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- [00:00]
A
Okay, guys, I'm sitting here after watching James Dickerson, the boring marketer, build out an entire inbound marketing campaign in cloud code. With landing page with lead magnet, with incredible positioning, and he took him 30 minutes. My mind is pretty blown. He shared tips I really didn't expect him to give away. Incredible skills that I myself took note of and I'm going to steal. This episode is gold for marketers who do not want to get left behind, who want to figure out how they can start to use cloud code to supercharge their own work. And better yet, if you want everything James talked about on this show, you can get it right here in the show notes. Just click on the link. That's all yours to get. All of that and more on this episode of Marketing against the Grain.
- [00:51]
B
Here's a quick word from HubSpot. HubSpot helped Tumblr solve a big problem. They needed to move fast to produce trending content. But their marketing team was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign. Now they use HubSpot's customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds. The impact, three times more engagement, double the content creation. Want to move faster like Tumblr? Visit HubSpot.
- [01:30]
A
All right, welcome to the show. James, you are the mind behind the born marketer, kind of the person that is pushing vibe marketing, showcasing how you can actually do a ton of marketing through cloud code skills. And one of our most requested shows that we have have kind of put off because we wanted you to come on, start doing it is Claude code. This is what everyone wants to know. How do I use cloud code? How do I use it for my work? How do I use it for marketing? What's all this magic that I hear online about people using cloud code to do amazing things? And so welcome to the show because you're going to give us a lesson on how to do that.
- [02:04]
C
Yeah, thanks for having me. You know, my goal here is to show people how cloud code can kind of become like their default place to get work done. And that ranges from marketing and data analytics, working with external APIs and tools, and then being able to deploy things onto a website.
- [02:23]
A
So Kip and I are Claude code converts. We are pretty obsessed with cloud codes. We are also pretty excited by the show. But for the person who is kind of starting to get themselves familiar with cloud code, their question is probably, can I not just do everything you're about to show me in Claude and using skills in cloud? So why don't you give Us a little introduction on what is the value of cloud code and when would I use that as a marketeer to do job like, what's the functionality that unlocks a ton of things for me.
- [02:55]
C
So Claude code is a coding agent that lives on your local machine. So it has access to everything on your computer. It can read, write, search files, perform a bunch of different functions very, very quickly, and it's fine tuned with different capabilities to write code effectively, to search code bases and to understand how to interact with like third party tools. So Claude desktop has been evolving a little bit. I don't know if you've seen Claude cowork come about.
- [03:27]
A
Yep.
- [03:28]
C
But that's starting to get some of the same capabilities as Claude code in a friendlier way, but it's not quite as advanced yet. Cloud code is really for, you know, the power users, if you will. So if you want to build a website, you want to build an application, you want to do marketing work and deploy it, cloud code is the way to go. It can access tools in the command line. So, you know, if you want to access your GitHub repos or something like that, you know, GitHub and these other third party tools have tools that are optimized to work in the terminal environment where Claude code lives. So cloud code can interact with tools that in a very efficient way and access the data, push, read and write to those as well.
- [04:11]
A
One of the other things, I think you mentioned this, but a good example would be if you were building a marketing research skill in Claude, it would be doing all of that research through Claude. Whereas if you build that in cloud code, you can give it access to multiple APIs in the environment. So I could say, hey, like you can use X, you can use Perplexity, you can use ChatGPT, you can use all of these different APIs to gather research from a bunch of different places for that skill. And so it just gives you way, way more functionalities capabilities.
- [04:39]
C
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And then you can build specific skills on how to utilize APIs and other tools to the most effective way. So like Fire Crawl is one of my favorite tools to have integrated into cloud code. Yeah, Perplexity is also great. Those are really the two tools that I recommend people start with is Perplexity and firecrawl. If you want to understand what your competitors are doing, crawl their websites, find gaps in the market, you know, those are the two tools that really start to unlock a lot of those workflows for you.
- [05:12]
B
We just dropped a free Claude code guide where James is giving you his four workflows and 12 prompts. This guide shows you how to create your own landing pages, build interactive lead magnets, email sequences, and even shows you how to find your competitors gaps, all without writing a single line of code. Get it right now. Click the link in the description now. Let's get back to the show. Now, James, I think a lot of people are really watching this and be like, oh, that's fine, James, you're an expert developer. This is easy for you to say. I've never been in a terminal before. I've never done all of this. Is that true? Did you come from a development background? Like, how the heck did you get started doing all this?
- [05:56]
C
Yeah, I mean, I'm a startup guy and a marketing guy and you know, I've been working in apps and websites and things like that and running marketing campaigns since around 2011, 2012. I didn't touch a terminal until about a year ago. And I first got started kind of playing with, you know, the typical kind of vibe coding tools like Replit and Lovable and things like that. But it left a lot to be desired for me. I wanted more control, I wanted to do more. And as these agents started to improve, I started testing cloud code. I saw a bunch of stuff happening on X as well, and I was like, I really have to learn this and figure out how to harness it. So at first it felt super uncomfortable. Like again, I had never touched a terminal, I had never opened cursor, anything like that before. But you know, to me it's just about like finding a small initial project and beginning to get your hands dirty. And once you start to work with it, you start to understand sort of what you've been missing. And it's a real eye opener once you just tinker around.
