← Behind the Craft
Behind the Craft
Full Tutorial: Connect Claude Code to Google, Slack, and Reddit in 40 Min (Skills + MCPs)
00:42:38
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- [00:00]
A
I am a Claude code maximalist. I just try to live in cloud code all day if I can. You start your day, you say, hey, Claude, help me prep for the day. Here's all the things for the meeting. Do you want me to update those notes? Here's what's going on in linear. Do you want me to send this message to Slack?
- [00:11]
B
This is like so much better than complicated cloud call setups with all these MD files. Connecting to all these different things you actually use at work is like way more powerful.
- [00:19]
A
I can just literally type consult the console and then and just hit Enter. So what this does is it just literally hits the APIs for ChatGPT, for Gemini, for Groq. There's usually just some little things that Claude just for some reason misses that with a fresh pair of eyes you can catch. Initial start is hard, but once you start getting the hang of it, it's so obviously awesome that people adopt it.
- [00:40]
B
All right, hey, everyone. My guest today is Carl, product lead and creator of the great free course. Cloud Code for Product Managers is the only course that actually teaches cloud code for PMs inside cloud code. And today we're going to demo how to connect clock code to Google Docs, Google Workspace, and a bunch of other common tools that product managers use. And Carl will also talk about how he builds PM skills in cloud code. So it's all going to be all about cloud code. So let's dive in. Carl, welcome.
- [01:11]
A
Yeah, thanks. I'm super excited. I've been doing lots of kind of work in just the cloud code world, cloud Code for product managers exploring this space. Every day there's new things to learn. So I'm super stoked to be here and I have never covered and how to connect AI to other things. And I know that that's basically the first question people have is you get using cloud code, you kind of start to understand your local file structure. But then you have to wonder, how do I actually get my work files or how can I connect this AI to everything? And so you see all these amazing demos and this is really how those things are possible. So I'm really excited to kind of walk through that today.
- [01:47]
B
I think that's really critical because like a lot of PMs and prod teams, they just spend our time in like Google Workspace and these other. These are programs. So, yeah. So maybe why don't we just dive straight in? Maybe you can show us how it works.
- [01:58]
A
Yeah. So today what we'll do is we will connect to Google Workspace, MCP which is on the kind of like the spectrum of easy to hard, is one of the more difficult ones. So I'll walk through that quickly and I'll kind of. For everything that we do, I have created good setup files so that anyone else is watching this, you can copy these files and then the instructions will be there. So on one hand, we'll do Google Workspace, which is on the more difficult side. And then I'll also demo how can you connect to Linear, which is so kind of for issue tracking. It's like a more modern jira, which is amazingly easy. And then I'll show a couple others, not really the full setup, but just other things that you can do. And I think that will give good coverage of, like, what's possible. And then what does a really hard setup look like? And what does a really easy setup look like?
- [02:45]
B
Okay. Yeah, let's do it, man.
- [02:46]
A
All right, so Peter showed you in another video how you can connect your Google mcp. So I'm just going to go ahead. We're in cloud code here and I will just show kind of all the MCPs that I have turned on. So we've got a Google Workspace one, which is the main one that we'll be using today. You can kind of see a couple other ones that I have. The main ones we'll be looking at today are Google Workspace. We'll look at Reddit, we'll look at Slack, and then we'll look at Linear. So once you have these configured, and one thing that's interesting is it used to be kind of a bigger deal if you had a bunch of MCPs open all at the same time, because they would use context. Anthropic just released a few weeks ago a tool search feature. So it makes it so that it won't actually load these into context, which is like Claude's amount of memory it can keep at one time until it actually needs it. So it's not as big of a deal to manage these. You used to have to be really careful about which ones were turned on and which ones were not available.
- [03:36]
B
Yeah.
- [03:36]
A
But with that, we'll go ahead and run our first command here. Okay, so we're connected to Google mcp, but we're what can we actually do with it? So what we're going to say is, we're going to say, please help me prepare for today's meetings. And we'll imagine that it's at the beginning of the day. And what we have here is we have my calendar and this is kind of a maybe a realistic PM calendar. So we'll imagine that it's at the beginning of this Friday and we have a daily standup, we have Sprint planning, we have design review, we have a one on one with our manager and then we have a stakeholder review at the end of the day. So what the Google MCP can do is it can look at your calendar and it can look at your local space, see what note files we might have, it can look at our Google Drive to figure out which Google Docs we have that are associated with these meetings and they can put all of that together. And so what I'm going to ask Claude to do here is look at my meetings, tell me the events that I have, find the relevant Google Docs, find my notes, compare against the agendas, and then help me suggest additions I can make to all those docs and then we'll actually have it be able to add to all those docs. So it's kind of like a big prompt and then we'll make sure that it knows. Imagine it's the beginning of the day. Let me make sure it knows. One last thing. We are on the. You have to kind of make sure you know which it knows which calendar to talk to. So we're in the Py demo calendar here. But if you like, for me I have a lot of different calendars for different things. You can basically hit any single one associated with your account. Okay, so now what it's going to do is it's. We'll see it use that mcp. So, so it's using Tool Search, which is that thing that I just mentioned. So it's saying, okay, what mcps do I have available? So it found Google Workspace and now it's listing the calendars. What's really cool about MCPS is that once you have them installed, then Claude just immediately understands how to use them because they have all of the tools and all the configuration within the mcp, which is kind of where some of that context that they take up comes from. One thing we'll look at later today is how you can connect your Claude to other stuff using APIs. And APIs are also good. And MCPs basically use APIs. I know there's a lot of acronyms, but when you have an API then it's just sort of like this thing that Claude can use and it will try to hit it and then it will make some mistakes and it will figure out the right pattern if it tries a couple times. But with mcps it has all of that documentation and exactly what's available right there. So it basically gets it right on the first try. Which is the really cool thing about MCPS is that you just get complete understanding of how to use it right as soon as it's installed. So here what we see it's doing is it's doing a bunch of things. It's so it found the meetings and then it's now it's finding the right Google Docs and it's now it's going to put all of that together in my workspace that we have here. This is a kind of like a realistic, maybe like a realistic PM setup is we have our meeting docs here as well and then kind of the projects that we're working on.
