Claude Cowork 101: How to automate your workday without touching code | JJ Englert (Tenex)

JJ Englert leads community enablement at Tenex. In this episode, JJ provides a complete zero-to-one tutorial on Claude Cowork, Anthropic’s desktop tool that sits between simple chat and full terminal-based coding. What you’ll learn: How to create your first Claude Cowork project by connecting a folder on your computer and building context over timeThe “brain” file strategy: how to create a preferences document that Claude reads every time to understand who you are and how you workWhy one-click connectors to Gmail, Slack, Notion, and Google Calendar unlock AI that actually does work instead of just suggesting itHow to analyze your sent emails to build a writing skill that perfectly matches your tone and styleThe sub-advisory-board technique: spinning up three AI agents with different personas to review your work from multiple perspectivesHow to set permissions for each connector so Claude only drafts (never sends) or always asks before taking actionThe scheduled-task workflow that creates a morning debrief by reading your email, Slack, and calendar every day at 7:30 a.m. Why projects with shared memory beat individual chat threads for consistent, high-quality AI outputs— Brought to you by: Tines https://tines.com/howiai—Start building intelligent workflows today Cursor https://www.chatprd.ai/howiai—The best way to code with AI — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to JJ Englert (02:48) What Cowork is and who it’s for (05:49) Getting started: Opening the Cowork tab in Claude Desktop (07:04) Understanding projects as folders on your computer (07:54) Creating your “brain” file, with working preferences and context (10:24) Demo: Building a daily operating system project from scratch (12:18) How to prompt Cowork when starting a new project (14:54) Understanding the project interface and shared memory (18:37) Setting up connectors to Gmail, Slack, Google Calendar, and other tools (21:00) Using connectors to analyze your emails and build personalized writing skills (24:21) Creating a thinking-partner skill for decision support (26:18) Cowork vs. OpenClaw (27:18) Building a sub-advisory skill with multiple AI personas for feedback (34:03) Advanced skill example: Multi-step newsletter creation with research and evaluation (36:08) Setting up scheduled tasks for morning debriefs (37:57) Going beyond one-off tasks with AI (41:00) Progressive trust and the tradeoff of information for productivity (44:08) Different use cases beyond work productivity (46:08) Lightning round — Tools referenced: • Claude Code: https://claude.ai/code • Wispr Flow: https://whisperflow.ai/ • Monologue: https://www.monologue.to/ • Domo: https://www.domo.com/ • Pencil.dev: https://pencil.dev/ • Remotion: https://www.remotion.dev/ • Obsidian: https://obsidian.md/ • OpenClaw: https://openclaw.com/ • Notion: https://notion.so/ — Other references: • Get Started with Claude Cowork: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13345190-get-started-with-cowork — Where to find JJ Englert: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv2ovDhYVtlJw4QMidLFP8Q X: https://twitter.com/jjenglert LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jj-englert-a08836a6/ — Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ X: https://x.com/clairevo — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  One of the things I love about having this project system, you're orchestrating now. Even though you might not be a developer, you're now an AI orchestrator. You can run many agents at once and have this top level view to be able to just quickly see which agent needs your attention and just give them those permissions or to pop back in.

• 0:16Claire Vo?

  I don't know. This is like very sad. All my friends are agents. I'm a solo founder. It is like very hard to just me by myself ensure that all my ideas are great.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  When you use subagents, it will spin up three different agents and each of those agents can have their own persona with like a fresh context window, meaning like fresh perspective to go and look at your work in an objective way.

• 0:36Claire Vo?

  If you're a product manager, build it and like put your boss in there, your engineering partner and your customer and say, every PRD, review from these three points of view and give me feedback. If you're in marketing, your ICP, I think there's just a lot of places where this multi-view feedback mechanism is super useful.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  100%. We could take this a step further and say, hey, create this sub-advisory skill, maybe three of the agents, like one agent is literally your boss, that you send an agent to go research who your boss is, their role, their perspective, and have them simulate the feedback that they might give you before you even go to them. The sky's the limit here. You just got to tell Claude what to do and it's going to go do it for you.

• 1:16Claire Vo?

  Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vought, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. When Claude Co-Work first came out, I was pretty much a skeptic, but I have been hearing more and more that Co-Work is the way that everybody I know, especially those who are a little less technical than us engineers, get their daily work done, which is why I'm so excited to have JJ Engler here from 10x, who is a Co-Work power user, but is going to take a step back and show us how to zero to one on Anthropic's new Get Work Done tool. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Tides, the intelligent workflow platform powering the world's most important work. Business moves faster than the systems meant to support it.

• 2:01Claire Vo?

  Teams are stuck with repetitive tasks, scattered tools and hard to reach data. AI has huge promise, but struggles when everything underneath. Is fragmented. Tines fixes that. It unifies your tools, data and processes in one secure, flexible platform, blending a jet tick AI, automation and human led intervention. Teams get their time back, workflows run smarter and AI actually delivers real value. Customers now automate over 1.5 billion actions every week. Tines is trusted by companies like Canva, Coinbase, Databricks, Gitlab, Mars and Reddit.

• 2:42Claire Vo?

  Try Tines at tines.com/ how I AI. JJ, welcome to How I AI.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  It is a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

• 2:54Claire Vo?

  I'm excited about what you're going to show us because when Claude cowork, which is what we're going to talk about, first came out, I wrote this article that kind of blew up on Twitter and a bunch of podcasts talked about it, which was who is cowork for anyway? Because when I first tried it, it seemed like a UI that had just been slapped on top of Claude code. And I looked at it and I said, okay, if you're not, you know, in Claude code all day, writing in the terminal, but you're not super technical, like what is this product that's in the middle? And, you know, shame on me because as it happens, product continues to progress week over week, the anthropic team, the Claude team is cooking nonstop.

