Introduction: A non-developer’s path into AI building

I've worked in the tech space for 25 years but up until 18 months ago could never have read a line of code could not have written a line of code but August 2024 I was like right I'm getting into AI

I'm going to teach myself and just as some of the tools that Glenn was talking about there were coming along cursor had arrived we had chat GPT Claude I was just getting into Claude code hadn't arrived yet and i said right i'm going to spend a few weekends teaching myself how to build something

Learning to build on weekends (and pushing through the pain)

and very very painful uh youtube videos i restricted it just to the weekends and back then it was just like a lot of copy pasting uh from chat gpt into cursor all of these things weren't quite there and nothing was working i didn't know why it wasn't working i was not a developer and I literally crying at my laptop and my wife going go for a run

you know clear your head and then while I'm away on my run I'd be like I'll just try this one thing get back oh it works right we're back in the game again and so by the end of each Sunday and I had I'd moved forward a little bit ready for next Saturday to break it again and so that was started in August or September

time and then by December I'd managed to build the first thing that was out there on the internet and working and someone could sign up to it no one did sign up to it because it's a bad idea but at least I'd built it and since then

through last year I've just carried on on this on this journey of learning and as I go through this that's why I want definitely to speak to anyone that is a non -developer to say that whilst it is painful and I did cry and pull my hair out there was this amazing thing on the other side whereas now and I still

restrict it to the weekends because if I didn't restrict it to the weekends I would do this all the time you can bring any ideas that you want into life and so

building on a few of the things that Glenn was talking about and if you're a developer you will do all of this but just for the non developers I want to

to link into what I'm going to talk about and why this agentic thing has been built off the back of Claude Code.

From traditional development to Claude Code

So Glenn talked about Claude Code being this sort of agentic coding platform that came out literally I want to say like eight months ago and hit a billion of revenue in six months just because oh it just works like an absolute dream.

What the pre-AI coding workflow looked like

So up until AI coding coming along this this is what things looked like. You might have had code up in GitHub, a sort of remote repository where everything sits,

and then what a developer would do is download that, clone it to their local laptop, and so we've got Acme Project here with some folders and some files,

and they would be developing on that, and once they finished their work, they would commit and push that back up again, and that is the development lifecycle.

How Claude Code changes the local workflow

So then Claude Code comes along. well this is this agentic platform that is running on your laptop as well and is able to interact with these files that are on your laptop and Claude code comes

with some funky stuff we're going to have a look at in a minute skills agents memory and this thing is just working away beavering away on your own laptop

Using agentic tools beyond software code

working on these folders and files now I well let me go back one here I like many many others realized well hang on if this thing can navigate around files and folders do they have to be full files and folders of code or could it be words just like me writing stuff and so I set up a new project which was my strategy

for the company koala strategy and these folders instead of being like UI and API routes were hiring people at finance fundraising and I was busy working away way in this thing.

Turning folders and files into a ‘second brain’ for strategy

Great. Showed it to a few other CEO friends. I was like, oh, I've got my second brain. This thing's amazing.

Now they had not gone on the coding journey. So they had their first view of an IDE like Cursor. And they were like, Charlie, it looks very complicated.

There's absolutely no way I'm getting involved in that. But if there's any way that you could make that more accessible, I'd be really interested in it.

Making agents accessible: Claude Agent SDK

So this is where the Claude Agent SDK comes in. So Anthropic also figured this out. They were like, hang on,

Claude Code is a great agent, but just like Glen said, it's quite inaccessible. If you're not a developer, you'd think, well, Claude Code is not for me, so I won't go near it.

So what they've done is wrap up everything that Claude Code can do, but into something that you can put wherever you want.

What the SDK packages up (skills, agents, memory, hooks)

So the Claude Agent SDK has all of the things that are in Claude Code, skills agents memory hooks lots and bits and pieces and it can take action and interact on these files in your local directory but you can then put it

wherever you want so it doesn't have to be in an ID and looking coding code like you can run it as a desktop app you could run it out and the internet should

What is an agent? The agentic loop explained

you should you wish Glenn touched a little bit on agents and for many people that can be like what is an agent have i got an agent is it an agent what is an agent so this is the very basic uh graphic of what an agent is this comes from uh from claude uh themselves or from

anthropic themselves so firstly you've got your prompt coming in one side so this is you saying you know help me build my strategy or help me write some code help me design some ui whatever whatever that is.