- [06:20]
B
Yeah, I think this is really important because like I think most product orgs are not using MD files and like sharing those. Right. So you kind of have to do this if you want to leverage clock code for your work.
- [06:31]
A
Yeah, exactly. So what we have here is we kind of found. So it was able to get all those meetings correctly. So it has the 9 o', clock, the 10 o', clock, the 11:30 and then it's saying, okay, in your Sprint planning doc you have a bunch of TBDs. So let me go ahead and show you what these docs look like. So we have our file here. So in our Sprint planning we just have these TBD's. So we're not really ready for these meetings at the beginning of the day with our manager, it's all empty. So we want Claude to help us figure this out, otherwise we have to go into every single one and update them ourselves. And so it's suggesting here based on all the things that it's found, some things that it can add, different blockers that it's found, maybe notes throughout your week that would be good to bring up with your manager or whatever meeting you have. And so now it's, it's saying, do you want me to update Sprint Planning and stakeholder review? So we just saw it pull in information, use that with all of our local stuff and now we'll be able to see it actually update those docs as well.
- [07:27]
B
That's great.
- [07:27]
A
Yeah, yeah. This is the type of stuff that's just great to use cloud code for. It's, it's kind of the, it's the work that doesn't need to be art, it just needs to kind of be there and make sense and it can really help you with just a lot of these day to day tasks that
- [07:41]
B
there's like so much, there's so much busy work in like a PM schedule. Like just updating random docs that like. Yeah, just, just get Cloud to do it for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [07:51]
A
It's amazing how much just of your. Of your day. It can just take up so much time just, you know, getting information and then putting it into formats for all these different stakeholders and then following up and then you just even clicking around and just the context in your own brain that you have to keep track of can be, can be a lot. And it's easy to forget things too. Okay, so Claude is telling us Sprint Planning doc is updated and stakeholder review doc is updated. So let's look at these. So we have our Sprint Planning doc, which we just saw a second ago it was all TBDs, but now we have these blockers. We can fix the formatting here and then now we have actual action items. So it's pretty cool. We were able to just combine all of the things that we have in our own context and then update our doc. So it's really powerful for pulling things down and then pushing back and working with these things, even if you don't have it all locally.
- [08:38]
B
Yeah, that's awesome. This episode is brought to you by Granola. If you're in back to back meetings, you know how much work it is to take notes, live and clean them up afterwards. That's why I love Granola, the best AI meeting notes app in the market. Here's how I use it. Granola automatically takes notes during a meeting and I can add my own notes too. After the meeting ends, I use a Granola recipe to extract granite clear takeaways and next steps in the exact format that I want. Then I can just share notes directly in Slack with my colleagues or even get Granola to share their notes automatically. Honestly, of all the AI apps that I use, Granola is the one that saves me the most time. Try it now at Granola AI Peter and use the code Peter to sign up and get three months free. That's Granola AI Peter. Now back to our episode.
- [09:26]
A
Okay, so we just saw Claude do all those things. What we're going to do next is we'll look at some other integrations. So another one that we have here is we have Linear is installed. So we have our Linear server going. This one is amazingly easy. If you watch Peter's video around how you set up Google workspace. So many steps. It's such a hassle with, with Linear, it's actually amazing. You literally just Put in this one command into your terminal and it installs on the first shot. Every time I've done it, it just works really well. So what we're going to do is we're going to say, hey, can you please tell me what all of my linear tickets are? So again, we're going to see it use a different MCP and then pull all this information in.
- [10:01]
B
Do you want to show us the linear thing? Yeah.