- [06:57]
A
What was the first use case you built in cloud code that kind of unlocked. I feel like there's this magic moment for a lot of how we use AI, where you're using your tool like that. For me, in cloud code, I built this skill that was able to like go through and parse imagery of a thing and then do research. And then I did a bunch of research and then create a script strategy. So playwright is a skill that allows you to actually take screen grabs. And I was like, holy smokes, this feels like living in the future. And I got like super addicted to being able to build these kind of incredible skills to do this work. What was the first one that you built when you felt like you were kind of working in a different Time.
- [07:36]
C
The first thing that I did was build a landing page. Being able to one shot a beautiful landing page to me was like my first eye opener. You know, I've run marketing agencies and things like that in the past and I would always have to work with developers or go find, you know, a front end designer or something like that, you know, to be able to do this type of stuff for me. So when I realized I could build and deploy like a high quality landing page, I was like, wow, this is amazing. I don't have to rely on someone else. I can just do this now whenever I want to. So that was step one and that's typically kind of the first test project that I tell people to start with, go and build a landing page. Because to build a landing page there are other steps and research steps you can do, which we'll get into. But you also have to begin to think like a developer and start to set up a developer environment. So maybe you set up GitHub, right, and you have version control and you code up this landing page and you learn how to push it to GitHub. Now it's there. So next I want to figure out, hey, how do I deploy something? Then I might go and link GitHub to Vercel or Netlify or something like that. And then I hit go in the terminal and I have a live website in a matter of minutes. That was really the first step and I started to learn how to kind of connect and orchestrate these systems so that, you know, I could move from just kind of working on my local machine to putting something out into the wild. And now like all my websites, like I've built myself, like you know, the vibe marketer.com and things like that. I've done all of that with Claude code. We've got, you know, lead magnets. I have a SaaS on there now. I sell skills. I've got links and landing pages for my community, a programmatic SEO strategy. All of that is done right from the terminal.
- [09:18]
A
So why don't we get into it? Why don't we show some of your skills in action and how you kind
- [09:24]
B
of use the tool.
- [09:26]
C
Let's do it. So to get started, let me go ahead and open up the terminal. And this is kind of the scary part.
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B
Don't be scared.
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C
Don't be scared though.
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B
Don't be scared, everybody.
- [09:36]
C
It works in natural language, just like your normal LLM. So I use a terminal called Ghosty and it's very clean, it's very fast. I've Used cursor and things in the past. But I let my agent write all the code and I don't even read the code, you know, so I don't need to see the file systems and the file structures and things like that. That's kind of noise to me. I just want to be able to chat with Claude code. So to get caught up here, I told Claude code, hey, let's come up with just like a new idea for a SaaS. And we're building kind of like a LinkedIn command center. It came up with that idea. I said, okay, cool. Build the landing page. It built the landing page. And what I just showed you is what it came up with. The first skill to make a beautiful landing page to consider is Anthropic's front end design skill. So I'm sure if you've seen Vibe coded projects, Vibe coded websites, things like that, you can notice the AI patterns, the gradients, the purple colors, the same fonts everywhere. The front end design skill explicitly tells Claud Code to avoid those sort of AI slot patterns and create something unique. So that's how we coded up this landing page. And it took just a couple minutes for cloud code to do it and deploy it on my local machine.
- [10:52]
B
And just for everybody watching, I want to actually just double down on skills. We've talked about some on the show, but you know, lots of new people watching today probably where skills are literally a file, a skill MD file, a markdown file. And James, I think of skills as like a list of very expert level instructions to apply in a specific situation in which instead of having to do a bunch of one off directions or research or anything else, it's almost like I have a friend who's a designer, they gave me their best advice, I put it in a document and then AI goes and acts as if they had a lot of the same skills that designer has. Is that like a good way to think about it or you have another
- [11:33]
C
definition that's the right way to think about it. And we'll also show some other ways to think about it as we get into using these skills. But yes, I typically explain it as, hey, this is an instruction manual for how you want an AI to handle a task. And when I build skills, I go and I understand how the best in the world complete a certain task. And I ask Claude code to build a skill around it. And then I go and look at references because Claude code and AI has to know what good actually looks like. And then I implement guardrails, do's and Don'ts you know things like that? And this is a persistent instruction manual that lives in your project that cloud code knows when to utilize based on your prompt. So skills are a way to level up your workflow almost instantly. There's a lot of skills out there that you can use. You can also create your own through some of these workflows that we'll look at here.
- [12:29]
A
And could you just maybe take us through how did you get this skill? And then how do you tell that skill to create this page? Like if you could actually show us the prompt?
- [12:38]
B
Because yeah, people, James are probably already struggling. Like how does Claude in this like weird terminal thing he's talking about? Right? So like give us a little of the foundational year ahead of everybody. We want to go back to the beginning a little bit.