And then we go into this agentic loop, so gathering some context, so going out around this directory, having a look at files, what's here, what can I learn, what do I understand about the world that I'm in, in this folder.

Then taking some action, which in development could be writing some code, building some kind of integration, but in the strategy world, it could be writing a document, it could be sending an email.

and then we verify results so having done that thing let's go and check it you know does it meet the needs yes or no but let's go back to the start and keep going and keep going and this is what's called this agentic loop and where we're talking about things running for 20 minutes two hours

seven hours this is where these models are getting so good that if you're giving them the right task and it's scoped well enough this thing can just crack on and on and on until you've finished the job or you've got involved by interrupting it or steering

A practical demo: an AI strategic partner for a CEO

it so what does that look like well this is my strategic partner my co -ceo let me jump in a little bit and so what you're looking at here maybe make it a little

bit bigger there on the left here is a directory a set of files and folders that are on my laptop in exactly the same way like glenn was showing code except these for me are folders about our strategy they're about our marketing campaigns they're about hiring they're about people and

these documents are mainly markdown documents so just written text sometimes it's a powerpoint Sometimes it's a Word document or a PDF, but mainly it's Markdown documents. Now, if I go over here, we get all of the bits and pieces, the goodies that Claude Agent SDK provides.

Connecting business systems (CRM, finance, roadmap, data)

1So firstly, connectors. So you might have heard of MCP servers, MCP connectors. These are all of the systems that we use in the company.

HubSpot for CRM, Xero for accounting, Sanity is our content management system that drives the website, Linear where we drive all the product roadmap, Superbase all of our customer data. This is all plugged into it so as I'm having a chat in here it's able to go and bring all of this information into the conversation.

So for example when I'm thinking about hiring plans you think right well what goes into building a hiring plan i need to know how much money we've got in the bank what invoices we're waiting to get paid i need to go and look in hubspot to look at open deals and find out what the status of those deals in and when they're going to close and then maybe i want to go and have a look at the product usage in in superbase for me to have that conversation i need to look in all of these different places and by bringing it all together in this one platform I'm able to have this conversation and and the platform will

go off and go and take a look at that now the main thing I want to show you is

Skills: turning SOPs into reusable AI workflows

a thing called skills so has anyone come across agent skills Claude skills heard that phrase it's going to get bigger and bigger and bigger through this year so skills is a thing that came from anthropic and initially landed in Claude and Claude code but they've made it an open standard so you're going to see it in chat GPT you're going to see it in Gemini and so what is a skill well let

me go to and we go to this one here so content writer so I create a lot of content I create content that goes on to the website I create content that goes into a newsletter I create content that goes on to LinkedIn or X and you know I've got this time block on a Wednesday you know write the newsletter and I always see that and oh god I gotta write the newsletter and then you've got to like put it in HubSpot and you've got all this sort of process that goes on

around it but this is very organized like I could write it down this is how I want to write a newsletter this is how I want to write a blog post these are the questions that I'd like someone to interview me about and this is what a

skill becomes so all skills follow a pretty standard format so you've got the name of the skill and then you have a skill MD file and this is where you follow a standard format of giving it a name and a description and then you describe what this skill does so in your company you may have got standard operating procedures you may have lots of physio diagrams or stuff on the intranet that no one ever goes to this is the stuff that you write down and put into it into

a skill so here this is basically saying i'm going to come to you and say oh i want to write something um is it a newsletter is it a blog post is it a linkedin post and then based on that i then want you to go and follow these various instructions in addition to your main skill .md which i think of as like the signpost this is basically the high level this is what this thing does then we create

