image is and moves it around. And so that's a script and so that's the power. You can combine these MCPs, these SOPs basically and traditional programming for deterministic outcomes and that I want to add something.

17:20

Here because when you start talking about traditional programming for deterministic outputs, I think there's probably a few non technical people out there who are thinking like that just went over my head. What the hell is he talking about? Okay, I want to like explain a few much more simple business use cases of why this is relevant. There's two things. One is you can share these processes, these skills with other people. So Gail, you created the newsletter skill file showcase newsletter skill. You shared it with me. I then used it to create a newsletter. Great. But in doing so, I also wanted to edit the output slightly so it was a little bit better, a little bit more to what I was trying to achieve. So afterwards I asked it to update the skill file to reflect the different direction I took it in. And so it went and it updated itself. It updated its own skill file, rewrote the process in here to add more information about what it could see as the difference between it output and was in the skill file. And that is like really a key improvement versus using, you know, a project in Claude or ChatGPT to do it. Because I don't know about you, but I would spend a long time making like really good system prompt and really good set of context files. I'd then run it a bunch of times and after a few weeks what I was doing would be quite a bit different. And I would. And I was like, oh, I've got to go and like spend all that time to update the system prompt again, again. And it's a hassle. But now you just say update your system prompt or update the skill file based on the output.

18:57

You're an employee, you essentially fix it with them, and then they learn from that experience. It's very similar. That's the problem with projects. It's like they're kind of stuck. And then you have to redownload the files, go edit some text file, like, fuck that, I don't have time for that. And quite often you just settle, right? It's kind of like 90%, and you're like, oh, I just have to tweak it at the end, etc. And it's not worth the effort to redownload, to slightly tweak it, and it still won't be perfect. But if you just say, look at everything that I gave you as feedback and web propose some edits to the system prompt, for example, then that's low effort after running a scale, basically. And that's kind of the point. I tell people, the first time you run it, it would be 70% as good, just the same as a project. But the point is, you will run it and won't be good. And then you tell it, no, change this, change that, edit this, edit that. And you tell it, okay, now fix your instructions and next time it'll be 80% and you do that again, there will be 85%. There's kind of like a diminishing return right as you go. It's not like it ever goes to 100%, but you get to a point where every output requires less time, which means that frees up more time for more things, and you end up essentially leveraging your time more and more because the other takes more burden away.

20:44

Which is exactly how it should work with an employee. Right? You have to invest all this time when they start to train them up and share your process and how you like to do things. And then probably the first time they do it, it's not great and needs quite a bit of feedback, but then the next time it is slightly less feedback and then slightly less and slightly less, and then eventually they can more or less do it themselves without too much hand holding from you. And that's exactly what AI has replicated.

21:51

Yeah, and that's the thing. It's like you're basically creating digital employees, or rather kind of like specialized freelancers that know how to do one task where when you create a skill, it keeps improving. I would say it's not as proactive as an employee would be. It's not going to spontaneously tell you how to make it better or look at your competitors if you don't tell it or whatever, which I think eventually will come. But in terms of improvement rate, it's not so far off from working with junior people on these kind of marketing tasks.

22:18

At least it's not even junior people because in a way some of the things that capabilities to do is it's very, very senior. But it's more like, I mean that's exactly what it is. Working with a robot that has no common sense. Like it's very smart, it has access to all the data on the Internet, it's relentless, it works 24 7. But like it really does lack some basic common sense sometimes. So you have to.

22:47

Which is why you're still here for a while.

23:15

Steer it a little bit.

23:16

Yeah, yeah, it's like I don't think it's going to replace you. But like, you know, I was talking to team from Ahrefs and he's like, Dmitry, who is the CEO of Hrefs, forces us, all of us, to use cloth code and do this. It's like it's mandatory at this point and create skills, et cetera. It's like everyone, you need to do this this year. If you don't do this this year, you're like the boomer who didn't know how to use a computer that arrived in an Office in the 2000s. Basically that's about the same.