- [12:51]
C
I got you. So basically everyone has a terminal on their computer. I just installed one called Ghosty. It's just a nice looking terminal and just open that terminal. And typically when you interact with a terminal outside of cloud code, you need to know all these like commands that a developer, developer might know. So don't worry about that. Just go to Google or go to your favorite AI and say how to install Claude code. And you're going to get a command that you can go and copy and paste right into that terminal window. So I'm just searching for Claude code install command and I'm going to grab that and we'll plug it in. It's going to go and it's going to install packages, it's going to access Claude code and then it's going to ask me to authenticate or to log in. So Claude code is successfully installed. That's all we had to do. We went and searched for the install command. We copy and pasted that into a terminal and cloud code is installed. So all you have to do now is type Claude and hit enter. Okay, so I trust that claude code can access my folders on my computer. I'm going to hit okay. And Claude code is up and active. Now. That's as easy as it is to install cloud code. So I'm logged in already. But if you're not logged in, you will be prompted to authenticate with your Claude or anthropic account. I subscribe to a Claude max account. It's like $200 a month. Yes, it is a little pricey, but I've never run out of tokens and I'm on this all day long. You can also go to Anthropic Console and get an API key to Authenticate with. The easiest way is if you subscribe to Claude, just select Claude account with subscription, you hit Enter, it'll open up a window and you just sign in and that's it.
- [14:41]
B
Not hard, not intimidating, not hard, pretty simple. Okay, so now once you're signed in, now you can think about these things called skills. And so Kieran, I think had a great question like how do you actually use them? How do you get them in here? How the heck does it work?
- [14:57]
C
There are a number of skills out there available like on the web. So the front end design skill is an example Anthropic created that you can go and search for skill directories for Claude code and you can find a bunch. There's some free marketing skills out there too, if marketing is your focus. A couple that I use, I use Claude code a lot for development. I have one called Superpowers that I found that's really amazing and that helps me, you know, spec out different tasks. As a non coder, cloud code kind of guides me through the workflow that it's doing and things of that nature. The skills that I really focus on are the ones that I created that I have on the viem marketer.com and I made these skills so that it removes all the guesswork from having to know how to interact with skills. So if you want to install skills, typically it's like a GitHub command or in the case of my skills, it's a zip folder. You download a zip folder, you drag it into this little chat box and Claude code will unzip it, it will install it into your workspace and then you have things like this available. So I'll just give you a demo.
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B
Yeah, please.
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A
This is called writing into the command line.
- [16:05]
C
So I mentioned that skills can go beyond an instruction manual and what I mean by that is we'll see an Orchestrator skill fire up here. So this Orchestrator skill will guide us through various skills to use to execute marketing campaigns. I don't even have to know like what questions to ask. I don't have to know what good looks like because that's encoded in the rest of the skills too. Now the biggest blocker for getting the most out of AI that I find is people don't know what questions to ask and they don't know what good looks like. I'm trying to remove that friction when you install these skills into cloud code. So I fired up the Orchestrator skill. I just said, hey, let's use the Orchestrator skill to get going when you install These skills, they'll also show up as slash commands. So if you type a slash command and you hit Orchestrator, you hit Enter, it'll fire it up. You don't have to ask it anything now. What it's done already is it's understanding what we have in the folder that cloud code is active in. So when you fire up cloud code, you tell it, hey, I want to start a new project. Let's call it LinkedIn Growth SaaS or whatever it's called. It'll create a folder on your computer. Okay. That cloud code is kind of logged into or has access to. And then when you say build a landing page, it'll build an HTML document or file and we can open that like on our machine. And that's kind of what cloud code is working within. So it looked at that HTML file that I showed you earlier that we had open, called Forge, and it's like, oh, this looks like a LinkedIn growth SaaS. We have a landing page built. What are we actually trying to produce for this demo? And it's saying, what's the primary goal for this session? And there's a few options that the Orchestrator skill is giving me. It's saying, do we want to build a marketing system, work on positioning, find a unique angle, write conversion copy for the landing page, do we want to generate leads content like a lead magnet concept, landing page copy and email sequence? We want to work on a content strategy, a launch workflow, or just show off the skills live. So I'll let you guys decide, like, what direction do you want to go down?
- [18:10]
A
And just on the Orchestrator skill, so it's kind of like an onboarding to AI skill. Like it needs whatever's in the folder can onboard you onto things that you can do for that folder. It's going to call other skills, then that can do all these different things or you have to like install them separately.
- [18:26]
C
So all the skills that I use are like one package. It installs it into the workspace, and then the Orchestrator skill is the one you fire up first. The Orchestrator Trader skill knows what skills are available for all kinds of different use cases. So it routes you to the skill to get the job done based on your goals.
- [18:44]
B
All right, I know what Kieran's doing tonight.
- [18:46]
C
Yeah, yeah.
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A
More skills.
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B
We want to do a generate leads content number two.
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C
Okay, so I'm just going to literally hit two and push enter also.
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B
Not hard, not hard, not hard. Typing two.
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A
I mean, hitting entertainment.
- [19:00]
B
It's a possible thing for everybody to do.