- [10:04]
A
Okay, so we're in linear here, which is kind of like a classic task management sort of team management platform. And we have a couple of different projects going on and we have our Multbot integration. So we're trying to be really AI first. We know that all these teams are going to start having these agents and we want to make sure that we have a really good one click solution for integrating into Multbot. And here we have a bunch of associated issues here. So security review. These are sort of realistic tickets and all of these have sort of good requirements in them. And so what we see here is that Claude was able to go in using that MCP and pull in all that information and tell us what is urgent, what is high priority and give us the links to all of these things. And now again, we would normally, if we wanted to update all of these to say like, we have Multba here, Moltba here. Instead of us going and updating all of them, you can, using this mcp, Claude can easily just do this all for us. So let's go ahead and tell it what we want it to do. So we're going to say update the project to the new name of openclaw instead of Multbot Official Rename. Update it across the entire project and tickets.
- [11:02]
B
Yeah, it's going to rename it tomorrow. I can't do it.
- [11:05]
A
I know, I know.
- [11:06]
B
Yeah. Do you use Linear for like personal task management or.
- [11:10]
A
Mostly, I think I should. I've heard that linear is just like an amazing way to kind of like work with your LLM to help you keep track of like, you know, content, like where, where is stuff, what, what status is in that it can move tickets around. I, I don't have a very sophisticated task management way. Do you?
- [11:27]
B
Yeah, no, I, I don't, I, I, I only have like my task management system is like my whiteboard, dude. Like I have like three tasks that I write by hand every day.
- [11:37]
A
Yeah. I think sometimes it's easier just to know like the next thing you need to work on.
- [11:42]
B
Yeah. But I will say like, because Linear can do all The AI agent stuff, maybe I'll start transitioning a bunch of my Google Docs to linear so that you know, like these AI agents can just like write for me and code for me and it's much easier that way.
- [11:53]
A
Yeah, I've heard that a lot of people are starting to use them, you know, especially for handling like a couple different agents that all have work in progress. It's just very nice to have a visual interface for all of them that they can work with. Okay, so Claude Code is saying that it is done. So rename Multbot to Open Claw everywhere. And so let's see, it's telling us exactly what it did. So it renamed the project and then it renamed the actual titles of these. So let's go ahead and see if that is true. Go ahead and refresh here actually before we even refresh, it's already good. So open cloud integration and then these are all here. And so obviously this is sort of a basic use case of we're just renaming it. But what you could do is you could, if let's say you have a PRD that you've hopefully you've worked with your engineers on and now you like you have your document, you have your maybe table of requirements, then you actually need to create the tickets. This is a perfect thing where you can say hey cloud code, take these requirements and then create the tickets. And you know, of course you should have an engineer review them or something like that. But it's just a great way to speed that flow up where you can manage all those tickets and or as you start your day, which we'll look at next, you can see what progress has been made on all of those tickets without ever actually having to go into linear. You can just ask Claude and it'll pull that information in for you.
- [13:03]
B
Oh yeah, manly. Creating tickets from a PRD is such a pain ass. So yeah, that definitely get the AI to do it.
- [13:08]
A
Yeah, yeah, it's such a pain. Before we. So what we're going to do is we'll demo a couple different ones and then we'll put them all together into like a really awesome command where we'll see Claude pull in information from our Google Docs from Slack from our own files and give us like a one big updated summary. So the next one I'll show is the Slack mcp. So there is an official Slack mcp but it is only sort of at certain companies. So if your company has it then maybe you can use it. There is also what's called a stealth mode mcp. And so the way these work is they kind of just use like information that is local on your computer to work with the app and they don't actually have to go through any sort of approval because all that information is already on your computer. So. So for example, for Slack, it can, you can have Claude. You just need like one specific value that you can get from opening Claude in your browser and then your Claude code can talk directly to Slack. So I would say for personal use, of course, this is fine at a company, probably get approval. And then one more that I'll show is Reddit has a really good mcp. So this one, the way it works is it you install it and then if you use Claude normally, it can't actually go to Reddit. Reddit, you know, very protective of their data, they don't want it to be super open access for AI to use in general. So the normal tool that Claude has access to, like it's a web fetch tool, can't get stuff from directly from Reddit. But if you have this mcp, then you can. And so here my question is, what are the top discussions in R Product management? Give me the titles of those posts and current upvotes. And this is something where, you know, if you're in a specific industry and you, there's a Reddit that's really relevant to things that you're working on. This is something you could set up to run every day or you could have it be part of your daily standup. It's a good way to just monitor, you know, another source of information for what are real people saying out there in the, in the real world? Okay, so we have all of them. It's kind of funny. I ran, I ran this earlier that there's definitely some irony here. I wonder if Claude picked it up. The, the top one for, for this week in R Product Management is what's up with PM influencers pushing their needlessly complicated cloud code setup. I will say that I think this is a good cloud code setup, but it's kind of funny that that was the one for the week. Okay, so we have, we've looked at a bunch of different MCPs. We have the workspace, linear, Slack and Reddit. And so now let's put this all together and then have Claude generate a standup that combines those linear issues, the calendar, the meeting notes, and then tell us what we should be working on, what are the meetings we have, and then what are any blockers we need to review. So going to go ahead and give this, and this will be kind of the last thing we look at in terms of just what can you do with all these different MCPs? In this case, it might pull in because we've