Getting started with AI desktop agents

[00:00:00:00]So, okay.

[00:00:02:03]Official intro, I am Novae Caelum.

[00:00:06:19]I'm an author, I am a filmmaker.

[00:00:09:11]I use AI to supercharge things.

[00:00:13:05]I'm mostly a direct sales author,

[00:00:15:04]so I work heavily with Shopify.

[00:00:17:13]And when AI agents came around that could talk to Shopify,

[00:00:22:01]like that'll go way easier.

[00:00:24:16]I use AI for editing.

[00:00:27:18]And when I say I use AI, it's mostly the desktop agents.

[00:00:32:03]It is mostly things that can do stuff for me.

[00:00:39:15]I am using it to help me with AI filmmaking.

[00:00:43:24]I'm using it for editing.

[00:00:45:12]I'm using it for newsletters and emails and just all kinds of stuff.

[00:00:52:11]Go out and do research.

[00:00:54:02]So, I'm going to be showing you first what the desktop agents are,

[00:01:01:05]walking through the basics of where to get them, how to download them,

[00:01:05:02]what all the menus are inside of them,

[00:01:08:20]what skills are, what connectors are, MCPs,

[00:01:13:14]how to talk with them, how to work in a mindset where you are building systems

[00:01:19:02]and not just having a chat where we still have a few people coming in.

[00:01:25:07]So, like most people at this point know how to use chatbots,

[00:01:28:24]like ChatGPT or even Claude or Gemini or any of those.

[00:01:36:00]Chatbots, you just have a conversation.

[00:01:38:03]And the desktop agents are similar,

[00:01:41:00]but with the difference that they can do things for you.

[00:01:45:13]They can take over your computer.

[00:01:47:00]They can go onto websites and do things for you.

[00:01:50:05]They can make you apps.

[00:01:52:15]They can take large bits of information and synthesize them.

[00:01:58:09]They can do a whole lot of things.

[00:02:02:05]Now, with OpenAI's Astra, Astra can go into like almost any app on your computer

[00:02:08:23]and just take it over and start doing things, which is kind of insane.

[00:02:13:11]I haven't done this personally, but I know people

[00:02:17:00]who have been using it to format with Vellum for books.

[00:02:20:06]So, there's so much you can do with it.

[00:02:23:13]And if you are on the coding end of things, if you're interested in that,

[00:02:27:21]that is what they were initially built for to do coding,

[00:02:31:18]but then realizing that people can just do all of these other things.

[00:02:36:03]So, there's some of this that you can do like on ChatGPT online or Claude online.

[00:02:41:05]You can hook some connectors and skills and stuff to it now,

[00:02:44:21]but the power of the desktop ones is that it's working in your own files.

[00:02:51:02]And they used to be a little shaky with that, but they're a lot more stable now.

[00:02:57:11]So, we'll go over like how to use it safely and just precautions that you take,

[00:03:03:09]like backing everything up, everything that you put an agent on,

[00:03:07:14]make sure you have a backup somewhere.

[00:03:10:03]And I say that as someone who plays pretty fast and loose with this

[00:03:13:05]because you get a lot done when you give it more permissions,

[00:03:19:07]but there is a little bit more risk to that, but you just back everything up.

[00:03:23:18]So, we're going to look at, I'm going to share my screen here.

[00:03:28:20]So, the main desktop agents are like everyone knows ChatGPT at this point.

[00:03:37:14]Everyone knows ChatGPT and Claude.

[00:03:42:15]We have ChatGPT and Claude.

[00:03:46:19]Oh, I guess we have a new Opus today.

[00:03:51:00]ChatGPT and Claude, like we're familiar with this on the desktop.

[00:03:54:19]And okay, chatgpt.com slash download is where you get the desktop app for that.

[00:04:00:23]And Claude, I believe, is something similar.

[00:04:06:08]Where you just basically search download for Claude.

[00:04:12:19]And they're actual apps that you will download.

[00:04:15:24]So, you will get that from here or through the ChatGPT.

[00:04:24:20]chatgpt.com slash download.

[00:04:27:03]When you download these, it'll be like, I've gotten, I've had these for a while.

[00:04:36:21]So, I'm going to walk you through the things.

[00:04:41:07]I might need to sign in again here.

[00:04:44:00]This one.

[00:04:46:23]I'll walk you through the things that are in these apps, but the onboarding might

[00:04:52:20]be a little bit different now than when I initially started.

[00:04:55:04]But usually, it'll walk you through just starting up depending on the app.

[00:05:06:07]Where your stuff is, maybe what your personalization preferences are.

[00:05:10:24]It's usually not much.

[00:05:12:00]It's very, very simple.

[00:05:15:07]So, within the apps themselves, we're going to look at ChatGPT first because I

[00:05:20:04]think that's the one more people need to be looking at right now.

[00:05:27:02]And I think that's the one more people will be using.

[00:05:30:00]There's different parts of this.

[00:05:32:04]There is the ChatGPT part, which is where you kind of do still chat.

[00:05:38:17]And you can do like work and stuff in here, but it is separate.

[00:05:44:20]And then there's the Codex part where Codex is more geared around coding.

[00:05:50:16]But this is the one I think that we need to use because

[00:05:55:08]this is the one that can just take things and run with it.

[00:05:59:03]So, there is ChatGPT in Codex.

[00:06:01:07]So, if you're just sort of casually chatting, you go to the ChatGPT area.

[00:06:06:02]If you want to get stuff done, you are going to want to be in Codex.

[00:06:09:18]And similarly, in Claude, they have this separate.

[00:06:15:03]They have the Claude chat area up here in the upper left here.

[00:06:21:05]This is chat and Cowork, which is a little bit confusing

[00:06:26:15]and I actually think they're going to be combining these.

[00:06:29:07]So, the chat, again, is just where you if you just all if

[00:06:32:09]all you want to do is have a chat, this is where you go.

[00:06:35:09]If you want to work with stuff on your computer,

[00:06:41:07]with your apps, with things that you have connected,

[00:06:43:19]you can use Cowork.

[00:06:45:06]If you want to do things more technical or kind of

[00:06:48:22]more rigorous up here, you flip over to Claude code.

[00:06:54:02]I mostly work in Claude code and you don't have to do code in Claude code, but it

[00:07:02:03]has some more advanced versioning controls.

[00:07:05:15]Like, even if you're not even if you're not doing

[00:07:11:05]code, there's some features in here that are very useful.

[00:07:16:10]So, I'm mostly going to be showing Cowork or code.

[00:07:23:03]And the difference also is that Cowork is it has a sandbox environment.

[00:07:28:20]So, it's a little bit safer to work on your computer if

[00:07:31:16]you don't really know what you're doing with any code.

[00:07:38:08]So, if you're completely new to all this, you probably want to work in Cowork if

[00:07:43:07]you are in Claude and more advanced to go into Claude code.

[00:07:49:10]So, within all of this, I'm going to hop back to ChatGPT.

[00:07:55:10]Within all of this in the settings, the number

[00:08:00:21]one thing you need to keep an eye on is usage.

[00:08:05:20]Both of these apps handle it a little differently.

[00:08:08:14]The ChatGPT app, you have a weekly limit and it's based on tokens.

[00:08:17:12]And tokens, most of you probably know what tokens

[00:08:20:21]are, but they're the units that it's not quite a word.

[00:08:24:17]It's a couple of characters.

[00:08:27:20]It's what is broken into for the information to be sent and come back from AI.

[00:08:34:04]So, you get X amount of tokens per week.

[00:08:37:01]You don't really have to worry about how many.

[00:08:39:01]You just need to watch how much is on your usage.

[00:08:43:17]When you're doing heavy agent tasks, you're going to

[00:08:46:03]see tokens slurp down more than if you're just chatting.

[00:08:51:10]Because what's happening with heavy agent tasks is it's spinning up subagents.

[00:08:56:22]And the subagents are going off and doing things and

[00:08:59:20]it's calling tools and it's doing all of these things.

[00:09:03:09]Versus when you're chatting, it's just kind of

[00:09:05:07]chatting and maybe researching in the background.

[00:09:08:06]So, chatting kind of spins subagents too, but it's much

[00:09:11:23]more when you're working with the tool calling agents.

[00:09:19:01]So, you just keep an eye on your usage.

[00:09:22:02]ChatGPT app, they often give you resets.

[00:09:25:16]If you get really low on your usage, if you're down to

[00:09:28:15]like 1%, you can use a reset and it'll pop it back up.

[00:09:33:06]If you use a reset, usually it resets your time to a whole week again.

[00:09:43:10]If you are in Claude, Claude works a little differently.

[00:09:47:06]If you go into the settings here and usage is where this is.

[00:09:52:09]Claude works a little differently where there is an all model usage.

[00:09:56:04]There is Fable.

[00:09:58:00]If you're on a max plan, which is $100 or $200 plan, you will have this bar too.

[00:10:06:09]This apparently Claude now gives us resets.

[00:10:12:09]That's nice.

[00:10:13:04]That's new.

[00:10:15:24]So, within Claude, you have a current session.

[00:10:21:11]This is how long?

[00:10:23:06]This is about a five hour window.

[00:10:24:20]If you hit this, you will have to stop even if you still have usage for the week.

[00:10:30:07]This is the weekly usage and then this is the Fable usage.

[00:10:34:12]Fable usage adds to the all models, but Fable is,

[00:10:40:01]you can use up to half of your weekly usage with Fable.

[00:10:43:13]That's how that works.

[00:10:45:20]Fable is the big guns.

[00:10:49:08]Fable is not what you want for your everyday tasks for the most part.

[00:10:55:12]Fable is very, very smart.

[00:10:56:17]Like if you are asking about a grocery list, do not use Fable because it will just

[00:11:01:08]slurp up your usage and he's too smart for that.

[00:11:06:08]Not necessary.

[00:11:09:20]And same thing in ChatGPT, you have different models.

[00:11:16:20]So, if you're in here, I'm in the Codex version of the chat

[00:11:22:17]GPT app and there's all these little controls around here.

[00:11:28:02]You will have the model picker here, which Astra, it's funny, their models kind of

[00:11:34:20]go from like big cosmic to little cosmic like moon, earth, sun, galaxy.

[00:11:44:24]Let's run in.

[00:11:46:14]So Astra is their big model.

[00:11:48:06]Astra is a beast.