- [19:02]
A
Okay, so I think the easiest way for folks to do this is going to be downloading the zip file and just drag and drop and just. On GitHub, it's a repository where you can store code, you can host things there. It gives you live links, you can test it out. And then Once you've installed GitHub with cloud code, you can basically pull those things into your workspace, your local workspace. I realized this morning I was talking to someone about cloud code and there's people who are using it are just not familiar what GitHub even is.
- [19:26]
C
Yeah, yeah. So just search like Claude code skill, GitHub or something like that. You'll find something. You could search marketing skills on GitHub, whatever it is you want and just ask Claude code. Hey, I found this on GitHub. Give it the link, say, hey, install this. It'll do it. It knows how to work.
- [19:45]
B
With GitHub, Claude code is the ultimate. You can just do things if you just, if you just like, I don't know, but I want to have a skill, I want to do this thing. How do I do it? You keep asking. It will keep pointing you in new and different directions until you get there.
- [20:00]
C
Yeah. And you know, a very simple helpful tip too is framing up the conversation with Claude code. You know, hey, I'm a beginner here. Guide me through like, I know nothing technical. I don't Even know what GitHub is. Tell me what to do. Tell me the most effective way to work with you. And you know every project when you work with Claude code has a Claude MD file.
- [20:21]
A
Yeah, exactly.
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C
Add that to the cloud MD file. So you know how to talk to me and guide me through these steps as a non technical person. And cloud code will work with you based on that MD file so that you know, there's not as much guesswork.
- [20:35]
A
Yeah. So the cloud MD file is like, you can basically give it a personality and a way of working with you. And you can do that at a global level and say, hey, I want you to work with me across all these projects. Or you can do it at a project level. And that has a huge unlock in how you actually personalize all this to the way you work.
- [20:51]
C
Yeah, exactly. And another Note on the CloudMD file is it's kind of like the soul of the project.
- [20:58]
A
Yeah.
- [20:59]
C
So anytime you get something done, say, hey, make sure the CloudMD file's updated so that when you fire this up again, there's memory of where you left off, what you're working on, what your Priorities are. I often say things like, hey, what'd you learn from our session today? How did we work together? What worked, what didn't, how can we improve next time save that to the cloud MD file. So really what you're doing there, you're almost creating a self improving system where your employee, which is cloud code, is learning how to work with you more effectively every time you fire it up.
- [21:30]
A
Yeah. You know what's also amazing about the cloud MD file is it makes intelligence shareable. So I was doing this internal use case with cloud code. Cloud code internally is connected to all of our systems like Snowflake, HubSpot, everything. And so I went into plan mode, work with it to have these bunch of hypotheses and then I was going to start to do some analysis and pull stuff from Looker and Snowflake and these different places. There's a person in HubSpot rich who's much better, way better and more advanced than me at how to do cloud code for analysis. So he just like give me his cloud MD file and I just pull them through git and then I have all of his like intelligence tailoring how that will work for me. And so it's like kind of interesting because it makes intelligence shareable. It's like pretty amazing how quickly you can just share that with others.
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C
Absolutely. You know the great thing about skills like you're mentioning is they're very portable. All it is is a MD file.
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B
Yeah.
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C
So I can take that MD file, I can use it in my OpenClaw. If you're using OpenClaw, I can use it in, you know, codex, which is OpenAI's coding agent. I can take that MD file and I can throw it into Claude desktop, you know, so they're, they're very portable and they're just simple documents. It's nothing, nothing crazy.
- [22:42]
B
We'll be right back, but I want to tell you about another podcast I love. The DTC Pod, hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas, is brought to you by HubSpot Media. DTC Pod is a podcast about all things direct to consumer. Ramon and Blaine cover everything from starting, growing and optimizing e commerce stores and direct to consumer brands. They talk with founders, marketers, platforms, creators and marketing and growth agencies to cover topics like brand building, social media, influencer marketing, website conversion, paid media, Facebook ads, and much, much more. If you're interested in the stories behind your favorite consumer brands, this podcast is for you. They did an amazing show called Meta ad. How top DTC brands spend 300k monthly, profitably. You can listen to the DTC podcast wherever you get your podcast. And James, we should call out right now that I think you're giving everybody a bunch of skills and everything. If you're watching the show, you can tell everybody about it real quick, but click the link in the show notes below on YouTube and you're going to give away a bunch of cool stuff.
- [23:45]
C
Yeah, I've got a full, like, playbook that, you know, kind of guides you through, like, what is cloud code for marketing? What are use cases? How do I think about skills? And I've also got a free skill in there, one of my favorites. It's like a copywriting skill that basically encodes like a hundred years of direct response copywriting and elevates it for, like, today's Internet. It's got persuasion and psychological principles built into it, and it's been a big unlock for me personally.
- [24:13]
A
Why don't we do that one? Because I am a lover of old worldly copywriters from the 1930s.
- [24:20]
B
Love Herschel Gordon Lewis, man.
- [24:22]
A
Yeah.
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C
Oh, it's so good.
- [24:23]
B
He's. He's my old school copywriter of favorite.
- [24:26]
A
I always talk about the guy who wrote the original Eminem strap line. They melt in your math, not in your hands. That was like, from 1951. And just a testament to great copy that it's still the strap line in 2026. Like, it's 75 years old. Yeah. True copywriters is a timeless skill. But let's see, I can replicate it.