been doing this all in one thread. It might already have this information, but we'll see if it already has the information and can put it together for us. Okay, so it didn't need to pull those MCPS again because we have that information. So it was just able to say, okay, I already know all of this stuff. I have that data from earlier. So here's your daily standup. So this is something that you just start your day. You can have it tell you what are your meetings, what time are they, what do I need to do to prep? Add all the things to the doc, and then right away you can say, okay, wow, these are big blockers. I need to work on as a PM today. Let me get going on these. So this is just like kind of a good example of how you can have Claude pull in a bunch of information and be your centralized workplace where without having to leave the tool at all. Okay, great. So so far we've seen Google and then we've seen Linear and we saw update all those things. So let's go ahead and move to Slack here. So let's say that we need to send a message to our Slack team, our team on Slack that we've updated and then we want to make sure that everyone knows what are the status of things that we have today. So we're going to use the Slack MCP for this one. It will kind of just use local information, so you don't even setting it up is super easy. And technically you can do it without ID approval. Of course you should get it. But for personal use or anything that you're using Slack for, otherwise this MCP is awesome. And so what we're going to do here is we're going to say send an update about the name change and then overall status to the, to the project. And so I have my own Slack here that we'll use as the demo. And then we can even say we can make sure that it looks good. So make sure to color code status for the team. Okay, so now again, we don't need to tell it to use the Slack tool. It knows that because I've asked it to use Slack and it knows that it can't do that on its own. It finds a Slack mcp, it figures out what is this channel, and then now it's going to go ahead and write this message to the team. So it's pretty cool. Again, you can kind of imagine, you start your day, you say, hey, Claude, help me prep for the day. Okay, hey, here's all the things for the meeting. Do you want me to update those notes? Hey, here's what's going on in linear. Do you want me to update anything? Hey, do you want me to send this message to Slack? And what's cool is that this interface, as it gets more and more connected to everything, instead of the traditional, you know, you're going into all these different apps, you're just doing it all straight from here. And I think that's kind of the future. So it's good to start getting familiar with this stuff now.
- [18:08]
B
Yeah, that's the way to go. Yeah.
- [18:09]
A
Okay, so didn't do the formatting superhero nicely. This is something we could probably have it do better if we gave it like a template or if there was a format we wanted. But it's pretty cool. We were able to say, hey, project Update Moldbot is now open Claw. And then now we have this whole thing in the real world. My suggested workflow would be that you would say draft the message. You could see it here and then you could have it send. Just in general, you can't ever trust the AI too much.
- [18:37]
B
That message is being sent as you or like as a bot, it's been sent from you. Right.
- [18:40]
A
So in this case it's actually being sent as me, which is kind of, kind of cool. You could set up like a Slack bot and it would send it through there. But this is actually coming through like my own app as if it was from me, which is kind of interesting. Okay, so now the team is fully updated.
- [18:55]
B
So let me, let me just quickly recap. So we set up. Okay, so let's quickly recap because a lot of people are going to be using this stuff inside companies. Right? So basically Google Workspace, your enterprise, has a grant you permission to set up all the Google Cloud stuff to use this. Right. And then Linear, I think if your company uses Linear, then you're probably pretty AI native already. And like it's like a one line set setup for the mcp. Yeah. And then Slack. Slack. So this is like a, this is official Slack or this is like a separate Slack mcp.
- [19:23]
A
Yeah, so Slack does have an official mcp, but it's not widely rolled out to everyone. So you can see if your company has it. But it's, it's still only with sort of, I think they're called preferred partners. So it's not widely rolled out yet.
- [19:35]
B
Okay. So there's like an unofficial MCP that you can actually. I mean, I don't, I don't think people should do this, but like you can actually just set up yourself without going through a company approval.
- [19:44]
A
Yeah, we didn't tell you to do that. We didn't. We did not tell you.
- [19:49]
B
Okay, great. Okay. Yeah, because Slack is. Slack is important, man.
- [19:52]
A
Yeah, yeah, Slack is important. I'm, you know, all these companies, anybody that doesn't have it, I'm sure that they are kind of racing to build one with how everything is going these days. Yeah. Okay. And then the last one we'll show this is like a little bit slightly outside of sort of maybe traditional work things, but it's good just to kind of show like. Another example of a good MCP is Reddit. So if you try to use cloud code to look at Reddit, normally it will use its web fetch tool and Reddit blocks the web fetch tool. They don't really want too much AI, I think, getting their data out. And so this MCP is a good one where it can actually do all kinds of things. With Reddit, you can have it look for the top posts in a. In a subreddit. You can ask it, what are the, what's the sentiment of the comments today around this tool? Things like that. So I'll just have a really simple prompt here, but it's a very powerful mvp. So what are the top discussions in our slash, product management this week? And then give me the titles in the post. So this is helpful, you know, if you're in a. If you're at a company like a very specific industry, or you personally are just want to follow certain topics instead of having to go in and click in through every subreddit. You can have Claude look at it for you and kind of report back what are the things that it's finding. Or if you want to do an analysis over, you know, a big amount of different Reddit threads, you can have it do that for you. So, okay, so this, that's just pulling all this stuff in here. Here are the top discussions in R Product management. And then it's kind of calling out something that's a bit funny is that the top post is about PM influencers pushing complicated cloud code setups. Really funny. I would say. I did read the thread. I think, I think that maybe there are, there are some setups that are just needlessly complicated, but here we're trying to keep it simple just of what you need to know. So hopefully this would not go in that category.