• 3:38Claire Vo?

  And I just kept hearing more and more from my non-technical friends, oh my God, cowork's amazing. Or, oh my God, I use cowork to do everything in my job now. And then, you know, I've given it a spin in the past couple of weeks and the UI has really gotten there, what it can do really has gotten there. And so I'm so excited for you to show us the zero to one for cowork. And I just have to ask you, what got you hooked on this particular tool?

• 4:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think like many, we were just experimenting with it. And then quickly I saw that how easy it was to connect your business tooling to it. Whereas like, you know, I built a lot in Claude code, but if I wanted to just connect my Slack, my Gmail, my Notion. Cowork is just one click and then all of a sudden you have an AI processing all of that information, helping you do your job better. And it's just so easy. And so like, that's where it started. But then I started to like, really like, go deep on it. I'm like, oh, my God, this is really helping me my day to day. So I use Cowork for all of like, my productivity stuff of like emailing, Slacks, building projects and documents, and then Claude Code I still build with.

• 4:45Claire Vo?

  I love that because everybody is saying, oh, everything's going to be a CLI, or an API, or a TUI, all this stuff. And I'm like, people just love clicking a button. I don't know, they're just, people want a button. So part of what I hear for you is like, it gave you a button to click to get connected to all your business data. And then when you're working in Cowork, you're in sort of like, business mindset, personal productivity mindset. And then when you're in Claude Code, you're in builder mindset.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I'll pull up my screen in a second here, but you know, the Anthropic Desktop app has three different modes, chat, Cowork, and Claude. We've been in chat for a while now with ChatGPT, etc. Like, I think most of the knowledge workers are like, in chat mode too. But the Cowork switch over to that tab is like the first kind of switch where these knowledge workers, even if they're not technical, can start doing more with AI. And it enables you to just do so much with AI in a very similar chat interface, but where like, it's actually doing stuff for you, where like, in chat, it's like, cool, you told me what to do, but now I gotta go do it. Cowork is literally doing it for you.

• 5:49Claire Vo?

  Why don't you get your screen started? And you're going to show us if you were completely brand new to Cowork, if you had spent all your time in that chat tab, and you're ready to click that middle tab, Cowork, in the Claude Desktop app, what you would do. And I just want to call out for folks, Cowork is available in the Claude Desktop app. So I think you have to be on desktop, not web. And it shows up, again, as one of these three tabs across the top. The middle one says Cowork, and you have to click that. And then you're going to show us what to do once we're there.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  So I have Cowork pulled up here. This is on the Desktop app, and they also have a mobile app as well. Mobile app does not work as well with Cowork. That's where kind of Claude code continues to be really powerful. But Cowork, let me give you the lowdown here. So Cowork can actually access your desktop. And a lot of people in the beginning days of like, hey, Cowork, go in like organize folders for me. Or go in like organize these receipts for me. And yes, Cowork can do that. But Cowork can do so much more as well. Cowork accesses your computer. It can access your browser. It can perform actions on your behalf. If you need to order or you know, book reservations for dinner, it will go find, you know, restaurants looking for you on your browser. You know, contact them, etc. Right?

• 7:04Speaker 00

  Now, when you get started with Cowork, you'll go to a new task and it's going to ask you to open up a project. Okay? Now, this is a very important concept that a lot of people kind of get stumbled on. It's like, what is a project? Well, in the simplest form, a project is a folder on your computer. This is where we are going to work out of and store our files for this project within that area. So if I look at my computer, I have a location called JJ. And within location JJ, I have projects. And this is where I build all of my projects. Now, some of these are Claude code projects and some of these are Cowork projects. Cowork is a really great like on-ramp to Claude code, teaching you some of the basic skills of like how to operate Claude code without going full terminal mode, all that kind of stuff.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  So, within this, I have a popular workspace that I use called Claude Cowork Workspace. That is like a generic, high-level workspace. And I start off this workspace with what I call is my brain. Okay? So my brain goes into very detail of like, what are my working preferences? Who are the team members that I work with? And if I were actually to open this up, I'm just going to hit spacebar. It's just an MD file, which is essentially like a doc file, a text file. This is a very specific series of instructions that we, you know, also known as a prompt, that Claude can read to get up to speed very quickly of who you are, how you like to work, who you work with, and all of your different preferences.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  This way, once I trigger a prompt within Cowork, it gets all of this information with it and just Knows so much more about me. And sometimes we had like in, you know, chat GPT, we had like that one thread of like, oh, this is my thread for like all my product marketing and this is my thread for like, brainstorming about this or whatever. You had like that one thread with a lot of good context that was like very important to you, but you couldn't transfer it anywhere. If you set up the time with your folders, you'll be able to build those threads, but in a very transferable way that allows you to take that context and bring it with you every single time you want to do anything in cowork. And that is the big unlock here. With cowork, you're not starting over from the start.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  If you build up these projects, you're starting from a really good place where cowork already knows about you, your preferences, all that kind of stuff. And then it just starts doing stuff with you as a, as a partner here, right?

• 9:23Claire Vo?

  Yeah, before you show us how you'd create maybe a new project here, I just want to call out some, some things for folks because, you know, if you're new to some of these, like I would say, 201 level AI concepts going from chat to projects, you get really confused. I remembered when Anthropic came out with skills and people are like, what's a skill? I'm so, and I was like, skill is literally like a file that describes what you want to do. Like, let me just make it very simple for you. It's a file. And then what's, what's a project? A project is just literally a folder with files in it. And so, you know, you don't have to be intimidated by these concepts. It's just, I'm working on something. I'm going to spin up a folder, a drive for this. I'm going to put all my context and capture all my context in that one folder.