- [24:44]
C
Yeah. So when I built the direct response copy skill, and I'll kind of give you an idea of what's in there, I went and researched all of the principles behind, you know, breakthrough advertising and Hopkins and Schwartz and all those folk.
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A
The very first thing I did with AI way back when it first came out, like the very first version of hey Gen, I took all the old PDFs from all the old copywriters and built a course with me as hey Jing. Given the course, it was all AI generated give 20,000 subscribers just as a test. And it was funny, like, guy we know, Brian Balfour, and this is like old H, right? And slacked me. And he was like, dude, you seem so depressed in this course. And I was like, it's not me. I'm kind of offended that you think I could have been me.
- [25:31]
B
So we got some skill stuff here.
- [25:32]
C
Yeah, we got some skill stuff here. So, you know, I did ping that orchestrator skill and it gave us a couple sequences. We picked number two. If you remember focusing on like lead generation and it gave us a plan. So first we're going to go and find a differentiated angle and research competitors. We're going to take that data and then we're going to create a compelling lead magnet or opt in offer around that winning angle. And then we're going to rewrite the landing page copy with a direct response copy skill. And then we're going to build a welcome sequence based on the lead magnet when people give us their email address. So we can just fire that up and it's going to run through all of that for us. I also opened up what exactly is in that direct response copy skill. This is a very high level summary. But you know, it's got capabilities for landing pages, sales pages, emails, ad copy, social posts, et cetera, each with format, specific constraints. It's got headline formulas that generates multiple variations, all kinds of different techniques that help produce great copy. So let's go ahead and kick off the system and we'll see what it comes up with and we can kind of vibe around on it.
- [26:40]
A
Another couple of tips that I think are really good that people should do is, you know, one of the things I've started love doing and I did it for one of yours and Greg's episodes because I was like deep into how other people use cloud code for a while and I would put on one of your YouTube episodes and then I would give the transcript to Claude and anytime you would say something that I was like, oh, I would love to go deeper in that. I was like, hey, tell me what James said about this and like give me three ways that I could do this or and so being a companion to how you watch content, pretty amazing actually. And so that's one way I use it and the other thing I do is, dude, if you want to learn cloud code, you're doing a lot of this and I can't listen to it all, but I can go get your transcripts and create a folder just of everything you've created and then ask it to create like the James course and cloud code. I don't like. People know that you can just rapidly learn this stuff. For me, I think it's beneficial to see in how someone works as well like in their terminal. But a couple of tips if you really want to try to accelerate your learning.
- [27:38]
C
Yeah, great tip. Yeah, I agree. So I found this interesting here and I think this is worth sharing. So I ran the positioning angle skill and the first thing that it looked for was a brand profile. So we want to make sure we have information about our brand. And it said, hey, there's not one created yet. I'm going to go and look at competitors. So it fired up the Fire crawl MCP automatically. That's coded within the skill. So hey, when you need to go research competitors and build out a brand profile, go and find who else is in this market. So it's saying let's go find LinkedIn, personal brand growth, SaaS tool, competitors and all this other stuff. So it's going around the web, it's scraping information about these, it's looking at these websites and it's still going. But yeah, it's going and finding all the information out there in our market that's relevant to what we're trying to create here.
- [28:33]
A
Maybe we'll touch on one thing while it's doing this here that might be useful as well is I think one of the blockers and you mentioned it actually right at the start, which is the good thing about this skill is it gives you ways to start. It's kind of like an app, right? It gives you like an onboarding screen. One of the struggles is AI for the most part is automation. Right. It's like automation you only would have imagined when you were a kid that was possible. But it's somewhat automation. And to do automation you have to have a systems mindset. You actually have to be able to think through. What will I even start with? You're not from a engineering background, you said, so maybe you've always had this, maybe you've developed it. What are some tips for people to kind of develop that mindset?
- [29:09]
C
I think that's a great question. So when I started vibe coding and stuff, I also got pretty deep into the node based workflows, right? Yeah, like innate in workflows and things like that. And that began to teach me how to think in sort of these like linear workflow based systems. So that was kind of stage one. But then I realized early on and I kind of ruffled some feathers. Like on X I was like N8N and node based workflows are going to totally die because agents with the access to the right skills and tools is the future. And all the N8N people were like, no, that's never going to happen. But really what you have to think about is less about systems engineering and more about what are the things that I'm giving a really smart agent access to.
- [30:01]
B
Yes.
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C
And when I provide it with the right prompt, will that agent be able to go be the systems thinker for me, what I do is I go through manually and do it. Just go back and forth and prompt and reprompt, give it different APIs, give it different tools until I get to the output that I with taste judge as awesome. And then once I get there, I say, hey, review everything that we did in this session, turn that into a skill. There's the system.
- [30:33]
A
Yeah, I love that.
- [30:35]
C
Yeah. So the way that you think in systems is just about learning to work with the agent until you arrive at the output and then let it decide how to encode that and how to turn that into a reproducible result.
- [30:49]
A
Yeah. One thing you're getting out there, and I think about it often, is we had Logan, who is the PM for the AI studio on was a great episode and I was like, what's one tip you can leave our audience with? He says AI can do way more than you think.