[00:11:49:24]Astra is the best model out there right now.

[00:11:52:15]Just hands down the best model out there.

[00:11:55:04]Astra can do most things for you.

[00:11:59:16]Sol is also very, very good.

[00:12:02:07]Terra and Luna are going to be like, if you just want to have a chat and

[00:12:06:12]conversation, Luna is, it's their least model.

[00:12:12:18]You're not going to want to be letting Luna take over your computer.

[00:12:17:22]Astra and Sol, you can let take over your computer, but

[00:12:21:23]these ones are just more like the small task and chat models.

[00:12:25:12]That said, Astra can spin up.

[00:12:30:00]When you're working with Astra, Astra can

[00:12:31:20]orchestrate lesser models to do other tasks.

[00:12:35:13]Same thing in Claude.

[00:12:37:18]In Claude, let me go back to Cowork.

[00:12:41:08]This is, yeah, we're, we're, Claude could Claude Cowork.

[00:12:45:01]So if we're in Cowork, this is the model picker here.

[00:12:49:05]Fable is the top one.

[00:12:51:07]This is the big guns.

[00:12:53:14]This is what you want for your crunchy tasks.

[00:12:56:05]Opus 5.5 is brand new, like as of today, I think.

[00:13:02:01]And Opus, it tends to be the workhorse for like most things.

[00:13:08:18]But Opus can, Opus kind of spins out on more complex things.

[00:13:13:09]So that's where you bump to Fable.

[00:13:15:20]Sonnet, I rarely use Sonnet just because Opus is very adequate.

[00:13:22:02]But if you are on a lesser token plan, if you're like

[00:13:25:20]on a $20 a month plan, Sonnet can handle a lot of stuff.

[00:13:29:10]Like Sonnet can go through email.

[00:13:31:07]Sonnet can handle a lot of like data entry and information tasks.

[00:13:37:19]So, and I almost never use Haiku.

[00:13:40:02]Haiku is just, it's their least model.

[00:13:44:20]With all of these, there are effort levels.

[00:13:48:13]I tend to keep to high or medium for most things.

[00:13:53:07]This is how much the model thinks and it uses more tokens when it thinks harder.

[00:14:02:11]Sometimes there is a trade-off where if you have it on medium and you give it a

[00:14:06:21]really tough task, it might take longer to think it through.

[00:14:11:04]And therefore, it will use more tokens anyway than it might have on high.

[00:14:14:12]So, we have, this is, it's how fast the models, or how

[00:14:22:03]much the models think to get done what you need to get done.

[00:14:26:06]So, I mostly keep it on medium and high.

[00:14:30:15]And I tend to just keep it high on default.

[00:14:33:20]Bump it down to medium if I'm low on tokens.

[00:14:36:18]But sometimes when it's on medium, it actually takes more

[00:14:40:05]tokens to think about a really, really tough task than high.

[00:14:44:24]It just kind of depends on the task.

[00:14:46:16]I almost never put it on extra and max, unless I am trying

[00:14:50:11]to get it to think through something very, very difficult.

[00:14:53:19]In which case, I will get it to think it

[00:14:55:09]through, make a plan, and then bump it back down.

[00:14:58:14]Same thing in the ChatGPT.

[00:15:01:11]This is the slider in the ChatGPT.

[00:15:05:07]Please don't put this on this, on Ultra, and think that you are going to get the

[00:15:10:01]best results because you might, but it'll just chew through your account.

[00:15:15:15]And almost everything high is adequate for

[00:15:19:06]almost everything, and even medium on many cases.

[00:15:22:09]So, I tend to just leave things on high.

Topic times use MM:SS within this episode. Adaptable prompts are templates based on the lesson, not verbatim quotations. App names, options, and capabilities reflect the recording and may change.

[00:00:00:00]There's also this thing, the permissions box.

[00:00:05:00]The safest way to use these agents is to have it ask for approval.

[00:00:09:14]However, it'll ask you every two seconds, and that is kind of defeating the point

[00:00:15:11]of letting an agent go off and do things for you if you

[00:00:17:12]have to sit there and hit approve, approve, approve, approve.

[00:00:21:03]So, I tend to put these on approve for me.

[00:00:24:23]It will approve most things on its own, and every now and

[00:00:28:17]then it'll come up with something that it decides is unsafe,

[00:00:31:05]and then it'll surface it to you and say, "Do you give me permission?"

[00:00:36:14]So, this is probably what you want on this one.

[00:00:40:07]Approve for me.

[00:00:41:19]In Claude, it's similar.

[00:00:45:11]Where's the permissions?

[00:00:49:09]Actually, I don't know where this is.

[00:00:51:02]They moved it.

[00:00:52:22]In Claude code, it is down here.

[00:00:55:13]Like, if you're in Claude code, it's this auto.

[00:00:59:11]There's manual, accept edits, plan, bypass permissions, and auto.

[00:01:04:05]Nine times out of ten, you want things on auto.

[00:01:06:21]It'll do the same thing like with chat GPT and handle permissions.

[00:01:13:02]I think...

[00:01:17:17]Okay, this is where it is here in Cowork.

[00:01:20:22]So, you have manually approve, automatically approve, skip all approvals.

[00:01:25:08]I have it on skip all approvals just because I

[00:01:27:09]hate hitting approve and I back my system up.

[00:01:31:01]But the safest one is automatically approve.

[00:01:35:04]It'll do it on its own, and then it will ask for anything that it thinks is unsafe.

[00:01:40:17]However, there's a lot that Claude thinks is unsafe

[00:01:43:15]that is fine, and it might just ask you a bazillion times.

[00:01:47:12]So, if you're getting fed up with that, you can put it on skip all approvals.

[00:01:51:12]The safety with this, though, is if you are doing things in your browser, if you

[00:01:57:17]have it going off and doing things for you in your browser,

[00:02:03:21]you can get what are called prompted injection attacks.

[00:02:06:18]And there's things that people can leave online

[00:02:12:24]maliciously that your agent can pick up and be like,

[00:02:15:24]"Oh, I will give you this information or that information."

[00:02:19:15]That is a possibility.

[00:02:22:02]If you are working on sites that you know, like

[00:02:26:07]if you're sending it off to research on Amazon,

[00:02:29:03]if you're sending it off to go look at your

[00:02:33:01]Gmail or something, that's less risky in that sense.

[00:02:37:15]The other thing with safety is when you give it

[00:02:41:17]permission to, you can have it work in a project folder.

[00:02:48:22]So, like, I could have it work in this Dropbox

[00:02:53:05]folder here, and then I will tell it to allow that.

[00:02:57:22]And then it will just work in this one folder with Cowork.

[00:03:02:08]But you can also, if you're in Cloud Code, you can

[00:03:08:02]give it the permission, like you can set a folder,

[00:03:10:15]and it'll see that folder, but it can also go

[00:03:14:16]off and look at everything else on your computer.

[00:03:17:05]I personally let it do that because I get a lot done quickly that way.

[00:03:22:19]However, back your stuff up because you want your whole computer backed up

[00:03:27:15]because there have been instances of agents that

[00:03:31:00]have gone, "Oops, I wiped your download folder,"

[00:03:33:24]or "Oops, I wiped your documents folder."

[00:03:37:16]So, if you give it permission to have the files all over your

[00:03:42:20]computer, just make sure you have an external drive back up,

[00:03:48:11]something backing up everything that is important

[00:03:51:18]because there is, it's not as big of a chance as it used to be,

[00:03:55:24]but there is still a chance that an agent could go,

[00:03:58:05]"Oops," and wipe something that you don't want it to wipe.

[00:04:02:00]So, just back things up, and if you're not

[00:04:08:10]comfortable with that, you don't have to.

[00:04:09:15]You can just give it one folder at a time, and

[00:04:13:24]there's a lot you can get done in one folder.

[00:04:16:06]Similar things with ChatGPT. I think in ChatGPT app,

[00:04:21:19]it's in the settings here, and I forget exactly where it is.

[00:04:31:07]It's in one of these. I think it might be in configuration.

[00:04:36:18]In configuration, you can tell it how much access you have, workspace, right,

[00:04:47:01]read-only, workspace, right, full access.

[00:04:50:02]So, I give it full access because I want it ripping

[00:04:52:23]across my files to get things done quickly for me.

[00:04:57:02]But the safer way to go is to do workspace, right,

[00:05:00:23]where it can only work in the folder that you give it.

[00:05:04:21]So, similar thing here is the approval

[00:05:09:16]settings, and you can do that on the chat itself.

[00:05:15:04]So, other things that might be important to know, we're going to look at...

[00:05:25:02]So, okay, let me back up.

[00:05:28:14]One of the things, one of the reasons the desktop agents are super powerful is that

[00:05:35:09]when you are giving them tasks, you can

[00:05:39:11]give them repeated instructions called skills.

[00:05:43:04]And many of you will have heard of or worked

[00:05:47:06]with skills before. A few of you might have not.

[00:05:50:22]There are instruction files. It's a set of instruction files that gives the AI a

[00:05:59:18]repeated ability to perform a task in a same or similar way, very similar.

[00:06:07:05]So, when I am doing anything in here, this is one of my film chats for filmmaking.

[00:06:15:05]If I'm doing anything in here, I have skills that I'm calling in the background

[00:06:21:01]that are my filmmaking skills or my editing

[00:06:25:00]skills or we were just doing color grading.

[00:06:29:10]We're going to make a color grading skill for...

[00:06:33:08]And when I say we're going to make a skill, that does not

[00:06:36:10]mean you go in and write the skill yourself. Do not do that.

[00:06:41:05]What you basically want to do is have a conversation with the agent or tell the

[00:06:47:05]agent what you want to do and then say, "Make this skill for me."

[00:06:52:12]And then you can ask it to install the

[00:06:55:05]skill and both codecs and chat GPT will do that.

[00:07:01:10]In Claude, it is under... it's under customize, I believe.

[00:07:08:20]So Claude, Cowork and chat and Claude code

[00:07:12:20]have slightly different ways they handle skills.

[00:07:15:23]But if you want to add a skill in Claude, you can hit

[00:07:19:03]add and then you can upload it or you can create with it.

[00:07:23:17]So yes, you can add skills here. So plugins, I think

[00:07:28:13]mostly over here, they just call it all plugins. I'm not sure.