• 10:07Claire Vo?

  So anytime I come back to work on that, I have the files that I'm working for. And this is how we work in business every day, right? You organize your G drive or your notion by folders. Exact same concept, except this time Claude can go in and actually do some work in, in that workspace alongside you.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  Great call out. That's exactly it. And actually in this session today, we are going to be building like a daily operating system that I will make downloadable for you all to get at the end of the show. So definitely stick with us for that. I do just want to continue to like overall explaining like what we're going to do. And then we're going to get hands on keyboard and start doing it together.

• 10:43Claire Vo?

  Great. Yeah.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  Cool. So this is my general architecture here. And at the top level, I have this workspace map. And so this is essentially something I said, hey Claude, look through all the folders in this or files in this folder and generate a workspace map to help you navigate this better. So that way, whenever I'm in this workspace, Claude and I send a prompt, Claude will look at that workspace map and see, oh, hey, he needs help with Twitter post. I'm going to go into his Twitter folder, use that skill that he's already prepared and then write it that way. Without that workspace map, sometimes Claude has to ingest all of that stuff, which takes up more tokens. And it kind of makes it a little bit muddy because you're sending a lot of context to Claude where maybe it just needs to know how you'd like to write on Twitter and that's it.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  So the workspace map helps Claude navigate your folder structure in a better way. And again, it's as simple as connecting Claude to any folder and just saying, hey Claude, create a workspace map for me. It's going to map everything out and create it for you.

• 11:41Claire Vo?

  Yeah, what I love about working with a tool like Claude, although other tools also do this, in a desktop folder of files is it is much faster at browsing files and figuring out what's going on in there than I am. And so you can actually, you know, I think this is a trick that anybody can use, which is whenever you're trying to orient yourself to something, some work, whether that's a repo, whether that's a folder that somebody, your colleague shared with you, you can open it in Claude and then just say, what's going on in here? And build, even build me a map to where, to where everything is. And that can be very helpful. But let's talk about how you actually kind of get started because you're showing us kind of a little bit of the endpoint. And I think people are saying, okay, this is great.

• 12:26Claire Vo?

  I can, I can end up with this project that has my brain in it. But how do you get started?

• 12:31Speaker 00

  Sure. So I'm going to go into projects here and I'm going to create a new folder. Okay? And this folder is going to be called daily operating system. Okay? And I'm just going to bring it back into my projects there. All right? This is the start of everything and it's an empty folder. Now I'm going to go back into Co-Work here. I'm going to open that up here and go to different folder, projects, daily operating system. There we go. We're going to allow Claude to operate within that. And it's saying, hey, do you want to use both of these or just this? And I'm going to uncheck this because I only want to use this folder right now. Okay? So I can say anything I want to this, but generally what I'm going to say is, Hey Claude, I want to build a daily operating system. This operating system is going to help me manage my day-to-day and become a superhero

• 13:16Speaker 00

  within my workplace. So I want this operating system to help me in a variety of ways. First, I'm going to have it help me work through my emails and help me not only understand my inbox, but help me write better emails. I'm also going to use it to help me look through my Slack and figure out how I need to respond to some of my teammates and then help me write some of those Slack messages. And then I also want a thinking partner, someone that can act as like a mentor to me and help me through tough decisions. So I'm going to go through and ask you some things to help build some skills, but start to lay the foundation for what this project is together.

• 13:51Speaker 00

  So there's a lot there. And I'd say like, this isn't much as you want it to be. Like, this is very a chat-focused experience. You could just start this off and it couldn't even look like any of that. It's just like, you could just start in a task. It's however you want it to be, and as you grow more comfortable with it, Claude will adapt to that. But I think the general point is like, don't let that big prompt like scare you. There's a lot of different ways to enter this, alright? Now, the first part is, okay, Claude looked at my prompt and says, "Okay, I have some questions for you." Now it's going to start asking me some questions. So, where do you want to store these files? I want to store it in my daily operations systems folder, like it recommended. How do you want to interact with the daily operating system? I'm going to be doing it on-demand at the moment, which essentially means like, whenever

• 14:35Speaker 00

  I want to interact with it, I will go into CoWork and interact with it. But I will also show you how to automate some of this stuff, too. For the thinking partner, what kind of support matters most to you? I really like the career coaching and decision frameworks, frameworks there. Alright, so we have this thing going here, right? Now, and let me explain CoWork projects, because this is a brand-new feature and I absolutely love it. So right now, we are in a chat here, okay? And we can start a new chat as well. And you could see that I have active tasks going on here. And so this view is kind of like a good orchestrator view of like seeing the agents that I have working for me. But projects allows you to take that to the next level.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  So what I could do is, I can go into a project here, and I can create a new project. And I'm going to create a new project from an existing folder. That's the same folder that we've already created with the daily operating system. So I'm going to go in there, projects, daily operating system, open, and it's going to open this new folder. And what is the instructions for this project? I'm going to use this folder and operating system to help me navigate the day-to-day life of a busy professional. You're going to help me with some superpowers by applying some AI magic to it all. All right, and I'm just going to keep it there for now. So we are now in a project interface, all right? And if I ever wanted to get back to it, I click on projects, see all my different projects, and then go into the project interface.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  Now, what is the importance of like, why are we in a project rather than a task? Well, these tasks, they all kind of work. But projects allow you to start chaining tasks together, which means shared memory. Okay? So I can find this task right here, this chat that I just had, and I can go and I can move it into this project. Okay? Now, this project, this chat right here, and if any other chat that I have, they all share the same context and Claude knows what you're working on and can bring that with all the new stuff together. Okay? So if you do anything new, it is very specifically knowing like what other chats you've had about this and picking up where you left off.