- [21:35]
B
Maybe this is from the future, man. With this episode already published.
- [21:39]
A
Yeah. Honestly.
- [21:41]
B
Yeah. Cool.
- [21:42]
A
Okay, so now kind of just to tie everything together. So let's. Let's go ahead and just so we're not cheating at all, we're going to go ahead and clear this and then we're going to do one kind of. You can imagine this would be like your ultimate command for the day. So generate my standard for the day, get the linear issues, my calendar and my meeting notes, and then tell me what am I working on, what are today's meetings, and then what are blockers I might want to resolve. And then we'll remind it to use the right calendar. So now it's going to. This is where you can kind of see a really. When you have all this stuff set up, then in the future, you know, the initial setup's hard, but then once you get it going, cloud code can just run all these tools and bring it in. And it's just a great way to kind of like get all this information in one place without having to leave. So we see it going into our Google workspace, getting our calendars, we see it going to linear, getting all our issues, and now I think it has all the information it needs and it is putting it all together. Okay, so, yeah, here we go. Here are kind of the most important in progress tickets urgent. So we might want to check on this one. Our engineers are evaluating open cloud deployment. We should see what that is. We have these meetings, we already went through the flow to kind of update all the agendas and then we have our blockers that we would need to look into as a pm. So again, all of this, you could systematize as much as you want, but once you give access to that tool, you can get all of it right here in cloud code.
- [23:06]
B
And you can just tell us you're like posting in Slack, right? Just like, do you want to give a shot? Just like post this. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [23:13]
A
Post this in Slack just to kind of out here. Yeah.
- [23:16]
B
Or maybe there's a way to just like set it up so every Monday it just does this.
- [23:20]
A
Yeah. And you could have a team, one that says like, hey everyone, here's current status of all the tickets. Let me know if this is inaccurate. Engineers never really love keeping their tickets too. No, nobody loves ticket management, so it can kind of be a good way to automate that. Okay, so it's asking me which one. So we'll just put it into the same one we had before.
- [23:40]
B
This is like a pretty big game changer, right? Because like instead of using all these different tools, you're just talking to this agent in this terminal. Yeah, it's a game changer, dude.
- [23:49]
A
Yeah. And the more and more stuff that gets connected because it is just such the wave right now. I think it's kind of the death of the Internet in certain. You know, if you want to be really dramatic, why would you need to go to all these websites if you can just get all the information right from here and AI can also interpret it and help you manage it. So last thing here is we kind of see that it gave that big update. I think figuring out a format tables in Slack might be a good thing to do. Actually not a hundred percent sure, but you get the idea.
- [24:18]
B
I mean usually what I do is I just screenshot this whole thing. I'd be like, hey, can you help me format this better?
- [24:24]
A
Oh yeah, true. Yeah.
- [24:25]
B
But okay. Awesome. This is awesome. Yeah, this is like so much better than. Because a lot of people, like a lot of people have complicated cloud call setups with all these MD files. And I see you have some on the left too. But like connecting to all these different things you actually use at work is like way more powerful, you know. Yeah. So but I guess in the last part of this interview, like, or this episode, do you want to kind of walk us through your clockhole setup or like, you know, kind of the folders and stuff?