23:17

Yeah, they will. As painful as it probably is for all the non technical folks in the company at the moment, they will be thanking them, thanking their CEO so much in a year's time for that because yeah, this really is the future.

23:42

Yeah, it's non negotiable and it's like, let me ask you, I mean, you didn't really write newsletters before but like how long do you think it would take you to write a newsletter now? How long does it take you versus how long would it have taken you if you did it without. I mean even with a chatbot, let's.

23:58

Say even with the chatbot, like an hour or so to do it back and forth, like to really, really get it down. Like I'd probably go get a few examples of ones that we'd done before. Maybe like a few examples of some newsletters. Some folks that I know do good newsletters, brain dump a bunch of my thoughts in there, you know, get a shitty version and then do like three rounds of feedback to it and then eventually I get that, take it and copy paste.

24:15

Then you have to upload it into.

24:41

Bento and send it. Whereas now you didn't explain that part.

24:42

Actually, what does it do exactly?

24:46

Well, yeah, whereas now with a Skill file, it's like, here is the transcript of the video which is based on Go and write the newsletter. And if there's any kind of direction I want to give, I can give it. But it's so good it usually doesn't need it. So it will sometimes ask some clarifying questions. I may get the opportunity to steer it if I want to, and then it will create it. I can edit it within Claude code in the text file there. I save it, tell it it's ready to go, and then it actually goes and connects into Bento and uploads it as a draft. It doesn't send it. I would never let it send it because that's like, could go terribly.

24:49

MSB doesn't let you. Anyway, like they built it on purpose so that it can't go crazy.

25:27

Bento, by the way, not sponsored at all. It's an email tool very similar to sort of activecampaign Accept. It's kind of like an indie tool and it's, it's very like AI native. So like they have one of the most robust mcps of. Out of all of these email tools out there. And it's just, it just works very well with this stuff. So if you want clog code to go upload your draft email into it, like it knows exactly what to do or gets all the fields correct, it's ready to go, basically. So all I would do at that point is just send myself a preview, check it, check the links, because, you know, I've made that mistake before, not putting links in there and then send it and it's press send inside Bento and it's good.

25:32

There's actually any skill that you don't. I don't know if you even understood it does that because I built it. But the point is, through the Bento msp, you can't upload images. So when we have like a thumbnail or something like that, actually the image needs to be hosted somewhere else. So within the Skill I've built a sub process that is uploading images and it's connecting to our Cloudflare. It uploads images to Cloudflare, gets a URL back when it's uploaded it, and then when it generates the HTML for the email, it puts essentially the image directly inside the HTML, which seamlessly adds the image to the email. And that's the kind of like sub workflows that you can build within these skills. You will understand if there's an image or Not. I will just figure it out, basically.

26:16

And that reminds me, because I have a complaint about this.

26:57

Okay, go ahead.

27:01

I don't know if it's Bento or if it's like the deliverability thing, but it suggests that images should be. Or the whole email should be below 100 kilobytes. And sometimes with cloud code, images which are bigger than that, it's not so good. So it's almost like you would want a image compression process in there. You don't even need like a third party service to do that. You just tell Claude code to compress the image and it will.

27:03

It's not so simple for you to.

27:25

Do it, but it's simple to.

27:26

No, no, no, it's not.

27:29

Wait, wait, it's simple to compress the image in Claude code? I think what you're saying is to do that as a skill is not so simple.

27:31

No, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is the reason Bento tells you you need images below 100 kilobytes is because for mobile, specifically, people who are unlike 3G.

27:38

So it's not images, it's the whole email below.

27:47

Let me finish. Yeah, but it doesn't matter. Text. Text. No space. The point is that Cloudflare detects the size of the viewport. So if it's easy on your phone, it will actually serve a smaller image automatically through the service that we use. But Bento, when it tests, it tests through desktop resolution, which is allowed to have bigger images than that. So the point is Bento is actually not very smart in the way it detects these things. But in reality, Cloudflare fixes a lot of that stuff for you by compressing the image automatically and also serving the right size for the right viewport. So it's like. Yeah, it's not.