[00:07:32:19]But over here in Claude, skills and plugins are a little different. A plugin is

[00:07:38:04]kind of a really robust collection of skills

[00:07:41:01]versus a skill can be kind of a small one-off thing.

[00:07:46:06]They have a bunch of skills that you can add. Like they have a bunch of pre-made

[00:07:51:17]things. But for the most part, you're going to want to

[00:07:54:23]be working with stuff that you make because that is the...

[00:08:02:09]Oh, okay. Skills. There is skills separately and

[00:08:05:10]then plugins. Okay. I swear they moved that around.

[00:08:12:01]Where was I in here? We'll just go in here.

[00:08:18:00]So when you were working with skills, like when I am doing this chat and I'm having

[00:08:24:06]it make these episodes for me with videos, every so often at the end of the chat, I

[00:08:29:16]will be like, okay, what were all the things that we learned?

[00:08:34:04]What were the obstacles we had? What do we take away from this that we can take to

[00:08:43:04]change the skill that we were using to work with this and improve it?

[00:08:47:22]So it's not just that you make these skills, you are constantly improving them and

[00:08:54:12]then they get better. But back up your original skills before you do that because

[00:08:58:14]every now and then it'll make changes where they go off the rails.

[00:09:03:20]So it's kind of an iterative process where I have a

[00:09:10:15]pretty intense set of skills by now. This is my skills folder.

[00:09:16:01]And these are all of these things that we have made. Like I have ones that help me

[00:09:22:17]with video captioning, ones that help me find tropes on Amazon.

[00:09:27:07]I have a whole protocol that every time I want to run my agents, I run them through

[00:09:37:13]a system that tells them everything that I have and

[00:09:41:22]everything that my system does and how to handle it.

[00:09:45:00]So I have ones that, just certain one off ones that my agents made me to help me

[00:09:54:18]figure out how to restore backups or some of these things I just rarely ever run.

[00:10:03:04]The agents will make a skill and be like, oh, okay, we'll just use this once.

[00:10:08:06]But there's some that I use all the time, like this creative relay skill. I had an

[00:10:12:22]intense conversation digging deeply into my

[00:10:15:15]writing process with Opus 4.6, which is a while ago.

[00:10:21:01]And we have refined this to the point where when I sit down to write and want to

[00:10:28:00]brainstorm, I load this skill and we go through this whole process.

[00:10:34:06]Like if I start a new chat here and let me get...

[00:10:40:21]Okay, so if I want to load this skill, I actually have this one installed, but I

[00:10:48:01]don't always install my skills. So a trick I learned from someone else, which is a

[00:10:53:17]good trick, is to have your skills in a Dropbox folder.

[00:11:00:04]Have your skills in a Dropbox folder and then when you want to call them, ask the

[00:11:08:08]agent, say, go to my local Dropbox, go to skills and then call the skill.

[00:11:12:22]If you do this, you can have this across several different systems and then your

[00:11:17:10]skills are completely synced across your systems

[00:11:19:23]versus when you're improving your skills all the time.

[00:11:24:08]If you have them just installed on Claude or installed on ChatGPT app and you're

[00:11:34:14]updating them on one, it might not update

[00:11:36:16]on the other.

[00:11:37:14]So, yeah, if you have your skills in a big folder in something like Dropbox or

[00:11:42:16]Google Drive or something like that and you're moving across different computers

[00:11:46:10]and you're moving across different systems or even different apps and you always

[00:11:50:10]point it to those skills, then they'll always be synced.

[00:11:55:05]So that is something that you can do. So if I want to start a writing conversation,

[00:12:02:20]I will be like, look in my local Dropbox and in my

[00:12:10:04]skills folder, load creative relay version, version two.

[00:12:19:10]That's kind of the long way around. You can still install these, in which case you

[00:12:27:03]would hit the slash command and be like creative.

[00:12:30:17]Okay, I'm not sure I actually have these installed anymore, but I do have my studio

[00:12:37:09]onboarding. If I want to start a new conversation

[00:12:39:23]and immediately have it look at everything that I am...

[00:12:44:17]A snapshot of my entire organization philosophy and how I want agents to run, I

[00:12:50:00]will go studio onboarding. And then this is calling a skill.

[00:12:56:01]So, but I don't need that here, but see the agent knows to go look in my Dropbox

[00:13:00:18]folder. That's the canonical skills folder.

[00:13:04:01]There is instructions in there that are like, these are the skills. These are...

[00:13:09:04]This is everything that we are using. So creative relay version three. This is a...

[00:13:18:08]This is a set of skills that tells the agents exactly how I want them to work with

[00:13:25:16]me when we're writing. I can call this skill in chatgpt

[00:13:30:17]and I can call it in Claude and it'll work very similarly.

[00:13:34:07]The models are slightly different, so it won't be entirely the same, but it'll be

[00:13:37:07]very similarly. So when... And because I have worked with this, I know that I will

[00:13:44:06]be like, okay, we're going to brainstorm a book.

[00:13:46:01]And then it will respond to me in a specific way because the instructions say that

[00:13:50:21]it should. So a skill will help you have a similar experience every time.

[00:13:59:04]And kind of a rule of thumb is any prompt that you find yourself putting into the

[00:14:05:09]agent again and again and again is something

[00:14:08:04]you want to turn into a skill, most likely.

[00:14:10:19]If you... If every day you go in and you're like, go into my connected email and

[00:14:16:03]find all the newsletters from yesterday and give me a summary.

[00:14:22:01]If you find yourself saying that every day, most likely you want to say it one more

[00:14:27:02]time and then say, turn this into a skill

[00:14:29:12]and then the AI will write itself a skill.

[00:14:33:13]And then either install it or put it in my skills folder. So this is... It's

[00:14:45:12]minimizing repetitive tasks. However, it's a little more powerful than that because

[00:14:50:09]I can be like load creative relay version 3

[00:14:53:11]and then load my studio protocol, which...

[00:15:01:02]Or studio onboarding. So if I have it in my studio onboarding, now all of a sudden

[00:15:05:21]it has all the access to my entire agent system. I have this whole app that's like

[00:15:14:03]a publishing command center that has everything of my business in this app.

[00:15:20:22]And when I hit that studio protocol studio onboarding skill, it immediately goes

[00:15:27:02]into this app and on boards itself with this entire agent handbook and system.

[00:15:34:05]So that's the power of this. You can take that and have it go off and do these

[00:15:40:04]different things. You can use several skills at a time.

[00:15:43:00]So now I know that it is completely onboarded in my studio and when I want to

[00:15:49:12]write, it can actually talk completely with the database

[00:15:53:09]behind my app and interact with my writing system that I have here.

[00:15:58:12]So when I'm writing, I'll be like, we're writing and it will just slide this right

[00:16:03:08]into my system here and then I can go edit it.

[00:16:05:14]So that is the kind of things that you can do with this. And these are just some

Topic times use MM:SS within this episode. Adaptable prompts are templates based on the lesson, not verbatim quotations. App names, options, and capabilities reflect the recording and may change.

[00:00:00:00]examples of systems. So there's also connectors.

[00:00:05:17]And I think on Claude, I believe they're called

[00:00:07:14]connectors. ChetGPT just calls them all plugins.

[00:00:13:05]So I heavily sell on Shopify. I have a Shopify connector on here.

[00:00:22:09]I think that's in the plugins thing. So there's a lot of connectors that you can

[00:00:27:13]just get. Like a lot of these big companies

[00:00:30:18]have made connectors like this is GitHub for code.

[00:00:36:06]I have a Klaviyo connector. I don't actually have

[00:00:39:00]Klaviyo anymore, so I need to uninstall that one.

[00:00:42:17]Supabase, I use Supabase as a database a lot.

[00:00:48:19]And Shopify. So you can add like Gmail, you can add your Dropbox, Descript.

[00:00:55:01]I do a lot with Descript with Claude, where I will upload a video and I have a

[00:01:00:09]skill that it makes my captions in a specific way every single time.

[00:01:06:18]And I'll be like, load the skill, go with the video, go.

[00:01:11:21]So you can add all of these things. And when you add

[00:01:16:00]them, it gives the agent the ability to work directly with it.

[00:01:20:11]If you connect Notion, you can have your agent just basically rip through your

[00:01:25:17]entire Notion database that you give it to. You can tell it certain spaces that you

[00:01:32:19]don't want it and spaces that you do want it.

[00:01:37:21]But you can have it go through your Outlook. Higgsfield. This one is like a lot of

[00:01:43:22]the Higgsfield, OpenART, Runway. They have these connectors now.

[00:01:50:08]These are technically MCPs. MCPs...

[00:01:58:22]Coming in now, this is way easier than it was like a year

[00:02:02:01]ago, where you had to actually install these things manually.

[00:02:07:01]But an MCP is a way that your agent can talk to

[00:02:12:13]another system and call tools from it to do specific things.

[00:02:19:10]Like if you are connecting to Higgsfield, you can ask it to make images. You can

[00:02:26:04]ask it to do videos. You can ask it to do specific Higgsfield workflows that they

[00:02:31:16]have made available for the agents to use with this connector.

[00:02:36:19]These are all basically MCPs. Now they're sanctioned MCPs and plugins.

[00:02:45:02]Is the term "agents" another word for using skills? If not, how do they differ?

[00:02:50:24]The agent will use the skills, but the skills are not the agent.

[00:02:55:19]The model that is using things is the agents, but

[00:03:01:21]the agents will use skills when they're doing things.

[00:03:07:13]The skills are like the agent instructions.

[00:03:10:14]Skills are just basically small to robust instruction

[00:03:15:11]manuals for the agents to use as they are doing the things.

[00:03:19:18]There's a lot of little finicky terms here that can get a little confusing.

[00:03:29:22]The MCPs are basically a way for the system to

[00:03:38:14]connect to your agent to another company's system.

[00:03:45:17]When I'm using the Shopify, pull up my three best products this month on Shopify.

[00:04:00:04]I am using Wispr Flow because I try to dictate a lot.

[00:04:05:24]I have Wispr Flow installed on my thing.

[00:04:11:22]You can also dictate down here. I tend to like to work hands-free just because it

[00:04:18:08]saves my wrists and it's way faster and it's easier to just talk to it.

[00:04:23:05]Both the ChatGPT app and Claude have dictation

[00:04:27:18]now, I believe. I'm pretty sure Claude has dictation.

[00:04:32:08]Let me go into a new chat here. Yes, Claude has dictation.