• 16:43Claire Vo?

  Yeah, so there are two things that people need to know about from an organization perspective, which is, one, we're going to pick a folder on your computer that contains all the files and context and all that stuff for a specific area you're working on. And then, two, you're going to attach that folder to something called projects, which is available in the left-hand nav, to make sure that every time you're working in that folder or in that topic, you're not only working with those files, but you're working with the memory of all the other things that you're either actively working on or have worked on in the past. And then you can give it, if you see in the top right, you can give it just general instructions, which is helpful for guiding any work you do in that, in that specific.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  And this is specific project instructions. And so each project can vary for different kinds of instructions, right? Which is also really good context to have.

• 17:30Claire Vo?

  Yeah, and speaking of context, if you look along the right-hand side, there is a section that says context, and there's exactly what we talked about, which is the context of the folder, and then the context of the memory that's been generated about this project.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  Right. And so this is like the HQ for each project that you work on, right? And it's really become so helpful for me because as you start to have more tasks, all of the different agents for that project are listed here, and you could see like a high-level orchestrator view of like which agent is working, which agent needs your help, and all of those tasks and conversations are like shared together for that shared memory. Again, we want Cowork to do stuff for us, and we want it to do it well and give us good, consistent results. Sometimes when we operate at this high level, it's getting so much information about all the different things we're doing, and the results can get confusing or fuzzy. But if you're operating within a project, it's very specific context about the specific project and your requirements for it, and it helps you get results faster,

• 18:28Speaker 00

  like the prompts are literally faster because you're sending less context, you're saving tokens because you're more focused and organized, and you just get better results in a more consistent way, all right?

• 18:37Claire Vo?

  Right.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  So let me continue to build on this so we can eventually have something that you can download at the end of this show to start using for your own daily operations. Sound cool?

• 18:45Claire Vo?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  Cool. So with a couple of things that I want to call out here, connectors, so important. So to add a connector, I'm going to right-click here and I'm going to go into connectors, and I could see that I've already enabled some of my connectors, but I'm just going to click here so you can see this view. So connectors allow you to connect your systems to Cowork, okay? So right now I have connected Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Notion, and Slack. And if I wanted to add more connectors, I can go to browse connectors, and I could see a ton of connectors that I could do. It's normally like a one-click, you authenticate, and it comes in and you're connected. That essentially means Cowork has access to that application and a lot of those actions within that application. If I wanted to go into like my Gmail connection here,

• 19:29Speaker 00

  I could see that Cowork now has access to all of these tools and can actually do these for me. And if I wanted to get very specific about the permissions, I can go in here and say, hey, Cowork, I'm not going to allow you to create an email draft or to do something, but I am going to allow you to do this, or sometimes I want you to do this, but always ask me for permission. So with each connector, you can go in and modify those permissions. But generally, this gives you a connection to your tools that you can use. Now, I can go back into Co-Work here, and I'm going to go back into my projects, daily operating system. And the first thing I'm going to do is say, hey,

• 20:09Speaker 00

  analyze my Gmail, specifically the emails that I have sent in the last 30 days, and use this to create a writing skill specifically for emails that I write, using my emails as an example of my writing structure. So whenever I want you to write an email in the future, you know exactly how I write my emails, and you'll use this skill.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  So this is going to start building an email skill for me. And it's going to do it by connecting to my Gmail, looking at my outbox of all the emails that I've sent in the last 30 days, analyzing that writing skill, and just perfectly matching the tone that I use in my writing. You know, AI is used for writing in a lot of different ways. And of course, there's a lot of AI slop. But when you can feed AI, like a series of like 100 messages, it could really get close to your exact writing style. And that's what this is doing here.

• 20:58Claire Vo?

  So just to kind of take a step back, connectors are really important because this is not only the tools that are going to do work on your behalf, right? I think this is something that people might miss, which is, yes, we can do connectors so you can draft emails to Gmail or write docs in Notion. But there's also this ingest path that can make your use of these AI tools a lot better. And I haven't seen this use case before, so I want to call it out for people, which is have AI go read your emails and come back and build a skill, which I think is really important. And skills, remember, for folks are just these like containerized little sets of instructions that can be called at any time. Go build a skill that writes emails in my tone.

• 21:42Claire Vo?

  And, you know, I think as somebody who's developing a daily operating system, I call this your like anti-to-do list is you come up with these lists of things that you just like never want to do again. Like, I never want to have to first draft my emails again. I never want to have to like show up to a meeting late because there's a conflict on my calendar or they've been setback. Back to back. I just want these things I never have to worry about. And I think as somebody who's coming in and trying to think about how could I use cowork or something for my daily operating system. This idea of like burning down your anti to do list and then building skills on all those is is really sharp. And what I think you're showing is you can use connectors plus the brains of cowork to kind of come together and not only functionally achieve that,

• 22:25Claire Vo?

  but achieve that in a way that's high quality for you personally.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, and the results have been really good with it, too.

• 22:31Claire Vo?

  Yeah, I mean, are you really getting emails that like, sound like, sound like you?

• 22:35Speaker 00

  Exactly. And normally what I'll do is I'll go into my instructions here. And I haven't done this step yet, but I'll say, never send emails on my behalf, only write them as drafts for me to review. Right? And now this is a very clear instructions of like, hey, it's actually never going to send anything for me because I don't trust that yet. But everything that I ask it to send, it's going to write that draft and just prepare it in my outbox or my drafts so I can approve it and then send it as well.

• 23:01Claire Vo?

  By the way, you're being very chill about all your voice entry stuff. What, what is your voice tool of choice?

• 23:08Speaker 00

  Whisperflow.

• 23:09Claire Vo?