27:51

So you chose to ignore it basically because it's not necessary.

28:28

I'm not saying we pass it all the time. It's like, if the image is really big, sure, but it does come off.

28:32

Like, if you have a four megabyte image, it seems a bit over the.

28:37

Top, it's a bit much. But I mean, you can just ask cloud code. You can be like, hey, before you upload the image, just compress the image. And it's like, honestly, you just tell it that it will just install the Python library, update the scale and then next time you run it, we'll just do it, just test it before so the image doesn't look like shit. But that's it, that's the beauty of it, it's like the time it took you to explain this to me, you probably could have edited the skill. Right? And that's the point as well. I think that's quite important. That's an important distinction because it means you don't need to go back to me when you need things like that done anymore. You can literally just tell the chatbot and it does it. And I think that's an unlock that a lot of people don't have yet. I even see it with questions in accelerator, et cetera. I would say it's less and less, but 20 to 30% of questions, I'm like, just ask Claude. Just tell the bot. Because it will actually solve it for you, even if you don't understand the tech behind it, the same way you did not understand the tech behind the dashboard. It's fine. It will translate your non technical language into technical stuff and specs and do it for you. And we are at that level of abstraction now for at least simple things. Like you're not going to build a full SaaS in one prompt, but simple marketing workflows like that, that easy.

28:40

Honestly, reminds me of, I saw this video years ago. It was talking about electricity generation and how they saw this future of abundant electricity and if you were just able to imagine a world where generation was so cheap, what benefits that would bring and what problems that would. What new problems that would face. And then the problem stopped being like, how do we make energy or electricity? And the problem became, how do we transfer it around or transmit it, move it? And so it just creates this whole different perspective of the world. I think we have a similar situation like that with, with coding and almost like work to an extent. Whereas it's so cheap and so fast and so easy for anyone to build anything these days that utilizing existing code or existing process doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, right? You built a V1 of this dashboard. It was much more simple, but it worked. And I was like, oh, do we need to like, can you pass it to me? I'm like, no, put this on GitHub and share it. And da da, da. And you're like, dude, just fucking rebuild it. And I was like, all right, fine. But that's like, I had a working version in 10 minutes. Like that was 90% what that did. So.

29:48

But I think also it's quite interesting because it means that because you're not a developer, historically you've solved most of your problems without code and you're kind of trained at looking for A solution or a SaaS or something like that, something that you can use off the shelf that will do 80% of what you want and you kind of have a shitty system to make up the.

31:05

Last 20% or some manual work.

31:23

You need to change your head around that. You can code, everyone can code now. At least personal tools that you run locally. There's really little risk if you don't upload it on the Internet. And you can solve your problems with code now, even if you understand none of it, provided you just learn the tool, which. How long did it take you to kind of like feel comfortable using cloth code? From the day you opened it to like, it's okay. Like, I don't understand everything.

31:25

Probably about three or four weeks, but that's not of usage. That's like total time. I was probably in those three or four weeks, used it like four days or something and it was really one when I spent a whole morning, like three hours messing around with this dashboard and then starting to like build out context files and things like that for other work that really like, all right, this is my new thing now. As soon as I had that mental shift from like, all right, I'm going to stop using all these projects I have in the Claude desktop app or in Gemini Gems and just rebuild everything. Basically anytime I came up with a task that I needed to do, I would migrate it over to cloud code. And then that was Friday, it's Tuesday. And most of the stuff I use is on here now. Yeah.

31:51

Okay. If you want, I can show you one of the skills I just built recently because I think people need to see more use cases. So let's do that. So actually what I'm going to do is I'm first going to share a Chrome tab for Marketing Pros. So Marketing Pros, a recruiting company we work with in South Africa, they recruit marketing professionals. It's cheaper than the US and people are pretty good. That's like the high level thing. And the thing is, one thing that they need to do right now is they need to run some ads. Like people who go on their website. If they saw us, they would get more leads. Basically that simple. Everyone should do that. We've never lost money doing that.