[00:04:41:02]I had it go and pull up my three best products on Shopify.

[00:04:50:05]It's using this connector and it will tell me exactly what those products are.

[00:04:55:12]I can have it dive deep into the analytics and be like, "Okay, what are these

[00:04:59:06]products this month compared to last month or this

[00:05:02:04]month compared to last year or any of this stuff?"

[00:05:07:10]I didn't have to go take screenshots or download CSVs or any of that.

[00:05:16:00]I didn't have to do any of that because this is connected directly to my Shopify so

[00:05:20:09]it can just immediately go pull that and then give me information.

[00:05:25:00]There is a Facebook Ads MCP now. It's a little funky. Some accounts have it and

[00:05:35:16]some don't, but there's ways to connect and that's kind of complex.

[00:05:40:12]I'm not going to go totally into that, but you can connect your Facebook Ads to

[00:05:45:15]here and be like, "Okay, here's this. Here's this."

[00:05:48:14]Go take over my browser and look at my KDP data, pull that all together, and then

[00:05:54:12]give me a snapshot of the week for what my ads are

[00:05:59:03]doing, what my Shopify is doing, what my KDP is doing.

[00:06:02:06]If you're a wide author, like what your other

[00:06:05:20]dashboards are doing, things like Publishing Champ has an API.

[00:06:14:05]So API is different than an MCP, but an MCP is basically

[00:06:21:03]kind of like an API or works similarly in the same way.

[00:06:25:22]But if you hear people talking about API, that's kind of like you have to set up a

[00:06:31:22]direct connection with something. You have to get a key.

[00:06:36:04]And it's a way for your agent, again, to talk to the system, but an MCP is where on

[00:06:42:08]their end, they've already kind of configured how it's going to work versus with an

[00:06:46:18]API, you're kind of building it on your own.

[00:06:49:06]So that's kind of complex. I would stick to

[00:06:52:12]connectors for now if you're not familiar with that.

[00:06:56:03]But the connectors, they've made this way, way, way easier now. So you can just

[00:07:00:09]basically hook any of these things, and there's a lot of them.

[00:07:05:00]You can even hook it to like your Spotify and it knows all your music and

[00:07:08:16]everything. You can hook it to like fitness stuff, you can hook it to travel stuff.

[00:07:14:08]This isn't just business. There's a lot of other things you can do with this.

[00:07:21:06]So there's a lot that you can hook to. You can search in here. If whatever you are

[00:07:27:03]looking for does not have a plugin here, you

[00:07:30:13]will go and look up on Google if it has an MCP.

[00:07:35:23]And if it has an MCP, copy it and then ask your agent to help you install it. Like,

[00:07:43:03]Codex can install its own MCPs. I'm pretty sure Claude can at this point too.

[00:07:49:01]I believe it is in...it might be in the plugins area again.

[00:07:57:23]Okay, so you can create an MCP app in here, and that would be where you would

[00:08:03:04]follow the instructions for that, I think.

[00:08:06:16]And the reason I don't know where that is is because we really don't have to do

[00:08:12:11]that anymore. You can pretty much just give it to the

[00:08:15:11]agent and be like, "Do this. Help me figure it out."

[00:08:19:02]And that's another thing with working with agents is if you don't know something,

[00:08:26:01]have the agent walk you through it. And not just walk you through it. Have the

[00:08:29:23]agent help you configure or build what you need to do what you need to do.

[00:08:35:13]So that's where it's like if you're making a skill, be like, "Install it for me."

[00:08:41:06]And in Claude, it'll come up with this little thing

[00:08:43:15]and it'll have an install button, you just hit it.

[00:08:46:02]In Codex, it will just install it for you. So there's a lot of things that we just

[00:08:53:23]really don't...there's steps that we don't have to actually take anymore.

[00:09:00:02]So, and the connectors in here are, I believe, under customized. Yeah, so in

[00:09:06:20]Claude, they have skills, connectors, and

[00:09:09:22]plugins. They kind of work a little differently.

[00:09:12:13]But similarly to the ChatGPT, the

[00:09:14:11]connectors are basically like the big business things.

[00:09:17:24]And that's...it's the same type of thing. So once you add this thing, it will show

[00:09:25:01]up in your list of connectors. And if it's on, it'll be on automatically.

[00:09:32:02]Plugins...Claude does...Cowork...so Claude's a little confusing in that Cowork has

[00:09:39:22]different plugins than like if you're in Claude Code, it handles that differently.

[00:09:46:05]Or maybe not. Did they harmonize that? It used to be that the plugins were slightly

[00:09:52:05]different for each thing. But they might have

[00:09:55:01]actually harmonized that, which would be good.

[00:09:57:20]So plugins are...pluggins for Claude are kind of like really, really, really robust

[00:10:04:06]skills. And some of these are big businesses too.

[00:10:10:24]It's...yeah, it's slightly different.

[00:10:15:02]Whereas ChatGPT kind of throws them all together.

[00:10:19:18]But like you can have the Canva plugin and I believe the Canva connector too. So

[00:10:25:18]I'm not actually sure what the difference is between these two.

[00:10:30:05]But one or the other of them, you can have it hooked to Canva and then have Claude

[00:10:34:24]make Canva things for you. However, they're not

[00:10:38:07]usually very good. So you don't necessarily want to do that.

[00:10:41:12]But same sort of thing, you can just you can connect all of these things. And

[00:10:47:04]if...if...if a company has an MCP but they do not have a specific official MCP,

[00:10:58:04]then here's where you would add a custom connector.

[00:11:01:17]So, yeah, they're mostly just calling it connectors now, I believe. But same thing

[00:11:07:11]here. I have like my Shopify connected, I have Supabase. So Supabase, if you were

[00:11:15:18]working with a lot of information, and if you were a writer, you probably are.

[00:11:21:04]It's not a bad idea to have a database somewhere and Supabase is a big, big

[00:11:27:23]database site where they have a free tier and you

[00:11:32:06]can get quite a bit out of it for the free tier.

[00:11:36:03]But what it is, is it's a place to put your information where your agents can

[00:11:44:04]easily access it. Like my publishing command center here is basically a front end

[00:11:50:20]for a database where I have...I track where all of my books are and...

[00:12:01:03]Yeah. I track everything that has come out in every edition and it's all kind of

[00:12:08:02]hooked together. So I have...it's got to load. Each one of these is information on

[00:12:16:06]my books. So it'll have like the overview and the editions and the files and hooks.

[00:12:21:12]This is intense. This I built a front end because I like things that are pretty.

[00:12:26:04]You don't have to have things that are pretty. What you

[00:12:28:24]can do is have your agent go through all of your books and...

[00:12:36:07]Go find it across the internet. Go find it on Amazon. Go find it on Audible. Go

[00:12:40:11]find it in everywhere that you do your books and then have it marked down. Is it in

[00:12:45:01]hardcover? Is it in paperback? Is it in French?

[00:12:48:03]German? What language is it in? Is it done yet?

[00:12:53:01]And things like that. You can have it pull in all your blurbs, all your marketing.

[00:12:58:05]Your agent will make tables of that for you. You don't have to have a front end

[00:13:02:20]like this to be able to use that. So if you are making a database like that and

[00:13:09:22]then say you want to do marketing on Instagram and your

[00:13:15:01]database has...already has all of your hooks and all of your...

[00:13:22:05]The text of all of your books, it has...it has your release schedule. It has all of

[00:13:28:18]this. If you've put all of that in your database, when you want to go and make new

[00:13:34:13]videos for Instagram, you can be like, "Oh, go look at my database. Go read this

[00:13:41:19]book. Go look at how we've done hooks before and then come up with 20 new ones."

[00:13:47:23]And then it will do that for you. And even just me saying that, "Go do this. Go do

[00:13:53:17]that. Go do this." You can make that a skill so that you're like, you know, load

[00:13:59:13]Instagram hooks skill and then it will load that. Go look at all those things.

[00:14:06:14]And, you know, go load Instagram hooks skill with this book and it will go do that.

[00:14:12:09]Read those books, look at all those things and come back with

[00:14:15:00]20 Instagram things for you. That's kind of how you do this.

[00:14:21:01]So all of this is working toward letting your agents do things for you that you

[00:14:29:12]don't have to do yourself anymore so that you can make the high level decisions and

[00:14:37:02]not have to do the grunt work, basically.

[00:14:40:03]So like when I'm doing like that Shopify chat that we just did, and I have no idea

[00:14:47:01]where that was. Yeah, it's somewhere. But that Shopify chat that we just did, like

[00:14:55:05]I used to go through and do my Shopify, like if I wanted to add a new product and

[00:15:03:15]if I have a new book coming out, I'd need to make

[00:15:05:12]an e-book, a paperback, an audio book, a hardcover.

[00:15:08:18]I'd need to switch over all the previous books from new release to now it's not or

[00:15:17:07]put all the pre-orders, put all the little pre-order signals on everything. I used

[00:15:23:06]to do that all by hand and I don't have to do that anymore.

[00:15:26:11]So now I'm like, I'm like, you use the Shopify connector, make a new product and it

[00:15:31:23]needs to be these formats and go look at how

[00:15:36:02]I set up my other pages and do this similarly.

[00:15:39:22]And then I don't have this set up yet, but that's something I'm trying to build

[00:15:45:20]where it's like I can give it the book cover and

[00:15:47:14]it'll just go make all the mockups and all of that.

[00:15:50:22]So you can build all of this and the whole thing is setting up systems so that the

[00:15:59:14]type of tasks where you can repeat it and it can be done

[00:16:05:20]in a repetitive way that the agent can do that for you.

[00:16:09:24]So Cassie, Cassie Alexander, who runs the AI

[00:16:15:24]Marketing for Storytellers sub-stack, we run that together.

[00:16:19:20]She has all these skills set up that go to all the different vendors for ebooks, so

[00:16:27:01]like Kobo and Barnes and Noble and Google and it allows the agent to go in and take

[00:16:34:19]over her browser and upload all her books and fill out all her information for her.

[00:16:39:14]So things like that. And I have... Yeah, so you can have it like take over your

[00:16:51:06]computer for you too. Like I have been using Astra now for video editing.

[00:16:59:01]Most of this timeline was initially edited by an agent, which is kind of insane.