References, assets, and output destinations (Sanity, HubSpot)

a load of references so when i'm creating a blog this is the workflow for creating a blog you're going to ask me some questions you're going to go off and do some web research we're going to draft it together you're then going to give me the draft i'm going to be happy with it and then we're going to push it out to sanity which is the content management system if we're doing a newsletter newsletter same thing you're going to ask me charlie what do you want the newsletter to be about have you got any specific resources or anything that you want to put into it once we've done that we're going to push it out to hubspot and that's when it's going to get sent out and so on

we can also provide it with assets and these assets tend to be like blank templates so what is it that claude should know about to fill in so i basically want a blog post to follow this kind kind of standard format with this kind of SEO and this is what needs to go into our content management system when we send a newsletter it needs to be a slightly different format so we're basically coaching the AI the whole way this is the process this is what I want you to ask me once we've drafted it I want you to put it in this format and then I want you to send send that so

this is it this is a skill and for anyone that is a knowledge worker a a leader, a manager. 1Laying down everything that you do, that your team does into these skills over the next year is going to be one of the most impactful things that you can do for your own use of AI. So I'm going to leave some other bits and pieces there and then just show you like what does this look like to actually use.

Capturing richer context with voice: Whisperflow

So I use a thing called Whisper Flow. Has anyone used Whisper Whisperflow, come across Whisperflow, couple of hands.

So Whisperflow, like a free download to your Mac or your Windows machine. And it basically, all I do is press my function key

and whatever I'm speaking, it will listen, it will tidy it up, it will get rid of my nonsense and then put it into the input box.

So if I was to say here, hey, I'm just describing about using Whisperflow and some of the amazing reasons why I'd use it one would be that I just have to press my function key and away

it goes to that I can use it wherever I am typing so I use it for LinkedIn or whatsapp or or X posts and three that even if I'm oh I don't know no don't do that no yeah making a mistake it'll just tidy up my rubbish and make it a bit more coherent so that is whisper flow it puts in the numbered lists and I just

I've given up typing I've literally have not typed for for a year now because once you can do that you're like am I going to talk through my fingertips it's just I can go way faster now why this is important for any AI whether

you're developing whether you are just using a knowledge tool like this these machines they crave context they crave context the more you can give it the the better and so I find myself talking to this but also when I'm coding I'll

talk for three four minutes about what I'm trying to build the feature the use case who's going to use it why I'm thinking about it or maybe now I'm thinking about a specific way that we might do that I'll just talk talk talk not worry about it let go of my finger on whisper flow and in it goes and it

will sort it sort it all out so definitely a top recommendation I'd say whisper flow is the number one thing I hear about four or five weeks later when I get a whatsapp that says hey Charlie and whisper flowing you this I've stopped

typing and I think you're absolutely gonna gonna love it so on the right -hand side here is the is Claude running in the background the agent SDK and just

Putting it together: sub-agents, coaching, and real decisions

could say hey I'm just doing a demo I want to talk through our playing to win strategy so can you just remind me what the playing to win strategy is where it comes from while I explain

it to people so has anyone read the book playing to win a couple of hands yeah so a really good book written by a guy called A .G. Lafley who was the CEO twice of Procter & Gamble so if you had a they're a big CPG company so you probably used one of their products today to have a shower and he and his consulting sidekick wrote this book

playing to win which codifies corporate strategy into five cascading questions so what is our winning aspiration what are we aiming for where to play where are we going to play geographically product services areas the value chain

chain, how to win on each of those playing fields, what are the must have capabilities that we need, factories, people, partners and then finally what are the management systems that we need, the cadence of our meetings and the accounting that we're going to need to do.