32:42

You talk about retargeting ads.

33:18

Yeah, I mean it's not really cold retargeting anymore because it's not pure retargeting, like broadens a bit. But the idea is people who interact with their brand on social as well, that kind of stuff. And so this is my VS code, looks Very similar to yours. Chatbot on the right, whatever content in the middle, files on the left. Right. It's pretty simple. And so I have this skill called Meta Ads. Meta campaign. Sorry. And you can see, literally I started the thing by saying metacampaign and I just gave marketing pros. And the thing is, it's quite hard to come up with good angles for ad campaigns, right? So how do I catch people? How do I stop the scroll, et cetera. And how do I make it interesting and fun while still selling my product? And so I built that skill that basically. Well, it creates a folder which you see here, marketingpros dorun and it kind of like scraped the site to understand what they do. It also, you know, we talked about scripts. It has this script that basically scraped their css. So it gets their colors, for example. So you see it got all the colors. It also, if I actually go and research, you will see that it actually downloaded their logo, for example. That's what you do Python script for, for example, on the scale. And again, I don't know how it works. I just told code make a script that does that. Right. So anyway, reviews it. By the way, their logo is way too big on their site. I discovered that writing that. Anyway, it made a brief and it was like, oh, they're basically a staffing company in South Africa. Does it look good? My input is looks good. Then after that it makes itself a little to do list and it interviews me on this. So actually you can't really see the questions. But it's like, who is your primary buyer? Have you run ads before? Do you have stuff that worked? What is, what's your best customer success? Best testimonial? Ask me a bunch of questions basically. And based on that, it basically writes a whole. Actually it has some notes here. You can see it writes this file basically based on all my answers.

33:20

And then after that it's creating its own context file there basically.

35:10

Exactly. We're building context, but it's painless for me, it's just like a question thing and just click the right answer or I type something. I don't have to think too much. I just give the URL and I just pick some answers. Then it has an agent that basically role plays as the customer. So it actually spawns a sub agent and it's like, hey, you are a struggling agency owner trying to grow your agency and you want like you have clients, you have demand and then you don't have people to execute. And then you hire people and the clients quit and Then you have too much stuff and not enough, etc. Like what are your problems, et cetera. It basically does all that brainstorming, role playing. The other one is a market research agent that goes and read Reddit and stuff like that and see what people complain about basically. And you can see this is the prompt that it gives to the agent, this is the prompt it gives to the market research, search for Reddit, search for all of that, et cetera. And it just comes back with a customer profile. So it's just I can't hire fast enough to keep up with client demand and the people I can find either cost too much or burn me, you know what I mean? So again, it builds context that way. It builds context also based on the research. So you can see. So whole research talks about upwork, talks about Fiverr, talks about the problem with offshore, talks about good marketing talent being hard to find all of that context, right? Then after that it just actually ran a bunch of extra searches because it decided to do that and it makes a strategy. And again, I didn't give much so far, right? I answered a few questions and it just ran after that it basically ran this and it ran, came up with a campaign plan. So you can see, for example, like I gave it a budget, et cetera. It came up with angles, which is burned by offshore upwork marketing only South Africa Advantage and 3X, your capacity for half the cost basically and kind of high level things and presented that to me. And my feedback was also, you see, I'm typing a lot on these things. Yes, let's go. And then essentially then it brainstormed each ad set and how it's going to do things. So you can see it picked some templates. So in my skill, actually if I go in assets, I have these templates that I curated manually. So for example, the Apple Note one. And so it does look at these and it just knows which template it can use. So in this case, for example, we have the before after, right? So if you go in before after, you check the examples, you can see it has examples of ads that you can use from that. And so it basically comes up with the ads and it's like, do you like this? Is this good enough? I'm like, yep, looks good, create them. So far I wrote about 20 words. Then what it does is it uses the Nanobanana API through a Python script again. And what's really good is because it can also upload in the prompt, it actually uploads the logo, it does all of that, etcetera and essentially it generates the whole ad campaign for you without doing anything. So it generates the copy first. So for example, not vas marketers. Actually, the other one I think was a bit better. If I check the copy. Yeah, done with upwork roulette. I thought that one was really good actually. And the point is, it has three versions of the copy, like short, medium, long that you can test link descriptions and CTAs. And you can see it basically generated ads. Like, for example, this one is really cool, like a text message one where people go back and forth. I hired this agency, et cetera. You can see some kind of like whiteboard one. Freelancers are hired this year. Go state bad work, Miss deadline. South Africa marketers I hired. Hold still here. Marketingpros co. These are pretty good. I tried offshore before. South Africa was different marketing pros. The point is, yeah, literally everything's generated on its own. And you can see I have a lot of these copies.