[00:17:05:21]But I will go into these and I have a skill set up that it knows how I like to edit

[00:17:13:22]videos now. So Astra will go over and be like, "Can I use DaVinci Resolve?" Yes.

[00:17:20:15]And then Astra will come in here and just go to town. There's actually a... If you

[00:17:27:09]do work with video, this is really good to know.

[00:17:30:22]And it's specifically DaVinci Resolve that has these abilities. You do need the

[00:17:35:24]paid version, but it's a one-time fee and then it can go to town.

[00:17:42:09]But there's scripting in here where your agent can go in and just basically take an

[00:17:49:01]entire timeline or video or whatever you're doing it with, your social media

[00:17:54:23]videos, any of that, and just rip through them.

[00:17:58:09]And then you go and look at it and you're like, "Oh, can you do it this way?" And

[00:18:02:22]it'll be like, "Okay," and then rip through it again.

[00:18:05:01]So if you do anything with video, this is a really good thing to do. And right now,

[00:18:11:02]the only model that can do that is Astra in the ChatGPT app.

[00:18:17:05]Like, if you connect your email to this or Claude, you can have it go organize

[00:18:23:23]things. You can have it summarize your newsletters or

[00:18:29:01]summarize whatever you need to do with email, basically.

[00:18:34:22]And there is... Yeah, so... You can have it organize your files on your computer,

[00:18:44:12]too, but I've had mixed results with this.

[00:18:47:04]I had Claude organize my entire download folder before, and I couldn't find

[00:18:54:04]anything thereafter because Claude's logic was not my logic.

[00:18:59:05]So if you are having it organize things on your

[00:19:02:19]computer, give it a clear roadmap and a clear plan.

[00:19:07:11]And that was several Claude versions ago, so it's very, very better than that now.

[00:19:13:08]But if you have an enormous folder with all your images for marketing for the last

[00:19:22:20]years, you can have it go in there and sort it by book.

[00:19:26:12]You can have it go in there and figure that out.

[00:19:31:04]All of these agents are able to look at video and

[00:19:35:14]images now, so they can read the text on images.

[00:19:40:01]I had a handwritten draft that I wrote, like, eight years ago in my closet, and one

[00:19:48:03]day I'm like, to hell with this being in my closet, I took my phone and I...

[00:19:53:21]It took about a half hour, but I snapped pictures of every

[00:19:56:16]single page and then had... I uploaded all of those images...

[00:20:03:10]Or put all those images into a folder and gave the folder to the Codex app here.

[00:20:12:20]I don't know if I can find that, Chad.

[00:20:17:10]Yeah, I actually think I have this chat.

[00:20:20:04]I gave everything to this and it made... it took all of these manuscript pages and

[00:20:29:17]gave me raw transcriptions and then there was a few parts where it was unclear.

[00:20:34:02]And it did this for... it was a 70,000-word book that it did in about three hours.

[00:20:42:08]It transcribed the entire book. That was

[00:20:44:07]handwritten pages. And I mean badly handwritten pages.

[00:20:48:16]So something like this. It's like I can give it that folder and I was like, "Okay,

[00:20:52:16]this is this folder. It's raw, rough draft. It's

[00:20:55:18]handwritten. Familiarize yourself with the series."

[00:20:58:09]So when I say familiarize yourself with the series, I... because I already have

[00:21:03:02]this system and everything, and I had this in a

[00:21:07:04]folder that had other parts of that series in it,

[00:21:12:20]it knew to go read the rest of that series so that it

[00:21:16:21]had the context for putting this book together, too.

[00:21:21:18]So it was able to kind of guess some of these areas that were unclear.

[00:21:29:10]So this is the kind of stuff you're doing.

[00:21:32:22]So if you have a folder with all of your series for a book in it, you can have it

[00:21:40:02]go through and be like, "Go read that and have this... here's this information."

[00:21:44:22]Or, "Go look at this and do this." Or, "It's just kind of piecing it all together."

Topic times use MM:SS within this episode. Adaptable prompts are templates based on the lesson, not verbatim quotations. App names, options, and capabilities reflect the recording and may change.

[00:00:00:00]So I have so many different things going at any given time.

[00:00:05:02]One of the things you can have, too, is you can have scheduled tasks.

[00:00:10:14]Like, I have this specific agent go and look at what my system says needs to be

[00:00:17:01]done that day, and it does it every day at the same time.

[00:00:21:22]And here it's like it pulled the evening pass, it checked what I told it to check,

[00:00:28:18]and then it said that there's nothing we need to do.

[00:00:33:20]So I have another heartbeat here that every day it will

[00:00:43:14]check the SEO on my site, and if there's anything new, it will...

[00:00:56:14]I don't even know what this one's doing. It's doing

[00:00:58:08]something useful. I have so much going at any given time.

[00:01:01:18]I have another one somewhere. The one I was talking about was this one, actually,

[00:01:05:22]where it goes and it looks on my site, and it's just checking to see if I have any

[00:01:12:07]new products that it needs to SEO, and it doesn't.

[00:01:16:08]When I do, it will do something, but right now it

[00:01:19:20]doesn't. But it just checks every day, every day, every day.

[00:01:24:03]You can schedule these manually, but you do not have to. You can just be talking to

[00:01:30:09]the agent and be like, "Okay, this is what I want to do. I want you to check my

[00:01:34:01]calendar every day and match it against my email."

[00:01:36:10]Or, "I want you to look at my Shopify every

[00:01:39:13]day and give me a report on my analytics."

[00:01:44:11]Even to more complex tasks, I have Claude set up with a bunch of scheduled things.

[00:01:57:08]I have... I don't think it's on this one.

[00:02:00:15]It's actually in Claude code. I have a... Okay.

[00:02:06:14]Okay, in Claude code, it's called Routines. I have an agent that every day pulls my

[00:02:14:10]meta comments from Instagram and Facebook and hides any anti-AI comments and

[00:02:21:03]then... or no, it deletes any anti-AI comments and then...

[00:02:26:10]So, when I go in to actually look at my comments, I never, ever see them. So, that

[00:02:32:03]is really nice. So, you can set up things like that. That's a little more

[00:02:35:04]technical. I actually had to set up a Facebook

[00:02:38:07]app that connected with it to do all of that.

[00:02:43:06]I actually have a set up here somewhere in here. I build these intense systems and

[00:02:51:22]then sometimes I don't even know where the things

[00:02:54:13]are inside of them. So, yeah, it's somewhere in here.

[00:02:59:09]But you can do these things. Like, I needed for a

[00:03:06:19]Kickstarter to... I needed to make a map of a location in my book.

[00:03:15:23]And I'm like, "I don't want to spend all this time rereading this entire series to

[00:03:21:15]figure out where everything was in this palace in the book."

[00:03:26:09]So, I was like, "Okay, go build me an architectural app that the agent can interact

[00:03:36:14]with and read through all of my books in this series and then basically make a

[00:03:42:09]layout of where you think everything is."

[00:03:44:07]This was not the initial layout. I had to kind of tweak this. But over here, you

[00:03:49:11]can see it's showing where everything it found in the

[00:03:56:03]books was and it's reasoning for where it put things.

[00:04:00:06]So, things like this. Do I use this all the time? No, but it is useful. So, I was

[00:04:07:18]able to take this and turn it into an actual map for the book.

[00:04:13:07]Another thing is that the Codex

[00:04:22:24]app will... It automatically has the GPT image...

[00:04:29:17]2.5 now integrated with it. So, you can... I needed

[00:04:36:13]YouTube thumbnails. So, I was like, "Here is my YouTube video."

[00:04:42:13]And I think I have these character references for all my characters and I gave it

[00:04:49:24]that folder and I gave it... This was the

[00:04:53:24]thumbnail that I originally had that wasn't really working.

[00:04:56:20]And I'm like, "This is this. This is that. I want to use these characters. I want a

[00:05:02:20]winning thumbnail and give me several versions."

[00:05:07:05]So, it looked at all of that and was like, "Okay, let's try these." And then it

[00:05:13:13]gave me these new thumbnails. So, I have been AAB testing those on YouTube.

[00:05:18:09]And it still has this in context. So, I think... Yeah, I kind of went off on a

[00:05:28:22]tangent with something else. But then when I had to come

[00:05:31:00]for the next video, I'm like, "Okay, we need this one."

[00:05:35:02]And we wanted similar writing. So, then it made me the thumbnails for episode two.

[00:05:43:21]So, I wanted to make a map of my fantasy kingdom.

[00:05:48:22]I had it read all four of the books again and come up with, "Okay, what are the

[00:05:54:03]major landmarks?" It came up with this

[00:05:57:19]blobby thing and I'm like, "Well, that's a start."

[00:06:00:17]So, I refined it from there. I'm like, "Okay, this, this, this, and this. Go back

[00:06:06:01]and change it." And then it's going through

[00:06:09:23]and it's like this back and forth process.

[00:06:11:20]This was the next iteration. That's way better. Still not quite it. So, I actually

[00:06:17:20]took a screenshot of this and drew over top of it in

[00:06:21:03]Photoshop and then brought it back in in one of these areas.

[00:06:27:06]I brought it back in. This is my drawn over version. So, I'm like, "Okay, this is

[00:06:32:12]how we want to change this." So, I'm like, "Can

[00:06:37:07]you make a SVG of that?" And it came back with this.

[00:06:41:14]And I'm like, "Wow, that is actually really good." So, I think we refined it a

[00:06:47:21]little bit more. I'm not even sure. We might have just ran with it then.

[00:06:51:00]So, this is just ChatGPT coding this, or Astra coding this to make it look like

[00:06:59:12]that, but I wanted it pretty. So, I'm like, "Use this as the reference to, I think

[00:07:05:24]this is the one we actually ran with, to make this map here."

[00:07:09:11]So, we started from my books and ended up with this. So, this is the kind of stuff.

[00:07:15:13]Like, you don't have to reread your books every time you do it, or you don't have

[00:07:19:05]to go search in through your email. You

[00:07:20:21]don't have to be looking all of these things up.

[00:07:25:03]You can just... The power of this is that it

[00:07:28:13]can rip through these things and then just do it.

[00:07:30:07]So, yesterday, I've been running this promotion thing where... Running this

[00:07:36:07]promotion thing on my website where I have a Harvest Festival in one of my books.

[00:07:41:21]So, I'm running this thing on my website where everyone's filling up seats in the

[00:07:45:22]Great Hall and there's milestones. So, it's

[00:07:48:21]kind of running almost like a Kickstarter.