- [31:03]
B
Yes.
- [31:03]
A
And you said something there that I don't think people really still have clicked with them, which is have a conversation, get it to a bunch of things and then say you create the skill, you just do that and then you can do that. They can one shot skills. Right. That's why there's skill libraries with like a billion different skills.
- [31:19]
C
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the big unlock is really learning how to work with the agent. Well, I mean, you don't have to know anything else, honestly, which is kind of crazy and scary at the same time. So back to the outputs here real quick. So it analyzed the entire landscape of LinkedIn growth, SaaS, tools and stuff, and it went and pulled the competitor messaging, it identified what everyone else is saying and then what's under exploited territory like white space that nobody owns. So it also did a market assessment and thinking back to those old school copywriters, it identified the market awareness or sophistication. So the market's crowded, AI powered is dead, skepticism is high. So what's the transformation that we want to provide within this unique angle that we have? So from posting randomly and hoping to running a system that produces real business outcomes, I think that's kind of interrupt testing because all these tools kind of generate a lot of AI slop or whatever. And you know, how does that result in actual outcomes? I can measure. So the mechanism, operator grade analytics and content studio in one suite that focuses on signal over noise. So based on that, it recommended some unique angles that we should focus on in our copy and in our positioning. So it's got a recommended one here. It says, statement, LinkedIn growth isn't a content problem, it's A systems problem. Forge is the operating system Operators are frustrated with random posting. They've tried the tools. They want a system, not more features. Framing it as infrastructure versus a content tool. Changes. Who raises their hand? Headlines. Stop treating LinkedIn like a slot machine. Run it like a system. So it's got a few others, some really good ones. But in the interest of time, we'll just tell it to go with its recommended angle and we can see how it routes us to the next step.
- [33:09]
B
Let's do it. You know, Kieran, you've used a word around Claude code that I've heard others use, and I think James is kind of implying it. Addicted. It's you. You kind of get sucked into the progressive and, like, near endless possibilities of it. And it. To me, Claude code seems like something that is, like, very paradoxical because there's such a fear and concern about getting started. But once you get started, it seems near, like, limitless on the other side. And I can't remember anything impacting, like business or marketing quite this way in my lifetime, at least.
- [33:47]
A
Yeah, that's the right word. You just have a new skill that feels like there's an unlimited amount of things you can do, and it's just addictive. Like, it's so addictive. I was never, like, a video game player, but I know video game players and they play a lot of video games. I suspect it feels similar. It's like dopamine hits. It's like just continually getting these dopamine heads, like, wow, wow, wow, wow. This is amazing. I kind of wrote about this that AI could definitely cause, like, many burnouts much more rapidly. Like, your brain just gets overloaded, loaded, because you're just cranking through so much work. I get AI migraines.
- [34:23]
C
I just had to get a new monitor. Now I have, like, in my typical workday, I have six or seven different, you know, terminal windows running at any given time, working on different projects.
- [34:35]
B
Well, I've seen people online being like that. They feel stressed if they're like, if they don't have multiple terminals running, if they don't have these agents doing stuff for them all the time because they feel like they're missing out on an opportunity.
- [34:48]
C
Yep.
- [34:49]
B
Like, that's the far end of what we're talking about. Everybody watching this. It's like you might be afraid to get started. The people who are, like, months in are like, the opportunity is so big. I have anxiety if it's not constantly building.
- [35:01]
C
Absolutely, yes, Totally relate with that. I think I'm starting to understand, like, Again, I'm not an engineer by trade, but I'm starting to understand, like, why coding can be addictive. And, you know, like when you work with engineers, like in a startup and you're sitting there grinding, like all night, you know, the engineers just plugging away, like on their code, and when they finally get it to work, there's that massive kind of like, yeah, I did it, you know, and that in itself is a very addicting thing. But now these coding agents, they give you that so quickly and they make it more accessible to more people. And, you know, I just kind of talk about like sometimes how, you know, we're all kind of getting that like, engineering brain in a sense. Obviously, like great engineers are miles beyond kind of like what I'm able to do. But engineers are used to like sitting there and debugging something until it works. They're used to banging their head against the wall until they get a breakthrough.
- [35:57]
B
And.
- [35:57]
C
And you have to kind of embrace that mindset if you want to get the most out of these tools at the same time, you know. So real quick, it found our positioning angle and I want to highlight something that's kind of interesting here. So in my orchestrator skill as we work, I have it saving these documents to a folder called brand. So it's saving context as we work. So it's got our positioning file in our brand folder right now. And then it's going to continue adding to that so that we have memory and we can pick back up. So when we say, hey, like create content, it can reference that brand folder, understand our positioning, understand our angle, understand who our ICP is, all that. So it's got that sort of memory aspect built in.
- [36:40]
A
And is that built into the skill or the cloud MD file?