35:13

These ones, they look great. I mean, if you're listening to the audio version of this, they look good. They look like any other ad you would see in your Facebook stream, I would say.

38:42

And the thing as well is like when it runs, let's say you don't like an output. I think at some point it generated an ad and there was a typo. Yeah, you can see that. Oh, there's a minor text glitch. And so there was a text glitch on this one, I think, and it regenerated it. So it's like, oh, there was a glitch. And it's like, boom, I regenerated it. It's fixed now and that's looks at it and it's smart, basically. But yeah, you can see this before, after try Risk Free. I had the listicle one and had the quotes, for example. I mean, these are decent ads, basically. And the point is, yeah, that's the kind of stuff you can do with a skill. And how long would it take you to generate all of that? Especially because it's all cut down in ad sets with all different copies to test and the creatives in the right folders. You can just go to Meta and upload this and it's ready, basically. So it's like that's the power of these skills. And that's why we tell people, if you don't do this now, you're fucked. Because I can make five campaigns when you make one or seven or something. And when it's running, I can do something else. And so I'm more likely to Test. I'm more likely to run more things and to find a winner than you are if you do this manually. Basically, even if my graphics are like 10% less good than the ones you may have. And it's also, I don't know, there's like 12 images times 40 cents. So it's like. Yeah, it's not very expensive, basically.

38:51

Yeah, I mean, it's super impressive. If you asked an agency, hey, design me some ads, they'll probably follow a similar process to what you've done there in terms of interviewing you, asking you questions, and, you know, okay, like, a pro designer might come up with a.

40:08

Feedback better, but not. Yeah, it's not.

40:24

It's like, yeah, it's like, it's not even 80, 20. It's like it's the 9010 kind of thing. Like, it's way good enough for any business that's not running ads to have this their first campaign. Or if your strategy is, I want to deploy, you know, dozens of new ads every day to test, then this is a way to do that quickly at scale.

40:27

And if you have ideas, you can also put them in the prompt. Right. Initially, I put zero. I put nothing. But if you have a special landing page, a special promo, a special thing, et cetera, you can put that. And that's going to influence the whole process. It's going to cascade all the way down to the creative. So it's like, that's so powerful. You could run it 100 times. You could be like, hey, let's brainstorm 20 angles for 20 campaigns and then run each one, one by one, and create all your ad sets that way. And then you have a lot, a lot, a lot of stuff to taste. And I did not even connect competitor scraping into this. I had it initially. Then it became too complicated. You can see my whole context is used actually in this one run. So this was already pretty intense, but I think it's good enough already, to be honest.

40:46

So what does it cost to generate those ads in terms of your usage or nano banana API?

41:26

Around $5 for this.

41:32

How many ads?

41:35

You can see there's 12 creatives. Okay, so 12 creatives. Around $5.40, $0.50 each?

41:36

Something like that?

41:43

Yeah, around that. And I mean, I'm pretty sure, like, there's going to be some kind of image model that's going to come soon that would be equally good and, you know, a quarter of the price. But, like, you know, you're spending money on ads like, does $5 really matter? Like, isn't it Better.

41:44

It's weird because there's like, we have this discussion internally. Gail's like, oh, shut up.

42:00

I'm gonna spend 100 bucks.