- [24:51]
A
Yeah, yeah. So I think that in general there's no, you know, definitive. Here's the best way to use cloud code, because cloud code is it's just files. You can have all different kinds of structures. So whatever you need to build for your workflow of course is, is going to be like more helpful. But this is what I have found is a pretty good starting place that allows you to basically keep all the information that you need to refer to easily have that on hand. And then how can you also make it dynamic so that when you're working on something new, you can easily add that to your system without it breaking. So this is what I use and this is like my overall kind of preferred setup. So a couple different things here. One is your context folder. And so this is things that you don't necessarily think are going to be changing a lot over time. And they are just things that like you want Claude to know so that you know when you're working on a prd, then you don't have to say, hey, here's like our current Q1 goals or here is how the product works. You can just say, help me write this prd. Here is all the context and you can even just drag this. You can drag like an entire folder into its, into it and it'll say, here's context on how my company operates. So you're never really starting fresh. You're not talking like a new chatbot. It really has like detailed information and then you can update this, you know, as things change. So having a context folder for anything that you're working on, especially stuff that doesn't get updated often, is just super helpful so that you have a really personalized assistant. Having one for meetings, just kind of like any kind of documents that you want to be able to refer back to, like working docs is helpful. I'll come back to projects. I think this is kind of like the most important element of this whole system. So we'll come back to it later. Templates is just where you can store anything that you want to reuse. So in this video we kind of showed, hey, write me a Slack message or hey, update these tickets. Realistically, you probably have templates or rules that you want AI to follow when it's doing those things. So if you store those here in a Templates folder, then anytime you need to do that, you can say, hey, give me an update in Slack use. You know, use my Slack format template or things like that. So having a templates that you can just update and add to is is really helpful to dos. Just like somewhere that you can track the things that you're working on. Like a backlog of just things to drop all the stuff that you're working on and then having like a current tasks. This is where when you're setting up your like daily system for Claude to see what you're working on just managing. I found that, you know, you can have whatever level of complexity of to do setups that you want. I've just having a list sometimes where you can have Claude know what you're working on is really helpful. Yep. Tools folder. So as you build out your system, you're going to enable kind of like different things to be possible. And so one thing we'll look at in a second is the ability for Claude to generate images using Nano Banana. And so you can, if you just ask it to do that and you say, hey, I want to build this tool, here's my API. It will just kind of drop it somewhere randomly like in your overall system system. But having a Tools folder where you can keep all that stuff sort of all together is really helpful just for you to remember what are the tools I have available. And then if you want to change something, you know exactly where to go. And then also with cloud code, when you say hey, I want to make a skill or I want to make a command that does uses this tool, then you have those tools all here. And it's helpful for just keeping track of like what is all the documentation. And especially if you want to remember how it was built or you want to, or you want Claude to know how it was built, you can keep that with the tool. So you can just kind of keep that information contextual within it.
- [28:22]
B
It's more organized.
- [28:23]
A
Yeah, yeah, more organized. Another thing that's helpful is like scripts especially. The amazing thing about Claude code of course is it can run code. So when you keep that code with the tool then it's just much easier for it to find it and just to kind of understand like what you're, what you're building. Another good one is workflows. So for example, we combined a bunch of different things here today with linear and checking linear, checking our own notes, checking our Google workspace, mcp. Anything that you are building out as a recurring workflow that is really helpful just to have. It's almost like a super template where templates are kind of with one off formatting workflows are where you can put. If you have something that requires like multiple steps then you, for each workflow you can have its own file with. Maybe for example, one thing that I use it for is when I'm writing my newsletter and I, or let's say I'm writing a piece of content and I'm having AI help me. But there's like maybe steps like first help me do research. So here is my like research process. Okay, next step, help me, you know, come up with a couple ideas. So for each part of that workflow you can have like a new a file so that you're can edit any individual piece within that workflow really easily. It's pretty simple. And I'll come back to projects in just a second, but just have a place where you can store context that you want to come back to. And then for every sort of piece within your system, just have it have its own folder so that when you're working with Claude you can point it back to that.
- [29:55]
B
Is there a reason why use this workflow cloud NV stuff instead of just using skills or you know, some sort of slash, slash command?
- [30:02]
A
Yeah, so I would say most of the time when I, I will usually Start like a workflow in just files and then when I'm ready, when I feel like it's, it's good, then I'll turn it into a command or a skill. And usually those are like pointing at these things. That's a good point. I didn't actually talk about the overall Claude file. And this is where your, your skills, like all of the Claude specific things live. For me personally, I often will start it as like a workflow that maybe isn't something I know I'm going to reuse a lot or I'm still refining. And then once it's pretty good, then I'll actually turn it into a real skill. And oftentimes these will kind of point to like use this tool. So for example, the generate image skill is just a simple MD that will know that the tools that it needs are in this tools folder.
- [30:44]
B
Dude, what's the consult the council skill? Is that like different point of views?
- [30:48]
A
Yeah, yeah, let's look at that one. We'll look at that one in just a sec. Okay. And then the last thing, and this is, this is what I have found most useful is having just a overall projects folder so that anytime you start a new project, you can just create a new folder. So we're going to create a new project here. So new project. And what's nice about this is like you, you might, you don't know if it's a workflow. You don't really know what exactly maybe you're working on yet. So you can say, okay, I want to put the PRD here. I want to put all the user research related to this. I want to put like any context around, like research that I've done. So let's say you're, you just want to know like, how does Open Claw work? You can put that into here, where you might not know otherwise where to put it. Because it's maybe not like context that you need all the time. It maybe isn't a template, it's not really part of a workflow. And this is just a good way where you can keep all of that stuff in that project. So anytime you're working on it, you can say, hey, Claude, we're working on this project and I can know all the information there. And then as you create, you know, new documents, or you have like a long working session with Claude, you can have it store it within that project. And that's just a good way to keep all that information like really contextual. And then of course, when the project is done, you can kind of archive it. But this for me is like, anytime I'm starting almost anything new, I'll make a new folder for it in projects. And then all of the things I'm working on or anything I want to dump just related to that just goes there and it keeps it nice and contained.
- [32:09]
B
Yeah, I. It's basically like, I still use like, web projects a lot on cloud. So you basically replicate it here, right? In clock code.