  Whisperflow.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  It's just, it's captured my heart.

• 23:12Claire Vo?

  I'm a monologue girl, so you know, we all, we all pick our favorite.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  You know what? It all works. It all works.

• 23:20Claire Vo?

  It all works. This episode is brought to you by Cursor. If you all have been watching How I AI, you already know this. Cursor is my favorite way to code with AI. Whether I'm using plan mode to build out an ambitious feature, reviewing AI generated diffs right in my editor, or kicking off cloud agents to multi-thread our roadmap, I reach for Cursor as my favorite multi-model coding platform. Even better than building myself in Cursor, I love collaborating with Bugbot to fix PRs for code security and quality, and have begun relying on Cursor's automated agents to keep our codebase clean. It's not just me. The most ambitious teams love Cursor, too, including engineers at Stripe, OpenAI, and Figma. Ready to build more?

• 24:06Claire Vo?

  We're giving $50 in Cursor credit to How I AI listeners. Claim your credits at chat. dot AI slash how I AI that's fifty dollars in cursor credits by going to chat PRD dot AI slash how I AI okay so you've started I see a pop up here so tell me what's what's going on

• 24:27Speaker 00

  so this is one of the things I love about having this project system you're orchestrating now even though you might not be a developer you're now an AI orchestrator you can run many agents at once and have this top level view to be able to just quickly see which agent needs your attention and just give them those permissions or to pop back in so right now we do see that hey this agent needs our attention we can go in and review that and it's asked actually just asking us if we want to allow this okay so without even having to go in there I can just allow that I could go into that connector and change those privileges just to say always allow so I don't have to do that but in this case that was set to a ask for my permission okay

• 25:07Claire Vo?

  this is one of my one of my problems with with cowork which is this is just like such a lovely non-technical experience until it shoves like a bash command in your face and is like hey do you want to allow this or not

• 25:21Speaker 00

  yeah

• 25:22Claire Vo?

  and I just for all all the non-technical folks out there that just were like hey hold on I just saw a big line of code that said are you okay with running this you can also like copy and paste that and ask a different Claude chat what does this mean you know and I think what's kind of interesting about these hybrid tools that are kind of user facing non-technical folks but have this like Claude code back backend is it's a nice way to actually step your way into the Claude code experience bit by bit but again don't be afraid I think you can be pretty unafraid of some of these alerts that may look technical because you can always go ask what does this mean should I do this and I will also say that I think cowork in particular has been tuned to be

• 26:05Claire Vo?

  pretty user friendly like there isn't a dangerously skip permissions on cowork quite yet and so anything that Claude's asking you to do is probably in the realm of safe although it's important to read whenever you hit that approve button

• 26:19Speaker 00

  I was on the fence about calling this out, but people ask me, Co-Work vs. OpenClaw. And I know you're really big into OpenClaw. And I am too. I really, really love it. But the way that I think about this is, OpenClaw is for work in business where you can trust it with your most significant connections. And OpenClaw is incredible, but you maybe don't trust as much with your business tooling, especially in the first. It's a great personal assistant, it's a great autonomous agent, and can do so much. And so I use both together, but Co-Work is like my daily business driver. And OpenClaw is more like my personal assistant, can just help me in a lot of things with limited access to a lot of its own accounts.

• 26:58Claire Vo?

  Yeah, I'm full Claw, full press, Claw world. But again, I mean, again, I cannot go throughout through my day without somebody texting me like, Co-Work is doing my job for me, I'm happy as can be. So you showed an example that I think is generally applicable to people, which is, write my emails. What else? I mean, just kind of top hits of workflows that you think something like Co-Work could do for you? That you think belongs in your operating system?

• 27:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. So I just looking at this agent here, it analyzed 46 emails. And it went in and created an email style guide for me, and a voice profile, and saved it to my memory as well. So I'm going to go back over here. The next thing that I really like to use is Claw as a thinking partner. Thinking partner can come in many shapes and sizes. It could be like, how do I respond to this Slack message? How do I respond to my colleague and give them good feedback? How do I think about my career and what I should do next? Now, you can have a skill or a thinking partner for each one of those, or you can have a generic one. Right now, we are going to just create like a thinking partner, like a mentor, that you can just trigger and just like help you think through important decisions. And it will kind of like,

• 28:12Speaker 00

  talk back to you in a way that you want to be supported. And so I'm going to launch another agent here, and I'm going to say, "Help me create a new skill that is going to be our thinking partner." This thinking partner skill, when invoked, is going to allow me to think about how to respond to something, how to make a decision, how to critique in a colleague that I'm working with in a good but effective and helpful way, how to think about my career at large, and just generally going to help me think through the bigger items of whatever task is at hand. And you can invoke this by saying, you know, "Help me think through this," or, you know, "Navigate my thinking partner," or anything like that. And then one last thing I do want to add is, please ask me any questions if you're unclear.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  I love the asking any questions if you're unclear, because generally, a lot of times it is, and it just forces it to like really get the more context that it needs to make sure that it's building something specific to you, right? Now, we've talked about skills a lot, and we've actually even started creating skills. Skills are really powerful. You can think about it as like a very detailed prompt that is reusable in many different ways. And so rather than saying, "Hey, go off and create this newsletter for me, and then tell it everything that you want in your newsletter," you can do that once and have a very clear pattern for like everything in your newsletter. And then you could just say, "Hey, write the newsletter," and it will invoke that skill and automatically use that instructions every single time.

• 29:37Claire Vo?