42:05

$100 to the $200 plan. And it's like, it's because you're spending it on, you know, let's put in the software group even. It's like an AI model or API. Credit it. You know, we're a little bit more cautious of it. Whereas you wouldn't even think about, oh, I need to spend $100 to pay a designer to do something. Like, it's. It's just. That's what you would pay. Yeah. So it's almost like there's a mental shift needs to happen there as well.

42:06

Yeah. But, I mean, you can see these are real outputs that you could really run. And it's like, this skill is available. Should be available in AI Accelerator. At the time we release this podcast, I just shot the video for it.

42:30

Yeah, let's actually try and talk about that for just a sec. So the AI Accelerator is our course community where we talk about how to build all these things, how to use it. We give you all these skills that we've created inside there. Like, you can go and use that today. I believe as this is going out, there's, you know, we're uploading multiple of these skills every single week into the accelerator at the moment. We do weekly group coaching calls there with other business owners. It's a good way to connect with just anyone else who's running a business, who's implementing AI in their company. And, you know, some folks bring their team in there as well. You know, there's a lot of debate at the moment. You know, ahrefs a good example there about, like, how do you get your team excited and using AI? While we hopefully will help give them some structure to be able to do that as well, if you wanted to do that. So if you're interested, it's the only thing we do. Only thing we sell. This episode is not sponsored. Head over to authorityhacker.com aiacccelerator and you can find all the details there.

42:41

Yeah, so, I mean, going back to the topic of skills, that's really kind of the hot topic right now. And what's really quite powerful, like, you talked about sharing and stuff. You can actually upload these skills to GitHub and then you can connect these skills into cloud cowork. So let's say you have staff that really is like, I can't do the terminal. Like, some people would be like, that there would be like, you know, probably some person with like glasses with a chain around their neck will be like, I can't do this. Well, actually these skills are usable inside the Claude chatbot and cowork. And so if you actually build them, they don't all run perfectly, but we had some members that have been using them directly inside there and skipping the VS code and terminal setup. And for the larger teams, I do think most people should learn, but I understand the constraints as well. And so there's a way to build some kind of like essentially company knowledge. You used to make sops for humans to read and do. Now basically everyone's a manager and is managing agents and is managing their own Library of SOPs for their responsibilities to be done and then it's just their job to maintain that. Basically that's working in 2026.

43:45

Yeah, I mean instead of that being in your brain, it's now just in a skill file.

44:51

Well, it was supposed to be in an SOP before, but let's be honest, most people didn't do it.

44:54

I do have one thing to ask here because we talked about Cowork, which is the new feature, something between Claude and Claude code, which is in the Claude desktop app at the moment. It's basically a dumbed down version of Claude code that they're trying to make more accessible for non developers, for knowledge workers. Isn't there an argument that people should just wait a few months till that develops and becomes more robust and not to worry about the terminal and Claude code?

45:01

I think cloud code will always be the edge the same way as you can do these things in cloud code, but not necessarily in cowork. Today there will be something that you can do in cloud code in six months that you can't do in co op. And it's like if you want that competitive advantage, if you want to actually be able to do more than most people right now, then it makes sense because it's not that difficult. It's really just a chatbot in a thumbnail. It's like the ratio of effort to reward is still incredible. It's one of the best things that you can learn right now, one of the best things you can spend two hours on.

45:33

And you do actually have a course inside the accelerator which teaches you a bit biased. But even if you don't want to buy our stuff, don't buy our course. You can go on YouTube and there are people, people who have like videos explaining how to do some of this stuff. So like it's like we really believe that this is like a key thing that everybody listening to this needs to know, needs to do this year.

46:06

Yeah. So it's like, yeah, you could wait six months and get the same capabilities of the expensive models in the cheap ones like Gemini Street Flash. It's about as smart as the best models a year ago, maybe even better. But the reality is if I put you on Gemini's free Flash for your day to day work, you're going to be like, I want Opus back. And then you'll want it because it just unlocked so many things for you. Same thing is going to happen and that thing is not going to change. It's just going to keep moving the goalpost and everything's going to evolve and you'll be able to one shot your dashboard instead of spending two hours on it by the time Cowork can do what you can do in cloak code today. So up to you. But I think that the productivity gain is so big that the people who are not willing to go to the edge are going to lose out anyway. The same way as people who stay on chatbots. You're just, you might as well just stay on the chatbot.