[00:07:50:06]Like, 25 seats that are filled up get this thing for everybody and 50 gets this

[00:07:56:02]thing. Well, we just passed 50 and I'm like, "Okay, I need a goodie for everybody."

[00:07:59:18]I have not planned this yet because I've got so much going on. Oh no! What do we

[00:08:04:02]do? And I'm like, "Okay, we're gonna make tarot cards."

[00:08:06:01]So, I did not spend a ton of time in Mid-Journey making tarot cards. What I did was

[00:08:12:16]come in here to this chat that had already read through all of my books.

[00:08:16:24]And I'm like, "Okay, I wanna make tarot cards in the main

[00:08:19:00]characters. These are the main characters in my series."

[00:08:22:16]This is what I want you to do, proposed designs.

[00:08:26:20]So, Astra, who had already read through all of my

[00:08:30:15]books, was like, "Okay, this is what I think we should do."

[00:08:34:21]And then, we back and forth a little bit because I didn't

[00:08:38:17]like one thing. And then, these were the first versions.

[00:08:43:03]And I was like, "It's okay. They're not really

[00:08:47:10]looking like what I vision the characters to look like."

[00:08:50:03]But, I happen to have this folder with all of

[00:08:54:07]these references I've already made for my characters.

[00:08:57:24]So, let's go back and I picked those all

[00:09:02:19]out, dumped them in here, and re-rolled them.

[00:09:05:11]And so, it re-rolled to the likenesses that were exactly on those images. And I'm

[00:09:10:14]like, "Yes! That is amazing! We're gonna roll with it!"

[00:09:13:10]So, I made a folder of it. I think I just redid this

[00:09:17:16]one. That was it. Because it needed to add magic to it.

[00:09:22:16]But, we made a folder of it, uploaded it, and boom! Sent it

[00:09:26:15]out to everybody. And I think that took about half an hour.

[00:09:30:07]So, if you build...

[00:09:35:23]The thing with working with agents is systems

[00:09:39:11]and context and knowing how to ask questions.

[00:09:45:11]If you have the skills, like things like the skills are your system.

[00:09:51:05]So, it's like if you have repeatable systems that will

[00:09:53:15]help you get faster and help you have more accurate work.

[00:09:56:24]Take away your brain space cycles because you don't have to think about...

[00:10:00:15]You don't even have to think about how to ask the right question.

[00:10:05:09]The question is already asked for you in your directions. You just need to know

[00:10:11:15]which directions to call to ask the question.

[00:10:14:24]So, if you have the systems, you have the context, like things like these...

[00:10:22:04]This is context. So, if you have images of your characters, if you have your books

[00:10:30:17]in a folder, if you have documents of marketing, if

[00:10:35:17]you have research that you have sent your AI out to do.

[00:10:40:06]It can take all of that and synthesize it into new

[00:10:43:06]things that you need. Like, I needed these tarot cards.

[00:10:46:20]I had all of the context. I had the books as context. I had the images as context.

[00:10:54:21]I didn't have a skill for this one specifically, but

[00:10:57:02]ChatGPT has its own image generation skills that it works through.

[00:11:03:02]So, this was the context that I was able to

[00:11:05:01]make this very quickly. And they look great.

[00:11:09:02]So, it had all of that together. And then

[00:11:13:24]the ability to ask the right questions is...

[00:11:17:24]That's something that you will get as you work with agents more.

[00:11:23:05]Where, like, when I am starting a new chat here, I'm not starting this as...

[00:11:30:20]This is my skill for the map. I sent it to do this studio onboarding so that it

[00:11:36:23]immediately has access to every single book in my system.

[00:11:41:18]It has access to every single book in my system. I have all of this context in

[00:11:50:20]here. I have all of my Kickstarter voice, marketing voice, newsletter voice.

[00:11:57:09]I have had my agents rip through all of my

[00:12:00:23]series and come up with algorithms on how I plot.

[00:12:05:16]I've had it go through and grab all my style. I have all of

[00:12:10:16]this. This is, like, years worth of context I have built up.

[00:12:14:13]I have all this story bible context for every single series.

[00:12:18:23]And, again, this is the whole thing that I've built to kind of interact with this.

[00:12:25:04]But it's not loading here.

[00:12:29:06]This is something that you can build over time. You can make a database of this

[00:12:34:18]stuff. You can have it in folders. You can

[00:12:36:14]have it in Notion. You can have it in Obsidian.

[00:12:39:15]This is the way I've chosen to organize my context, which is basically all I'm

[00:12:44:16]doing. This is one big organization for all of my context that when I want to send

[00:12:51:14]my agent to do things, I can be like, go look at this book

[00:12:54:23]and the image context in my super base and pull that together.

[00:13:01:17]I have all my world building data here. I have all my

[00:13:06:04]costumes and objects. This is kind of not all the way done.

[00:13:13:05]And they're loading kind of slowly.

[00:13:15:21]But I have marketing context. I have, like, the tropes and quotes. And I had the AI

[00:13:25:02]go through everything that I have and pull out all the quotes, all the quotes in

[00:13:33:12]the books so that when I am making Instagram slides,

[00:13:40:03]I can go through and be like, oh, we need this one.

[00:13:42:21]Oh, we need this one. Oh, we need this one. So that kind of thing. And also, one of

[00:13:52:05]the things agents are very, very good at is pinpointed research. Fable in

[00:13:58:11]particular in Claude. If you are in Claude and you go back to Cowork.

[00:14:06:11]If you were in Claude Cowork and you go to Fable and you are like, go look at or

[00:14:16:04]go research all of the problems that readers have with this genre and look at

[00:14:26:20]Reddit and look at Goodreads and look at this and look at that.

[00:14:29:21]And you'll find like reader pain points. They'll be like, oh, we don't like these

[00:14:33:21]endings or oh, we want more of this or oh,

[00:14:36:09]there's no books that have this trope in it.

[00:14:39:03]You can find that out very quickly and then be like, OK, here's a gap I can feel.

[00:14:45:06]Here's a gap I can fill. But that's just like that. You can do like multifaceted

[00:14:51:19]research where, say you do that and you get this big report.

[00:14:55:22]Then you have your A.I. put that in your database. Like I will send a A.I. out. I

[00:15:02:16]sent the A.I. out after micro market research. And this was one big run on like go

[00:15:08:19]go look at Goodreads, go look at Amazon, go look at Reddit.

[00:15:11:13]Find all of these trending micro markets that that people are talking about, but

[00:15:19:23]they're not like big. They're the niche things. So

[00:15:22:07]it came back. This entire thing was one research run.

[00:15:26:09]It came back on a massive trend report and then a deep dive into every single one

[00:15:30:23]of these niches. This is one research call.

[00:15:35:12]If you tell it if you tell your agent to especially in Claude, if you tell it to

[00:15:42:18]start a workflow, it'll spin up like 100 agents or something like that.

[00:15:49:24]If you do that, know that it's going to really crunch your usage, but it's going to

[00:15:53:24]come out with just craziness. So I dump this in my database. So the next time I

[00:16:00:19]want to do a massive report, I'll be like, go look at it.

[00:16:04:20]Go look at this report in my database. Now go look at YouTube, go look at Amazon,

[00:16:11:10]go look at all of these other things like this. This one was a brand research run

[00:16:17:23]that I had it do. I had it look at I had it look at my micro market report.

[00:16:23:04]I had it look at I pulled in the entirety of my Facebook ad library into here.

[00:16:30:06]Every ad that I have ever run is now in this database. Every newsletter I've ever

[00:16:35:07]sent is in this database. Go look at this, go look at that, go look at my

[00:16:39:09]analytics, go look at this, like the ads that have done the best.

[00:16:46:15]Now go look at YouTube and here's three YouTube videos I like. Go pull the

[00:16:51:01]transcripts. So you're able to synthesize these large amounts of information. So I

[00:16:58:12]have all this information here. Now I want to go make my ads.

[00:17:02:01]I'm like, go look at my brand report, go look at my ads, go look at my Shopify

[00:17:10:14]analytics, go look at my current ads that are performing now, go look at my

[00:17:16:03]Instagram, go pull from this, go pull from that.

[00:17:19:08]Now we're going to synthesize these ads and when I'm doing the ads, I have skills

[00:17:24:21]that I have skills that are putting together the ads the way I want them to be put

[00:17:31:11]together like that's my brand voice. This is my brand voice.

[00:17:35:11]So this is what I mean when we're building systems that can pull all of these

[00:17:41:24]things together because it's not about doing it is

[00:17:44:15]about doing things faster. It is about doing things faster.

[00:17:48:01]It's also about doing things very smartly because these kind of reports are the

[00:17:54:07]kind of reports that agencies spend thousands of dollars hiring people to research

[00:17:59:17]to do. And here you can just do it in a couple hours in an

[00:18:04:05]afternoon and have this information ready to hand to use.

[00:18:10:01]I have not read all of this. I've skimmed over parts of it, but I have not read all

[00:18:14:18]of this, like this micro market report. I looked at areas that were interesting to

[00:18:20:23]me, but I didn't read all of this. However, when I am choosing what genre I want to

[00:18:29:13]write in, when I'm planning future books, I'm like, go look at this report.

[00:18:35:06]Go look at all of these. And because my system has all of my context in it, like

[00:18:45:00]what I call like my author DNA, my system knows what I like. So it has the context

[00:18:53:18]of these are the types of books that I write. These are the types of books that I

[00:18:57:03]consistently do not write or I just like I don't kill

[00:19:00:08]my characters. I'm never going to write Game of Thrones.

[00:19:02:24]So that kind of thing, it's pulling all of this together. It is synthesizing mass

[00:19:10:05]amounts of information. So when I'm doing my Instagram, when I'm doing my ads, when

[00:19:16:09]I'm making businesses decisions, I can make

[00:19:18:17]them with a high degree of information behind them.

[00:19:24:24]So it can help you do smaller tasks. It can help you do like this in scope is kind

[00:19:34:05]of a smaller task. But if I had to like sit down and draw this on my own, for one,

[00:19:41:16]I procrastinated doing this for nine

[00:19:43:08]months anyway, it just would not have been done.