  Yeah, and for folks, I do actually have literally that skill in my core ChatPRD repo. I use it through Claude Code. So I just do a slash newsletter every Monday, and it goes and looks through my change log. It writes the newsletter, it does it in my voice, it formats it for the newsletter platform, it pushes it via API, and then I just go in and do a couple edits and move on with my life. So that's a really great, great use case.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  Let me have one more that we get going here. This is already building. "Hey Claude, I want you to build another skill, and this is going to be a review agent. For this skill, you're going to launch a series of sub-agents that have each their own persona. And this can differ per the task, but an example is if we're launching a newsletter, we want to have sub-agents that represent our ICP. Maybe for me, it would be AI builders, AI executives, and AI-interested people. And the goal of this skill is to allow sub-agents to be able to review your work and give you honest feedback, and to see from three different perspectives where you need to focus at your next iteration to improve the quality of your work. Let me know if you have any questions.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  So this is another skill that I really love and I use like across so much of my work. It's like I use it in my newsletter, I use it in my podcast, I use it in my social media writing. It's a sub advisory skill, it's a general pattern. And what it allows you to do is Claude, you know, it's working with you in this context and it generates an output. When you use subagents, it will spin up three different agents and each of those agents can have their own persona. So like, hey, Agent One, you are an AI builder. Agent Two, you are someone that is so worried about security. And Agent Three, maybe you're just a mom worried about AI usage, or a dad worried about AI usage, or just as an arbitrary example. But my point of this is you can define three individual personas with like a fresh context

• 31:33Speaker 00

  window, meaning like fresh perspective, to go and look at your work in an objective way. That then brings back that feedback and it helps you kind of figure out like, how is this going to be received before I even send it? Right? And if you include your ICP personas in there, it also helps with this a lot too. And I found really good results with this kind of framework for creating your skills.

• 31:54Claire Vo?

  The one thing I think is really important to call out as, you know, people think about where this is applicable in their work is so many of us in the last five, six years have moved to remote first working, where getting collaborative feedback from your teammates is actually highly expensive. You have to call a meeting, everybody is busy, synchronous work is quite hard. And so being able to spin up pre feedback feedback from AI, which will give you sort of a roundtable view of your work, allows you to come to those very expensive meetings, honestly, with much higher quality pre-thought out work. And also, I don't know, this is like very sad, all my friends are agents, which is like,

• 32:37Claire Vo?

  it's really hard to work solo. Like I'm a solo founder, it is like very hard to just me by myself ensure that all my ideas are great. And so I haven't heard of anybody giving this advice of like very specific use of subagents, which as you said, is just imagine like there's a chat that's chatting with other chats that have some, but not all the context and their own point of view. Maybe that's how you think about subagents for folks that aren't super technical. And then aggregate that back up and give you some feedback, I think is a really useful just hack that everybody should have for their work. So if you're a product manager, build it and like, put your boss in there, your engineering partner and your customer

• 33:18Claire Vo?

  and say, every PRD, review from these three points of view and give me feedback. If you're in marketing, again, like your ICP, give feedback. I think there's just a lot of places where this sort of multi-view feedback mechanism is super useful.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  100%. We could take this a step further and say, hey, create this sub-advisory skill and each, maybe three of the agents, like one agent is literally your boss, that you send an agent to go research who your boss is, their role, their perspective, and like really define like the people that you work with and have like them simulate the feedback that they might give you before you even go to them. Like, the sky's the limit here. And you just gotta tell Claude what to do and it's gonna go do it for you. So, there's a lot of tools that you have at your disposal now to automate a lot of this. Like, one example with this is, I also run a newsletter. And so, the skill that we have for the newsletter is a, almost like a 10-step skill of like, before we even start writing this newsletter,

• 34:14Speaker 00

  I want you to interview me what this newsletter should be written about. Then, once you're interviewing me, I also want you to run a sub-agent to do internet research on what is good in the AI world this week? What should we talk about in this? And once my interview is complete and what's the research is complete, we now have an idea of like the content that we can do. And then it's gonna start working through a series of sub-skills which are like, what should our subject line be? And what are really good subject lines? And it's gonna have one set of instructions for that. And then my newsletter has like very specific body segments. And each body segments has a specific skill within it, saying like, here's what makes a really good AI native section, or what makes a really good AI future section,

• 34:57Speaker 00

  right? And at the end of all those steps, it has an evaluation part of the skill, where it's gonna go through a series of checklists, lists, and also launch that sub-advisory board. And so, it's gonna go through all of this. And all I need to do is say, ultra-think skill, and then it's gonna start this series that it works through. Just helps me and by the end of it, it's done so much work for me. And I've just had to answer some questions and then it's outputted a draft that I think is really good. And I also feed it my past results of my newsletter of like, hey, we've written this together. This performed okay and I give it the results and it has a series of feedback and like, you know, review of like how these things are performing to see what's working and what's not, which is a very important step because like if you don't tell AI what success is to you,

• 35:43Speaker 00

  AI doesn't know what success is for you. So I always love including good examples and bad examples. This is very clear for like writing. If you're writing and you really like something, include it in a good example. But if it comes back with something that you don't like, put it in a bad example like, hey, don't do that again. That doesn't look good. And this way you're showing Claude what is good for you and what is bad for you because that's subjective and different for everyone and Claude needs to know it. All right, so we have this multi-agent perspective here and we can see that we've done a couple of things. This one, the thinking partner skill needs my review. So I'm going to go in there and I'm just going to review it and it's looking for some information here and it looks like it had opened up.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  So they have this new interface here, which allows you to review your thinking skill or whatever skill you created and see like, and I tested in real time to see how it would come back and evaluate it like that, right? So that's very helpful if you want to use that. But what I want to do is I want to go back to my project here.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  And I want to create something called a scheduled task with you. A scheduled task allows you to create something that runs on a frequency. So it could run every hour, day, weekdays, weekly, whatever. And this scheduled task is going to be a morning debrief. I want you every single morning to look at my email, my Slack and my calendar and check it to help organize a plan of action for the day. So that way, when I get into the office, I am aware of any kind of messages that need my attention. And you can start preparing me for my day by looking through my calendar and looking through my events. And if I need any kind of meeting prep, helping me do that. But generally the output is going to be like a plan for the day,

• 37:27Speaker 00

  helping me get started on the best foot every single day.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  So that's going to be the prompt and I'm going to run that daily. And I want it to run at like 7:30 AM. And I could choose what model I want this to run with or where these outputs should go. In this sense, it's going to be, you know, the daily operations. That's going to be good. And I'm going to just be able to save that.