- [32:16]
A
Yeah, exactly. And then the last one I'll say that is really helpful is just having this, like, temp. So what I like having just like a temp. I just make it this, like, underscore temp. This is just. Sometimes you have something that you want Claude to be able to look at. Like you have some, you know, some piece of paperwork that you need to fill out with Claude, and that doesn't really belong anywhere here. And, you know, you're not going to need it for very long. You just need. You like, you just literally, you just need Claude to look at it. You can just drop it in this temp folder. And the idea with the temp folder is that you. Anything that goes in here, like, at any point you could basically just delete and then you're never going to need it again. This can also be helpful for something like, hey, I need to draft an email to my manager and then maybe about this topic. Then you draft it here just in working with Claude and then copy and pasting out of the terminal, you get all these, like, extra spaces. You can say, hey, can you make this as a new file in temp just so you can copy and paste it. So I really like this as just like a very dynamic working folder just to throw stuff into, have cloud look at it, you know, have push stuff into there that you're going to copy and paste out anyway and that you don't need permanently just to have it here for easy access.
- [33:25]
B
All right, dude, one last thing. Let's go back to that council that the. Yeah, yeah, Lord of the Rings council.
- [33:32]
A
So, yeah, let's. We can quickly. We can talk about some of my favorite skills here. Okay, so these are all just like different skills that I've made. So this one is one I just made this last week and I really like a lot. So the way this one works is a lot of times you'll have an implementation plan for something you're going to build and Claude comes up with the spec for it. And what I found myself doing is a lot of times I would take that spec and then I would copy and Paste it into chatgpt, into grok, into Gemini, because I just pay way too much money on all these AI subscriptions. And then I was copy and pasting what they were saying back into Cloud and being like, hey, what do you think of this feedback? And usually there would be things that every AI just has a slightly different way of thinking about these problems. And so sometimes one will miss something that the others won't. So what this does is it just literally hits the APIs for ChatGPT, for Gemini, for Grok, and they're all at the sort of maximum level of thinking. So this can take five minutes to run. And then I say, hey, you need to get approval from the Council before we move forward with this. And then a lot of times there's feedback, and then it will address and be like, okay. ChatGPT says this is not okay because of this. So I made this update. It's like, okay, consult the Council again. So this one I found results in much better specs because I'm getting a review from all of the best models.
- [34:46]
B
Oh, wow. Okay. So use this for planning. Do you use this for, like, bug fixings too, or. Mostly for planning?
- [34:50]
A
I usually use it, like, early on. Yeah. Bug fixes is a good one as well. So if, like, early on with a specific, make sure it's good. And then if Claude can't figure something out, it's like, okay, I can just literally type consult the Council, and then. And then. And just hit enter. And Claude knows in this skill, like, kind of what that means, so it'll summarize the whole problem, and then it will give it to them. And. And that actually helps a lot. There's usually just some little things that Claude just, for some reason, misses that with a fresh, you know, fresh pair of eyes, you can catch that.
- [35:21]
B
That's. That's a brilliant idea. I'm copy. Well, I. I don't know if I want to pay for all these different models, but if I.
- [35:26]
A
Well, the nice thing about this is that they're not like you Don. Actually, these are just API keys.
- [35:30]
B
Oh.
- [35:31]
A
You don't actually need to pay for the service itself. So the cost per consult the Council is like a few cents, so it's not a lot.
- [35:38]
B
Okay, that's not bad. Okay. Sweet. All right, man. Well, do you want to show one more skill?
- [35:44]
A
Just show one more. Another good one here. So this is kind of an example of how you can use and build out your system where you have tools, and then you can have Claude use those tools. So here we have the Gemini API key for Nano Banana is in this project and we have a skill so that it can generate an image. So for example, we'll run generate image and then we need to give it an input. So let's go ahead and say let's generate an image. For our Multbot integration that we've been looking at, we have a prd. So I'm going to go into our projects Multbot, we'll give it this context and then say you can do any kind of thing, you know, Nanobaness, super powerful. So here we're going to say make an architecture diagram to include in this prd. And so what this will do is we already have the script and we already have the API in this project. So this skill just lets it use those tools and do different kinds of stuff like this. And this is just another way to make this overall workflow and your overall system just much more powerful by giving Claude these tools so that it can do stuff that, you know, Gemini models are the absolute best at making images. But you can have Claude make those images for you if you give it those tools in your own workspace.
- [36:59]
B
Yeah, this is a way better context than if I go to gemini.com, i pace a lot of shitting. It takes forever.
- [37:04]
A
So yeah, and what's cool is that like Claude is pretty good at writing the prompts so it will like it can do that part for you. I feel like a lot of times when I prompt I'm like, okay, make me an architecture diagram of this. But let's say you had specific style you wanted it to be in, then you could have that stored here and you can say like, I want it to be in my own company's design system or things like that. Okay, so last thing here, tools and then it's telling us that it's in the outputs folder. Okay, not too bad. Very AI looking, but not too bad. So now we have like this decent architecture diagram that we could put into our PRD straight from all in cloud code.