[00:19:45:08]And then when I finally did do it, the agents were smart enough to be able to rip

[00:19:51:12]through and get all of this for me. So this is the map that I wanted. But I didn't

[00:20:01:14]have to I didn't have to exhaust myself getting there. And I could have drawn this

[00:20:08:10]by hand, but this is going to be a better result.

[00:20:12:12]So these are the kinds of things that we can do. And there's there's just so much.

[00:20:20:21]So anything you don't know, you can send it out to research to find out any

[00:20:26:03]anything that you want to build, you can have it walk you through and or build it

[00:20:32:01]for you and walk you through how to set it up.

[00:20:35:05]A bunch of things that you don't want to do on your computer, like you can just

[00:20:40:24]have it like like like video editing. It's not that I don't want to do this. It's

[00:20:45:20]just I'm always trying to find ways to make

[00:20:48:19]this easier. I had I think it was over 200 clips.

[00:20:54:00]There's a there's a lot of clips in here. And I'm like, we need to get these all on

[00:20:59:06]the timeline. And and the agent was able to look at the systems I'd already built

[00:21:04:12]around where the clips were and line them all up all

[00:21:07:24]in order. And I went through and tweaked it by hand.

[00:21:11:07]And then I'm like, OK, like here's some spots and and we need to compress this and

[00:21:17:03]whatever an agent's like, OK, it goes in and

[00:21:19:08]just put soup, soup, soup, soup, soup around.

[00:21:21:21]It's not perfect, but it's a back and forth process.

[00:21:25:06]And that's kind of that's kind of what it is working with.

[00:21:30:04]Yeah, it's not going to be perfect. It's you can get it to to write email in your

[00:21:35:21]voice. You can get it to do all of these things very closely to how you want to do

[00:21:40:19]it. You can sometimes hit it 100, 100 percent.

[00:21:43:19]But you're not going to get 100 percent all the time, all the time on everything.

[00:21:48:19]It can get very close, but you always have to look over

[00:21:51:08]everything. But most of it is it's just going to be back and forth.

[00:21:55:22]It can be like, go do this thing and it'll do the thing.

Topic times use MM:SS within this episode. Adaptable prompts are templates based on the lesson, not verbatim quotations. App names, options, and capabilities reflect the recording and may change.

[00:00:00:00]I have had like this SEO chat. I think that's a maintenance one, but I had it audit

[00:00:08:05]my entire Shopify SEO strategy and it went through and it looked at everything.

[00:00:14:22]And it we had a bit of back and forth about how I want to run my SEO and then we I

[00:00:24:16]had it just ripped through my entire back end of my site.

[00:00:27:21]And like two hours later, it was like, OK, done hundred. Was it two hundred and

[00:00:33:08]eighty four native SEO records, one hundred eighty three live passes.

[00:00:38:11]I was able to get rid of a plug in that I had been paying for. So and that's where

[00:00:43:11]I set it up to every day. It looks for new products.

[00:00:46:01]And is there a new product? No, then we don't do anything.

[00:00:48:17]If there's a new product, then we go in and change that SEO according to these

[00:00:52:19]guidelines. So this is the kind of stuff we can do.

[00:00:57:11]It's just there isn't any one thing where it's like, oh, you have to do this or or.

[00:01:04:13]It has to be done a certain way or you need to do systems

[00:01:06:24]a certain way. Everyone's going to have different systems.

[00:01:10:24]Every way you work with this is going to be different and kind of the only way to

[00:01:16:17]figure out how it's best for you is to just kind of start.

[00:01:21:18]My systems are intense at this point because I've been building them for years. But

[00:01:30:05]I mean, even even before there were agents,

[00:01:31:22]I had folders full of all of these things.

[00:01:34:19]So. It's just a matter of you just got to start. So like a good place to start with

[00:01:41:22]this, like for for help with your books would be to make folders of your books.

[00:01:47:06]Like if you have like wherever you format things, make a copy of that folder and

[00:01:53:05]then have the agent go through and pull all your

[00:01:56:05]final versions of your books into into folders.

[00:01:59:06]Or if you want to be brave, get a Supabase and have it start pulling it into a

[00:02:03:06]database or notion or obsidian or something like that.

[00:02:07:08]Any place where you have a consolidated area where the A.I. can go to look for

[00:02:12:16]context and then start gathering your images

[00:02:16:01]that you've been collecting throughout the years.

[00:02:19:06]Pull that into context and have it go through your

[00:02:23:06]Instagram or go through your TikTok and get get your descriptions.

[00:02:30:08]Anywhere where you have context, have it start gathering that. Have it go have it

[00:02:35:14]go look at all your books on Amazon and pull all your descriptions.

[00:02:39:10]Agents sometimes flake a little on Amazon. So if you have wide books, I would send

[00:02:43:21]it to like Barnes and Noble or Kobo first.

[00:02:46:21]To go pull all your descriptions, pull all your blurbs. It can harvest your

[00:02:52:07]reviews. It can all of this. You gather it into context because then like say

[00:03:00:06]you're making marketing stuff and you're like, oh, I would normally have to go to

[00:03:05:19]Amazon right now and brave looking at my reviews to find a review to put on this

[00:03:09:23]quote on this thing that I want to put on social media.

[00:03:13:04]But if you've already had it go and harvest your reviews, you don't have to do

[00:03:16:21]that. You'd be like, OK, pull three of my best reviews and then put them on these

[00:03:21:04]images and then go look at my character images and then make something like it and

[00:03:26:00]then put it all together and then you've got your ads.

[00:03:29:23]So.

[00:03:32:04]And then as you go, you just build more context, you build more research, you build

[00:03:38:00]more systems so and you build more skills. So it's like as you're doing this, if

[00:03:43:06]that's something you do all the time, you're like, you've done that three times in

[00:03:46:07]this chat and you're like, OK, turn this into a skill so that the next time you

[00:03:49:17]don't have to say all of that, you'll just be like, go do this with this book done.

[00:03:53:18]So that is how to work with the desktop agents. And that's why they're so powerful.

[00:04:02:08]And and and I mean, so like even like with that Instagram making quotes of this and

[00:04:08:15]that with all that context, if you turn it into a skill and then you have it

[00:04:11:18]scheduled so that every week you get a new

[00:04:14:23]batch of things made for you automatically.

[00:04:17:02]You just happen to pop into this folder and you just go look at that folder and you

[00:04:21:12]can even set up systems where it pulls that for you

[00:04:24:09]and schedules it for you. So all of this because like.

[00:04:30:20]We're trying to do things smarter. We're trying to do things where.

[00:04:38:09]We can reclaim back the creative time that the admin admin had us doing and also.

[00:04:46:20]Quite frankly, because lots of the marketing world is doing this, it's not

[00:04:52:09]necessarily it's still an advantage because not everyone is doing it, especially in

[00:04:56:14]the author world. It's still an advantage.

[00:04:58:11]But there's going to reach a point where everyone is doing stuff like this, like,

[00:05:02:08]especially in the high power marketing realm, you are getting people who are doing

[00:05:06:10]things like this heavily where this is kind of the new the new layer.

[00:05:12:10]This this is getting to be the new

[00:05:15:01]standard and it's going to get easier because the.

[00:05:20:03]The systems that people were building are continually getting easier to work with.

[00:05:25:14]But this is kind of how you work at scale and these are you build these systems and

[00:05:31:22]then you can scale them and you're able to take

[00:05:36:21]what would take you a much smaller sphere of operation.

[00:05:44:15]I guess you're able to take that and expand it and do a whole lot more.

[00:05:48:18]You might not even be reclaiming back a whole lot of time. You can just do a whole

[00:05:53:05]lot more. You can do more with your ideas. You

[00:05:55:24]can you can do more things and do them creatively.

[00:05:59:18]You can make your special editions while you are making your audio books, while you

[00:06:03:14]are making your marketing, while you are making all of this.

[00:06:08:16]You can have these things done and it's it's just it's building systems and it's

[00:06:15:23]learning to think in systems and learning to think it's it's almost like in the sci

[00:06:22:00]fi movies when when they're manipulating holograms and

[00:06:27:10]like Iron Man with his Jarvis and that kind of stuff.

[00:06:31:02]That is that is what we are doing. Like it's it's literally sci fi what we're

[00:06:35:04]doing. Like it's those of us who work with it every day. It's like I think we just

[00:06:39:03]get into the habit of just like, oh, we're just doing this and that.

[00:06:41:14]But if you really step back, it's like, no, this is really

[00:06:44:15]intense and it's it's this it's new and it's still evolving.

[00:06:48:15]If we're just getting started, can you recommend

[00:06:50:15]your top three suggestions for us to do with an agent?

[00:06:55:16]So everyone's top three is going to be different. I think I would look at.

[00:07:02:06]I'd make a list of the top top like 10 things that you were doing that one you

[00:07:08:08]don't like to do or you think are tedious.

[00:07:13:06]And or you think take too much time. And that is where I would start. So like like

[00:07:22:05]if you don't like to clean your your email

[00:07:24:08]inbox, that would be a very good place to start.

[00:07:27:12]Hook your Gmail to it and have it have it go through and clean up your inbox and

[00:07:34:20]then have it schedule it to clean up your inbox in

[00:07:38:15]the same way like every week or something like that.

[00:07:43:10]Which scheduling that might be a little like don't don't don't run it autonomously

[00:07:49:01]until you know that it knows what you want.

[00:07:51:11]Otherwise, it can just go through and be like, oh, I'll

[00:07:53:10]just delete all these things for you. Yay. And it's like, no.

[00:07:57:23]But so like something like that newsletters

[00:08:02:12]newsletters is a really good place to start.

[00:08:04:12]So like I have. Oh, I think it's over here. I have I have a connector to Spoks,

[00:08:13:21]which is what I do my newsletters through.

[00:08:16:07]So every time I want to do a newsletter, I'm just like, OK, like go pull my

[00:08:22:07]products from Shopify and figure out this and that and then write me a newsletter.

[00:08:29:17]And I already have I had it go through all of my previous newsletters at some point

[00:08:36:17]and pull out like what my newsletter voices.

[00:08:39:09]I had it make a newsletter skill so that it

[00:08:42:06]writes in my voice and it knows what I like.

[00:08:45:06]It knows the type of things that I do. So when. So like, OK.

[00:08:53:15]I think this will open the box link. It'll it'll just because it's connected to

[00:08:58:18]Spoks, it'll write that newsletter and then it'll just immediately put it in here

[00:09:02:18]so that all I have to do is proof it and then be like, go.