• 37:52Claire Vo?

  It needs a name.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  Ah, there it is. Thank you. I was like, why is it? Morning, people.

• 37:56Claire Vo?

  I want to call out for folks, we've seen a couple of these like morning debrief examples on how AI. We've seen Hillary has shown us, she uses Obsidian hooked up to her Claude code, hooked up to her calendar, she writes Plan My Day. We've seen a couple of these scheduled sort of like news I need to know tasks in ChatGPT. I think what I want to call out for folks, especially those who are again new to using AI beyond asking a question in ChatGPT, which I know honestly, many of you are, which is, I've used ChatGPT or Claude to ask a one-off question, get some info,

• 38:39Claire Vo?

  you know, like write a song for my, you know, grandchild or answer a question about my medical health or write a document to my HOA, whatever, you know, people have used that use case. But what I think you're showing here is something that wasn't accessible to folks, which is you can actually build a little software-powered system for yourself to make your day go easier. And it could be writing emails for you. It could be, you know, every morning, send you a message about what your schedule looks like. Let's say you're not even, you don't even have a busy schedule. Like I'm thinking about, you know, my dad's retired, like news that you're, you might be interested in for the day.

• 39:23Claire Vo?

  I have a daily, you know, in the, in the technical world, we call it a cron. And when you're on the, when you're on the open claw side, but I have a daily schedule. And in the morning I get pushed something. Kind of fun and interesting in the AI space. And at night, I get pushed an article that will like make me feel good. You know, and so you just think about if the internet could come to me.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:45Claire Vo?

  As opposed to me having to go to the internet. What would I want the internet to come to come to me with? And that's what I think you focus your your morning debrief on. So it could be like highly functional from a productivity perspective. It could be, you know, go fill your water glass. Don't drink coffee on an empty stomach. Go for a walk and say hello to the sun. Give me any of those things, but it can be scheduled and it can be pushed to you.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  Right. And right now, since we've scheduled this within a project, it has all the context of your project as well. Meaning the skills, your connectors and everything. And that's why having it scheduled within a project, like building up that context. It gets very powerful over time and you're going to get better results. So this could be a project debrief where like if you're a project manager, every single day it's going to look at this project and just help write a plan of action for all of your team members to and send as a Slack message. So like, once they enter, that project plan for the day is done and very specific to each project. Right? So there's just so many ways you can use it. And this also connects to all of my tools.

• 40:46Speaker 00

  So it's going to read my email and my calendar and my Slack and just prepare a daily plan with all that context in mind in a safe way. That's like the unlock for me is like just being able to read all of these tools and use an AI on top of that to like help me do my job better.

• 41:01Claire Vo?

  Yeah, and I'll just call off for folks because again, I think this is sort of like a Claude cowork 101. Folks that are maybe newer to using AI in this particular way. And the things that you're going to hear is like, do I want AI reading my email? Do I want AI reading, you know, my calendar? And the recommendation that I give to everybody is again, just think about this as progressive trust, which is at first, you just may want it to draft emails for you. Then you may want it to read your emails. Then you may want it to read your calendar or your Slack or any of those things. Then you may want to have like a shadow JJ that actually just operates completely independent of you.

• 41:41Claire Vo?

  And you're in the Bahamas hanging out and you know, Agent JJ is actually doing your job for you. Just think about this on like a trust spectrum. You'll get, you know, you'll get to Clairvaux level at some point where you're just like floating, floating through the tokens, approving API access. But I do think, you know, people get nervous about this.

• 42:04Claire Vo?

  It's a trade of information for productivity. And it's like, we're all on one side or the other, which is you give the AI a little bit of information. It can help you be very, very productive. And you've got to figure out where you feel comfortable on that spectrum in your business, in your personal life. I think you and I are just showing if you get to this far further edge, you're going to get a lot of value out of it that you couldn't before.

• 42:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, and especially with the skills. Like, I know everyone says skills, skills, skills, but like, I have a skill for everything. I have a skill for writing on Twitter. I have a skill for writing on LinkedIn. I have a skill for doing my YouTube, my podcast, my newsletter. Like, just having that built in infrastructure that whenever I need to do any of that stuff and knows exactly the way I like to work, that is a very big unlock for me. Another thing that I've been doing is I'm working with Anthropic through my company 10x right now. And one of the things that we're doing is we're hosting a workshop for Anthropic. And so I threw in all of the documents that Anthropic gave us of like, we're a program guidelines and workshop guidelines and everything. And so anytime I ask a question about this project, it has all of that context in mind. It knows exactly what Anthropic wants it to do.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  It wants all that kind of stuff, and it's very clear and easy. And so whenever I start a new project, the first step is like, all right, I'm going to create a folder. I'm going to put all my files in that folder. I'm going to open up that folder in Claude, Co-Work, create a project for it. And now that project can access all that information and be very specific about helping me do better with that context in mind. And it's just a big unlock for me. And it's a very easy way to get started doing more with AI. They will teach you a lot of skills that you can transfer over to actually building stuff with AI, which is Claude code, which is also incredible. And the rate at which Co-Work is improving is really, really awesome. And so it's just one of those things where it's like, if you're ready to do more with AI, which hopefully you are, because that's where we're going.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  And those that can are rising up really quickly. So hopefully you are. And if you are, Co-Work is a really good next step for you to blossom a little bit, spread your wings, and just see what you can do with AI doing stuff with you.