- [36:44]
C
I built that into my orchestrators. As outputs are created from individual skills, it saves the outputs into a brand folder so that it can be re referenced every single time. So got what I need here are the lead magnet concepts that it came up with. Brand context loaded. So you see that like before it tries to run this lead magnet skill, it goes and references the brand context folder. So it's saying, what's our voice profile? What's our positioning? What's our audience, what's our learnings? We haven't gone through and done those things yet. We could, and we could save it to the folder, but in the interest of time, we'll keep running. So it also found competitive lead magnets. So like, what are all those competitors doing that we went ahead and we identified when we Found our unique angle. What's overdone? What's the gap? And the gap is a really interesting concept that I'm constantly looking at. So something that AI is very good at obviously is synthesizing large amounts of information and large amounts of data. And if you just ask it, hey, like based on everything that you found, what's the gap that I can attack? Like that to me is like such a power prompt because you're ingesting all this information and you have context here and ask it to find the gap and ask it how you can exploit it with whatever you're trying to do. All right, so we have a few different lead magnet recommendations. Again, I'm just going to go ahead and go with the one that the Orchestrator skill is recommending out of the box, which is the LinkedIn system audit. So is your LinkedIn a system or a slot machine? Find out in five minutes. It's an interactive assessment. It'll reveal which part of your system is broken. So let's just see what happens and go.
- [38:22]
A
Yeah, there was an early version of VI Marketing and I think maybe this is your early version. So I don't mean to be like speaking ill of it, but the first version of VIVE Marketing was kind of like marketing automation tool. Like maybe the Node era, right? Maybe it was all like these kind of flows, which really is like automation. Whereas this, this really is like marking the clip from the 5 marketing. Because you really are just like vibing. Oh yeah, choose this one, choose that one. I'll try one. I'll iterate on that one. It's like much more in a flow state.
- [38:50]
C
Yes, it's real now. You know, when we first started talking about VI marketing, it was still kind of like a concept in a way. I could start to see how like node based workflows could eventually evolve. And you know, when you see kind of the automations working, you're like, hey, are we always going to be like setting up these nodes and like manually configuring them or is AI going to get smart enough to, to kind of do it for us? And you know, now with like the latest model releases like Opus 4.6 and, and things like that, I mean it, it's so good at using tools, using skills, chaining things together. You can just sit back and hit a button and deploy marketing assets.
- [39:32]
A
So I always had like two laptops. I probably should be a third laptop. Like, okay, it's doing something here. I have to fill that moment, I have to fill that time with something else. So I kick off it doing something else on another laptop because I use them for different things. Do you use workload tools anymore?
- [39:46]
C
No.
- [39:48]
A
Amazing.
- [39:48]
C
No, not at all. All I use is Claude code and codecs. So, you know, for the more advanced folks, like typically what I do when I'm working on a project, I've got Claude code in this side of my terminal and I have Codex on this side of my terminal. And codex runs on ChatGPT 5.3. And it's extremely good at solving bugs that Claude code often misses. So think of it as having like a senior developer on one side kind of overseeing the other developer's work and being able to understand like what it's working on, what's happening in the code base and pinpoint things that it can provide fixes to. That's how I use it. I call it AI ping pong. But I'm always bouncing back and forth between two panes here to use the power of kind of both agents.
- [40:37]
A
Oh, this is a great tip. Okay, I'm going to steal this tip. So are you cutting pasting the bugs across terminals? You have it connected to your git and you're just uploading the changes and download them onto Godex, you know, for
- [40:49]
C
a long time just copy paste. And now I'm doing more automation with like GitHub and things like that. But yeah, like just copying and pasting. Like, hey, what's the bug you're having? Let me throw it into Codex. Okay, here's the problem I'm facing. Here's the bug.
- [41:04]
A
Cool.
- [41:05]
C
Here's the root cause, here's the fix. You know, so that's, that's kind of how I work. And I've noticed that you're able to move a lot faster. You don't get hung up as much. And you know, you might notice when you go into a long kind of cloud code chat, like it starts to kind of lose perspective sometimes. So Codex is like this really smart agent that can take like this 10,000 foot view and think about it without all the context overload in the chat. So it's almost like a fresh perspective that can go in and help you solve a problem. Yeah.
- [41:38]
A
Maybe summarize just what you've done because you've done a lot of work. We've been like talking about a bunch of different things, but in the. Can you just like recaps be like really internalized?
- [41:46]
B
Like literally 45 minutes. What work have we done?
- [41:49]
C
Yeah, in 45 minutes, a we created a landing page for this concept that looks beautiful we researched all our competitors in the market. We found a unique positioning angle. We started to define our brand. We researched lead magnet opportunities that pertain specific to our positioning and our unique angle in the market. And we built a brief for our lead magnet. And we're going to go ahead and create the lead magnet.
- [42:15]
B
Awesome.
- [42:17]
C
So let's just tell it to go ahead and get started on that.
- [42:20]
A
By the way, if you hear us typing, we're not being rude. We're typing about how awesome this is.
- [42:23]
B
So type in about this. I'm building a skill right now because I'm feeling inspired. The data centers are keeping warm with us right now.
- [42:30]
A
Now? Yeah. There's a lot of stuff you're showing. I'm like, I just want to actually go try and build this thing and that thing. You give me a ton of ideas.
- [42:35]
B
Kieran's not sleeping this weekend. I bet he wasn't.