[00:09:07:16]I think this is when I sent already, so

[00:09:09:02]I'm not sure it's going to let me. OK, yeah.

[00:09:11:17]So I had it do that and it automatically pulled the

[00:09:15:18]product and the links, wrote the wrote the what do you call it?

[00:09:21:22]The accessibility text. It made the buttons. It wrote the copy. It pulled this in.

[00:09:28:18]It's like I gave it a brief on what I wanted, but then it pulled these things in

[00:09:33:07]for me and even went and found this story that I wanted to add in here.

[00:09:37:03]So all I was able all I had to do was proof this and then hit go.

[00:09:43:21]So considering an agent for going into a six to claim

[00:09:47:04]all the books I just translated, that is a very good idea.

[00:09:50:03]Actually, if you have 100 books to claim, would it be

[00:09:54:01]safe for the agent to live in your account to do the things?

[00:09:58:00]Generally, yes. However, some.

[00:10:03:00]I think you get more into trouble with it's not even that you get into trouble.

[00:10:07:13]Some sites don't like agents. Amazon sites can be kind of

[00:10:12:05]notorious for bouncing agents where it's nothing bad happens.

[00:10:18:02]It's just that the agent won't do what you want it to do.

[00:10:21:11]The agent will be like, I can't do this thing. Help. Oh, no.

[00:10:27:01]It's iffy like like for the for the Amazon sites. It's iffy.

[00:10:34:18]I haven't let it into my KDP back in yet

[00:10:37:20]just because I'm slightly paranoid about that.

[00:10:40:13]But like I will have it go on the front end of Amazon and rip through things.

[00:10:46:18]If the agent what I would do with that is you can like in the connector.

[00:10:53:17]You can record a skill where you record it. You do it by hand.

[00:11:00:07]It watches what you're doing and then it knows the steps so that it can go through

[00:11:07:00]and repeat those steps when you're doing it.

[00:11:11:11]And you don't necessarily have to do it like that either.

[00:11:14:03]You can kind of talk it through as well.

[00:11:17:21]But. Yeah, it's.

[00:11:23:10]It's one of those things where.

[00:11:27:16]You just kind of have to walk through it and figure out.

[00:11:34:03]If it can do it for one and make sure that it does it the

[00:11:37:19]right way, you kind of have to babysit it the first few times.

[00:11:40:16]If it gets like two or three books and you're good and you're golden and you watch

[00:11:44:14]it work and and then you're like, OK, now I

[00:11:47:22]can go and let it do like the next 50 of them.

[00:11:52:00]And just check occasionally. That's kind of that's kind of what you have to do with

[00:11:56:06]any kind of agent automation where it's like the first time the first time you have

[00:12:00:11]to show it what to do the next few times.

[00:12:03:05]You need to babysit it and occasionally correct it.

[00:12:05:23]You're like, no, that's not what we're doing. We need to go do it this way.

[00:12:10:02]And then once you have seen that it can repeat the process successfully several

[00:12:17:14]times, then you can usually let it go off on it.

[00:12:21:12]So but still check on it.

[00:12:24:22]The agents these days are way better than the agents of a few months ago.

[00:12:31:03]If you were doing anything with a high degree of complexity, use Astra or I'd use

[00:12:37:15]Astra or maybe Sol as the models, these models here, possibly Fable.

[00:12:47:02]With Claude agents Fable and Opus, I wouldn't hand Fable can handle really, really

[00:12:53:04]intense tasks like that, but Fable sometimes refuses to

[00:12:56:15]do things where it thinks it's it's hitting safety filters.

[00:13:01:19]So watch that. But Opus is not a great agent for like it can do these things, but

[00:13:09:05]Opus kind of spins on its own wheels sometimes.

[00:13:11:23]So I would not hand this kind of task to Opus in Claude.

[00:13:17:22]So since Goodreads is owned by Amazons, can you use an agent to clean up a

[00:13:21:19]Goodreads that has old outdated information and

[00:13:24:04]book versions or is that something you can't do?

[00:13:28:06]That you could try. I think I've heard people having more luck with Goodreads than

[00:13:36:11]Amazon, but it just it depends. It just depends. You can try.

[00:13:42:20]Everything is worth a try. It's totally worth a try.

[00:13:46:22]And and and seeing if the agent is able to manipulate that on its own.

[00:13:52:24]A lot of most sites will let agents in at some point, but and when an agent is like

[00:14:04:04]working on things, you'll see the browser

[00:14:05:20]moving around and you'll see like the cursor moving.

[00:14:09:14]I would try with Astra. See if Astra can do it.

[00:14:12:23]If Astra is like, oh, their site is blocking me.

[00:14:17:09]If it doesn't work with the browser, have it take over

[00:14:20:06]your computer and and it might be able to do it that way.

[00:14:23:20]I've every now and then if something doesn't work with the browser, I have it.

[00:14:28:01]It must approach it slightly differently because I

[00:14:31:13]sometimes have more luck when it takes over the computer.

[00:14:36:04]But it's worth a try. It's.

[00:14:40:02]I know like Cassie has had it uploading to her KDP dashboard, so it's like it's

[00:14:47:05]it's possible and and most of it like if you hit

[00:14:51:10]walls, be like, OK, like how do you approach it differently?

[00:14:54:21]Can can you do it differently? Because a lot of times the agents are like, oh,

[00:14:58:00]we'll just scrape this whole thing with Jason.

[00:14:59:20]It's like, nope, you need to act like you are actually a person clicking on things.

[00:15:04:15]So sometimes it'll go off and try to do things and it'll bounce and you'll be like,

[00:15:09:19]nope, go go do this a different way or nope, go do this this way.

[00:15:14:19]So it's worth a try. I think you might be able to.

[00:15:20:01]It it's and if you do that with like old outdated information, you would first need

[00:15:26:15]to have you need to give it the right information or you'd need to tell it where to

[00:15:31:01]look to where it's like, OK, go look at my Amazon.

[00:15:34:23]And this is the current information. Update it to this or go look at my my

[00:15:40:16]database, which has all this stuff in it and then update it to this.

[00:15:43:24]So. You kind of have to give guardrails. You need to give instructions.

[00:15:50:16]Otherwise, it'll kind of just go off on its own and pull from any random

[00:15:54:00]information that it thinks is helpful, which is not always helpful.

[00:15:57:14]Like the agents right now are very, very,

[00:15:59:09]very smart. However, they still make mistakes.

[00:16:03:05]So and if you if you do have it do an automation like that, just double check

[00:16:08:00]everything, especially if it's public facing.

[00:16:10:03]So, yeah, I I think I would give that to Astra and and and see I haven't personally

[00:16:20:14]had it going into Goodreads because I am allergic to Goodreads.

[00:16:25:03]I just don't go there. But I think that's worth a try.

[00:16:30:14]Um. Which is is is any of it, it's like.

[00:16:38:02]Things things can change often and sites can change often and things that you could

[00:16:44:12]do a couple of weeks ago, sometimes you

[00:16:47:00]can't do now, it's it's all kind of in flux, so.

[00:16:52:03]So it's one of those things where you just kind of remain fluid with things.

[00:16:58:06]But you yeah, you just have a conversation as like, can we do this? Can we do that?

[00:17:04:18]And how do we do it? And and if you run up

[00:17:08:13]into obstacles, how do you get around it? So.

[00:17:13:17]Any more questions?

[00:17:17:02]I think I'm gonna stop here.

[00:17:22:07]We have any more questions, I think.

[00:17:28:04]Yeah, I think we covered we covered a lot. I had this whole.

[00:17:32:24]I had this whole notebook paper that like we've covered most of it.

[00:17:43:04]Yeah.

[00:17:44:15]It's it's one of those things that you kind of just you have to do it. And as

[00:17:49:14]you're doing it, you'll be like, oh my God, I can do this thing with it.

[00:17:52:21]And oh my God, I can do this thing with it. And you'll be having these

[00:17:56:22]conversations. And the agent will be like, oh, did you

[00:18:00:10]know that you can do this, this and this really quickly?

[00:18:02:22]And you'll be like, ah. So it's all.

[00:18:08:04]It's all an exploration. I like to say that this is

[00:18:12:07]the best strategy game you will ever, ever, ever play.

[00:18:15:10]So and you can go on any of our sub-site posts and

[00:18:22:08]ask questions, basically, like, well, we'll get it.

[00:18:27:09]Cassie or me. So what if you want to learn more about this and if you want to do

[00:18:36:03]more with like this was all the foundational stuff.

[00:18:40:19]Cassie, Alexander and I do run the marketing for storytellers sub-stack and we have

[00:18:46:08]weekly calls where we are going into depth on all of this stuff like this was an

[00:18:52:06]overview, but like going into depth and like digging in with all of our

[00:18:56:13]experiments, because we're always trying to find out

[00:18:58:13]how do we do things better, faster, smarter, all of that.

[00:19:02:16]So check that out. We do weekly calls on the paid sub-stack and we have at this

[00:19:09:04]point, we have a fairly enormous archive of calls and posts and all of these things

[00:19:15:13]and skills that we have made that we've shared that you can

[00:19:19:05]use with your agents as well and systems that you can build.

[00:19:22:15]If you like that command center that I was showing that I organize all my stuff in,

[00:19:27:16]I actually have a build out prompt on there that you can give to an agent and it'll

[00:19:33:03]start building that for you within your own systems.

[00:19:36:12]I know quite a few people have built their own with that prompt at this point.

[00:19:43:13]So if you want to go deeper, that's where you can go deeper.

[00:19:48:18]But as far as an overview, like just play with it. Just play with it. Have fun.

[00:19:57:07]It's really fun actually to learn how to have superpowers.

[00:20:01:18]But yeah, thank you for coming. I hope this was helpful. I really hope this was

[00:20:06:02]helpful because, and I know it's a lot of

[00:20:07:23]information so probably some of you are trying to absorb it.

[00:20:11:08]But yeah, this is kind of one of those things where go forth and have fun and be

[00:20:16:17]more awesome, right? Because that's always the plan.

[00:20:20:18]So thank you for coming and I will see you all around the internet.

[00:20:29:19]Yep. All right. Goodbye.

Topic times use MM:SS within this episode. Adaptable prompts are templates based on the lesson, not verbatim quotations. App names, options, and capabilities reflect the recording and may change.