• 44:08Claire Vo?

  Well, and again, I want to go back to folks that are like, okay, we got these two like podcast hosts telling us how they are planning their like YouTube releases using Co-Work. I want to say that, again, these projects do not have to be work-related, right? They don't. You can make a project that's house maintenance. Let me tell you a project that you make house maintenance. Every couple of months, you need to change your air filters. Every, you know, like, you know, in the winter, you want to make sure to plan for XYZ. You've got a big, kind of like remodel project going on. Put that in a Claude cowork project. Generate the things that you need to generate. Keep it in, keep it in a workspace. And so you can be really creative about what the idea of a project means.

• 44:52Claire Vo?

  I've seen other people who are doing hiring and they're saying, here's my recruiting engineers project. And it's all the work they need to do around job descriptions, sourcing, onboarding, interviews, all in one project. So again, it doesn't have to be personal productivity. It doesn't have to be workshops with Anthropic. It doesn't have to be your YouTube. And I love, I'm glad you're showing this screen, which is cowork has this list of ideas of kind of things you can do with it. I think like, good job cowork product team. Because again, people just, this is part of the point of this podcast, which is people hear that AI is awesome, they want to use it, they're ready to go. And then they sit in front of a chat box and like, what do I do with this?

• 45:36Claire Vo?

  Like, what can I possibly do?

• 45:38Speaker 00

  And is AI going to steal all of my data?

• 45:41Claire Vo?

  And is AI going to steal? Those are the two questions. Like, is it going to steal everything and run off with my spouse? And like, what do I actually do? And so I think like, pod, you know, this podcast is a resource. We actually put, we're now almost 200 individual workflows documented out of this podcast on the chat PRD How AI Blog, where we've just like given you step by step how to copy this stuff. We'll do this episode as well. But I think the point is just like, find something you're working on and give it a go. JJ, I know that we got to get you back to your cowork projects and your podcasts, your pod coding and 10x and all that stuff. So let's just do really quick lightning round, super, super fast answers. One, outside of what we just saw, what is your number one favorite cowork use case that you've discovered?

• 46:25Speaker 00

  Content creation is huge. Doing this Anthropic workshop right now, like, it's so intense. But, so this project has been really helping me because they gave us like 30-page document of like what to do and what not to do. And at any time, I could just go and say like, what do they say here? What do they do here? And it literally helps me. So navigating a lot of files with CoWorks is just so helpful.

• 46:48Claire Vo?

  Amazing. I've heard a lot of event planning with CoWorks and a lot of event planning with Codex, which is OpenAI's kind of version of this. Very good. I'm wait, I call, how AI request, if you're planning your wedding with CoWorks, I want to hear that.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  Great use case.

• 47:04Claire Vo?

  Great use case.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  You can go find the vendors for you. It can write the emails for you. Oh, my God, great use case.

• 47:10Claire Vo?

  I know, I know. This is gonna be my next business. I'm gonna do AI-driven wedding planning.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  There we go.

• 47:15Claire Vo?

  Okay, my second question to you, outside of CoWorks, what's, what's a tool that you're loving?

• 47:20Speaker 00

  I do Remotion a lot. I'm doing programmatic video creation for like so much of my stuff right now. That's really working well. I really love pencil.dev, too. It's like the cursor but for design. And so you tell it what you want and it'll design for you. So those are some of my two favorites that I've been digging into outside of Anthropic, Claude code stuff.

• 47:41Claire Vo?

  Yeah, man. Okay, if I haven't done a Remotion video by the time this comes out, yell at me in the comments, I will do it. People have been asking this from me for months and months and months. I love Remotion, too. Again, programmatic video generation, super, super cool. I mean, you can do it with, with Claude code. And then my last question, which is, you're, this is maybe tricky because you seem to be a whisper flow, sort of talk to the AI with your human voice, which I think keeps us a little bit more polite. But when AI is not listening, what do you do? What's your prompting strategy?

• 48:14Speaker 00

  I'm generally polite.

• 48:15Claire Vo?

  Me, too.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  Because I, I'm generally polite. But I will, I will put on the cap locks and I will let it know sometimes when I'm talking, when I mean business. I don't normally swear at it, though. Usually when it's, it's not behaving, it just doesn't know what I'm asking and that's a good chance to like better communicate of like, here's what I'm asking. Here's what a successful output gets me. Help me figure that out. Ask me any questions to help us get back on track. Launch a subagent to figure out what's going on here. That kind of stuff like helps me like navigate back to being like on track. And then also saying like, hey, what we just experienced, that was not good. Add that like scenario to like my negative outputs. So we don't do that again.

• 49:00Claire Vo?

  I love it. I found myself, I don't yell. I do sometimes all caps. I found myself being like, this is truly insane. What you just did is cuckoo. Fix it. Not super polite, but but effective. Okay, JJ, where can we find you and how can we be helpful?

• 49:17Speaker 00

  I think I'm pretty much everywhere. I run a YouTube channel called 10x Builder. I'm on X for at JJ Englert, LinkedIn at JJ Englert as well. I work at 10x and I lead our community enablement here. We're doing a ton of stuff. So if you need help bringing AI transformation and enablement to your org, let us know. But otherwise, it is a pleasure being here. We love your work. I love your work. Thank you for inviting me. It's been a joy.

• 49:40Claire Vo?

  Thanks for joining us. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube. Or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.