Now if you're like me, you might have loved reading business books, a framework, a template, here's how we're going to do X or Y and then you get to the end of the book and you put it back in the bookshelf and then never go near it again because you've got no way of like bringing it to life um unless you're gonna i well i don't know it's really difficult i really suffered from

this so so now what i do is i build skills for that and my process for building the skill is literally um have you heard of this book i'll ask claude have you heard of this book yes of course i've heard of it and it'll describe the the book so you don't need to upload the book to it it's

already got that then the building the skill bit is saying right i literally i've got the book next to me and i'm going to the key chapters or the frameworks that i found really useful and then i'm building the skill to say right when i come to talk to you about this i want you to interview me

or ask me about this so if i go here to my playing to win skill somewhere down here playing to win here's the skill you're going to channel you know AG Lafley and Roger Martin and here are the main references winning aspiration these are the conversations we want you to have with me where to play how to win and I want it to coach me and guide me and challenge me as we as we're going through so let me go here

Sending sub-agents to review strategy and alignment

so the five core questions great can you send off a couple of sub agents to go and take a look firstly at what our current playing to win choices are in our corporate strategy but then go and take a look at our product uh roadmap and also some of our open artisan campaigns that are in the go -to -market section i just want to make sure that we're aligned because we are now

starting to build some agents that are delivering our work and i i think we need to change our how how to win choices.

Whisper flow, I mean, I'm just rambling, but this is what I'm rambling to it the whole time and I never worry about was my question exactly right? Cause it works it out. And so this is the agentic bit.

So people talked about sub -agents. And so this is something that you get as part of Claude Agent SDK.

So I asked it to send off some sub -agents and what these are like little minions, right? go off. So one is going off to review the playing to win strategy because I asked it to.

One is going to analyze our product and GTM alignment because I asked it to. And these go off in their own little context windows.

It might work for two or three minutes. Let's see. And then they'll report back to the main chat and say, right, I found this stuff.

And what they're doing is is navigating around these files and folders on my own directory and so you know I'll do something I'll be working elsewhere normally I'm working on building some other stuff over at the side but hopefully these little minions

Why this feels like a coach who actually knows your business

will come back come back shortly what I have found through this and I don't know if this is just like the way that my mind is working is that I've now got a a coach or a mentor or someone that I'm speaking to about all of the decisions about what we're you know what we're hiring the product what we're going to build I live in this probably more than I

do email and I think what I would have done before this I would probably have had to hire an executive coach and I would have met with them once a month and they would ask me their coaching questions without actually knowing anything about my business and I may have come away going was that a good thousand pounds well spent I don't know this I'm like

we're buddies we're all in this thing knows exactly what's going on and if there's anything that comes back so so here we go right so both agents are back and the picture is crystal clear you're playing to win says we win through business KPI led consulting blah blah blah blah blah the choice ahead option

one agent first how to win I won't read you all of this option to keep the current how to win and this is what I love because I've trained it like this don't be sycophantic like I'm the thick one in this relationship you've got all -knowing experience of all these different domains so I want you to tell

me what I'm doing wrong and so I get this my challenge to you you can't have it both ways either agents are your differentiator and you lead with it or their infrastructure and you hide them at the finance CEO campaign testing Claude agent SDK messaging suggests someone in your team thinks it's a differentiator worth talking about what do you want to do and I'm saying oh this

thing doesn't let me off the hook and so that my wife's like suppertime and I can't stop now we're having a deep conversation here yeah yeah exactly time Time to go, time to go.

Conclusion: start with skills, not code

So, this is the Claude Agent SDK. What I would wrap up with is that you do not need to build something like this.

Glen said the Claude Cowork was launched just a couple of weeks ago. You can do the guts of this in your actual Claude account. Just look for Cowork.

the key thing is building out your skills to start with now I don't know if there's a way of distributing some of these slides but I'll give you some guidance and a template on how to build your first skill but this does not need

development expertise it needs ability for you to grab a whiteboard some pens and look at the work that you're doing and start to break it down into these these skills, these references and assets, and then plug it into Claude, and away you go.

Don't plug Claude, but can we sign up to your tool? You can. Yeah.

That Claude code is, you need a Mac subscription. I think it's too confusing to use as much as they try and make it simple.

That was very easy, and I think it unlocked for a lot of people the potential of AI.

I think the skills with Markdown format you can go to my website and I can handhold you into it so there's still a few bits and pieces to get the API key to be able to use it which get makes a

little bit more complex but yes and happy to have people to test it because you'll be using your own Claude license for the subscription but yeah happy to share it.