46:27

And I think that when we were in the SEO industry, we talked for so long about how big companies and big sites had such an advantage over small one person companies or small size. It feels like this is almost like a great equalizer in a sense. Right. You know, small medium companies who are using this technology effectively are going to be able to out compete, not just catch up with, but out compete bigger companies who are going to be obviously much slower to implement this across their larger teams and get everyone on board and using it correctly. And they're going to be worried about more safety, security, governance stuff, whereas a small business can be a lot more nimble.

47:18

I think it depends. Like for example, I met at Instagram, right? I was watching some videos from product managers on Instagram, product managers on Instagram, they had to kind of essentially make a proposal, make a presentation for a new feature, etc. Now they are forced to vibe code it, no developer involved. They vibe code it in a test environment and then they present the feature built and then it's like if it's good enough, then it's passed to the dev team who vibe codes it properly and then that's how it works. And so that's. Not every company works, but big companies are jumping onto this fast already.

48:01

I feel like if you're meta and you know you have the best of the best people who are paid the big bucks. Like, you know, you can issue a top down command like everybody has to do this or else. And you know, you have smart people around you, they'll get on board. There might be a bit of resistance, but you can get it working. But think of like the average company, not like full of rock stars. Like you know, with 20,000 people trying to make that happen, like it's going to be harder.

48:35

Yeah, we see it with some people we consulted with, for example, like the engineering things are resisting and so on. Yeah, I mean the guy who built Cloudbot, right? He just got acquired by OpenAI, supposedly for a shit ton of money. Single guy, alone building. And according to his stats from the guys from Codex, he uses more than entire teams. He uses more tokens than entire teams sometimes. And so, yeah, there's an opportunity. It's just like, it's so funny because I know a lot of people who still listen to us that they're still kind of think in terms of SEO, et cetera, but the edge is not there anymore. SEO is a mature, declining market and the edge is there. The edge is like, how do I build stuff, how do I do things faster, how do I do good marketing? Like these ad campaigns that I showed you, for example, using these tools with a minimal drop in quality, but a massive improvement in productivity. And the value of these things is still pretty high because most people can't do it. That's the thing. You're kind of fighting against the curve of people who also adopt these tools. And you want to be ahead to create value. And that's what the edge is. And if you're a marketer, that's what you need to do. I see tons of CEOs, of agencies and so on now they're like, oh, if you're a big cloud code user, et cetera, we want to hire you, send us your cv, et cetera. They're desperate for it, I'm telling you. Yeah. If you went to Ahrefs and you told them that you're a marketer and a big code user, your chances of being hired would probably be pretty high if they're hiring, for example.

49:04

So, yeah, great, I think we'll leave it there. Any final words of wisdom?

50:30

No, just fucking do it. It's last chance, last call right now. By the end of this year, if you haven't done it, you're officially a boomer and we can't help you anymore. No, I'm kidding.

50:35

We are going to be around this year to help you for free on this podcast. We're going to be covering this in a lot of detail. We'll have more dedicated episodes to it, how to set it up, how to optimize it, you know, all that kind of stuff. But you know, if you want to get in there right now, then head on over to authorityhacker.com AI Accelerator and you can get all our stuff in there. It's currently live. Thanks for listening. I know this is a little bit rambly and this is a random podcast usual episode, but we really just do feel it's so important that people have to take note of it now. This is not an early adopters thing anymore. This is an everyone thing. And now is the time. So thank you for listening. If you have any thoughts on this, please head over to our YouTube channel and leave a comment. We do read them all. Drop us a like subscribe while you're there as well. That really, really, really helps us out in the YouTube algorithm. So we appreciate everybody who's done that and we'll see you next week for another episode.

50:49