- [37:41]
B
That's awesome, dude. That's awesome. Let me ask you some wrap up questions. So you basically, you basically are only using cloud code, right? You're not everybody using the cloud on the web or you know that stuff. You have your phone.
- [37:50]
A
I'm a cloud code maximalist. I just try to live in cloud code all day if I can.
- [37:54]
B
Okay, well let me ask this. So at least for me, like a lot of times I'm like on the go or like in meetings and shit like that. And Like I have to use my phone. So like have you figured out where to talk to sing on your phone?
- [38:05]
A
Yeah, there's. So the Claude app does have the code option and so sometimes if I just have like an idea, I'm like, oh, like I have this project with would this be possible or could we integrate this API? You can then select like your, you have to have it in GitHub and then you can have it talk to it that way. That is the way I use cloud code on the go. I will say I think cloud code is mainly more of like a kind of sit down at your desk type of piece of work. But there are ways that you can have your terminal running like on your computer and then you can open that up. But yeah, I don't, I don't have a good workflow for that personally.
- [38:37]
B
Yeah, I think there's this app called Happy or something Happy engineering that maybe does some of this.
- [38:42]
A
I think the Open Claw claudebot stuff might be a good solution to that where if you have all your files on your computer there, then you can ask it and it will go on your computer and find that information for you.
- [38:55]
B
And I only have three questions, so second question is all this Cloud ND shit, all this folder stuff, how much of the stuff did you write manually versus just try to get Cloud to write it for you?
- [39:06]
A
For example, what do you mean? The overall structure or.
- [39:09]
B
Oh no, like, like for example, some of your skill files and like some of your context, I guess. Context. You probably write Mali for the most part.
- [39:16]
A
Oh yeah, it depends. I would say a lot of it. Usually my, my workflow is I usually will have Claude take a first pass with like a really light outline in the kind of chat area. And then once I've seen it and I say, okay, we don't need like this, this and this, but we do want this. Then I just have it write it. I have found that if I just say, hey, make a cloud file for this, you know, this project or whatever, then it will include a ton of stuff that I don't actually need. And it's very easy, I think when you generate something with AI, especially when you're not actually like seeing it in front of your eyes to never go back and look at it. So that's my. I would say I don't write a lot of it, but I definitely review it before it goes into the system.
- [39:57]
B
Yeah. Cause if you just let it go, witty nanny, it's going to make a mess. I think it's gonna be.
- [40:02]
A
Yeah.
- [40:02]
B
Every time okay, got it. And let me ask this. So now that we have OpenCloud, hopefully it's still called OpenCloud by the time this publishes. Are you planning to migrate any of this to openclaw or still stick with cloud code?
- [40:14]
A
So I think that this overall, like setup works pretty well with openclaw as well. From my one day of testing it out where I think you want to build the tools and like have it be very clear how to use them. So then what's cool is, you know, you can ask your, your Open Claw bot, say, hey, can you generate an image? And if it knows kind of like what the repo is that's on your machine, then it has access to those tools. So I think something like this is still helpful so that like you can keep its work organized. The way I feel is like, this is kind of like a me being really in the loop setup where I can like directly tell it exactly what. But I think that if I'm asking, even if I'm remote and I'm asking it to do stuff, I still have to have like some idea of what the setup looks like that it has access to.
- [41:02]
B
Yeah, I think Open Claw is for like on the go mostly. At least the way I use it is on the go and just like update the stock or update this thing. It's not like, if you're like super attention oriented, like detail oriented, then Cloud Claw I think is still better, like for doing real work, you know, so.
- [41:17]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [41:18]
B
All right, dude. Well, where can people find your awesome course and yourself?
- [41:22]
A
Yeah, so I'm on, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Twitter, I'm pretty easy to find. I have. My main course is cloud code for product managers. I've done a good job with SEO, so if you Google that, you should find it. What it is is it's a cloud code course that you do in cloud code. So literally every single thing, all the stuff that we showed today, you can do that in cloud code and it will actually guide you around and you can see what's happening. So that's kind of the main place. And then my main newsletter where I publish is called the Full Stack pm and that's at just fullstack pm. Com. So those are all the best ways to reach me and find my work.
- [41:57]
B
And you gotta mention that like, unlike, you know, like when Carl's talking about his course, he's not charging like a thousand dollars for it. It's, it's, it's free, so.
- [42:04]
A
Oh yeah, yeah, completely free. That's been fun to build, and honestly, my. The amount of just goodwill that has been generated for making it free has been very worth it. And so I just. I. I genuinely find cloud code to be the biggest improvement to my workflow that I've ever had. And so sharing that with other people, because that initial start is hard, but once you start getting the hang of it, it's so obviously awesome that people adopt it. So, yeah, 100% free. And you can download the files and do it in, like, two hours.
- [42:33]
B
Awesome, dude. Well, thanks so much for your time, man.
- [42:35]
A
Yeah, thank you. This was super fun. Thanks for having me on.