- [42:37]
A
Anyway, yeah, I'm actually asking Dan for the work transcript of this because there's some things in here I need to extract out tonight.
- [42:44]
C
So right now it's building a fully interactive tool, like a micro tool that we can deploy on the site with
- [42:50]
A
a tool for lead magnet.
- [42:52]
C
Yeah. Like, okay, let's just go ahead and build like an app that we can put on the website as we're updating. I love tools and I think tools are a great, like vibe marketing use case. Yes, tools are terrific for SEO. They're terrific mechanisms to turn traffic into leads or subscribers or whatever. They can kind of show sort of a micro value moment of like the core product that you have also LLMs like tools. So I've noticed that tools are also beneficial for like, you know, ranking on ChatGPT or, you know, something like that as well. So tools are great. And you know, another thing that I often work on with cloud code is SEO optimization. You know, SEO can be technical. You know, there's a lot to it. But guess what? When cloud code has access to your code base, it can go and solve technical SEO challenges or optimize your website for technical SEO in a matter of a couple prompts. It can go and ideate keywords, it can plan out your content strategy, it can develop a programmatic SEO strategy and launch multiple pages in one go to target certain keywords. So it's a great kind of vibe marketing use case to dig into more if you're interested in that.
- [44:08]
A
My brother built a E o clock code skill that's pretty dope, actually. We have to come back and show us your open class stuff that's the next one. I know people.
- [44:19]
B
Yeah. I would tell everybody to drop comments below on like future things. We want James to come back on in maybe a few weeks or a month or so and chat with us
- [44:28]
A
about People are building pretty cool agentic teams in Codex. Be kind of cool. And I think Open Claw, you built some cool stuff with opencloth.
- [44:35]
C
So we built a like a fully kind of interactive lead magnet here. So you know, start the audit. I love quizzes. Do you have defined content pillars, specific topics? I haven't even thought about this. When you sit down to write a LinkedIn post, how long does it take you to decide what to write about? A long time. How would you describe your posting cadence? Sporadic. Do you have a scheduled time block each week? Eh, not really. Do you know which of your posts generated the most reach? No idea. Can you name us insight from your LinkedIn data? I don't even look. Never thought about it. I don't know what the outcomes are. It's all from scratch with no process whatever. So now we're kind of auditing the quiz results, identifying the core problems, giving people some tips and then we have a call to action to go and sign up for the actual product.
- [45:25]
B
Very cool.
- [45:26]
A
So you really have like built up entire kind of in my marketing campaign from start to scratch in a singular podcast whilst we were also talking about multiple other topics. I think this is a incredible introduction for people on the value of cloud code. I think it's a great introduction for how you should start to think about integrating this into your own workflows. And I'm glad we waited to cover this the first very episode on here with you because I think you've given a pretty incredible go from like novice to pretty good in a short amount of time.
- [46:00]
C
Yep. And to use one of the tips I gave in real time here, we're going to save this Progress in a CloudMD file so we know where we left off and where we could pick it up next time and kind of complete the loop.
- [46:12]
A
Very cool. Dave, this is awesome. I know you're all over the net, but where is the best place for people to go and learn these skills from you?
- [46:19]
C
So I share a lot on X. I'm at Boring Marketer on X, so that's the best place to kind of like, you know, learn and interact. I have an online community where, you know, I get on every couple weeks and we do this exact thing that we just did on this podcast with a group of people. We have mentors doing workshops and things like that. It's called the Vibe Marketers. You can find all the links on my X profile. They're all there.
- [46:42]
A
Oh, you do like a look over your shoulder as you build on that community. Oh. Oh, join up. That's invaluable.
- [46:49]
C
Yeah. We call it Vibe Sessions. I just open up kind of behind the curtain, show people what I'm working on, share learnings. We've got a bunch of smart people that are all using these systems for marketing and it's just an amazing place to kind of like learn what people are doing, you know, to kind of push the limits of these tools.
- [47:07]
A
Super cool jigs. Thanks so much for coming on. We really appreciate it.
- [47:11]
C
It was a blast. Thanks so much.
- [47:31]
B
Hey, everyone. You know Kieran and I have been doing the podcast for a while now. We've been at this for a couple years. We love it. We could not be happier to be doing this, but we wanted to take things to the next level. We want to level up the impact we're having with marketing. It's the grain. So the next step of our journey is something we're really, really excited about. We're going to launch the Marketing against the Grain newsletter. And Marketing against the Grain newsletter is going to be amazing. If you are a marketing leader practitioner, you're in the trenches doing marketing every day. This is for you. We're going to deliver right to your email inbox and you're going to get all the behind the scenes, frameworks, practices, tutorials from us, from guests we have on the show, and from people even beyond the podcast that we think are going to be helpful and really have an impact on your day to day, week to week doing marketing. You're going to love it. It is something we've been talking about for a while. We're really excited to have it out in the world. We've already got a hundred thousand marketers who are on this newsletter. Please join. It's completely free. We'd love to have you as part of the Marketing against the Grain community. And it's easy. You can click the link in the description below or you can head to marketingagainsthegrain.com subscribe.