So What? Setting Up Claude Code for Success

Well, hey everyone, happy Thursday. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I am Katie, joined by Chris. John is somewhere in Italia eating the pasta and drinking the vino. So fun fact, I cannot do accents to save my life aside from my own accent, which is still sort of like a mumbles thing.

So anyway, John's on vacation. You're stuck with the two of us. This week, we are setting up Claude Code for success. Why should we have to do that? Um, Claude Code is a piece of software, you develop software with Claude Code.

So there are standards that you should be abiding by in order to set yourself up for success, which are things like the software development lifecycle, the project lifecycle. But there's even more than that. And so that's what we're gonna get into today. Chris, where would you like to start? Let's start by explaining why you would use Claude Code versus another system.

Because Katie, you're a huge fan of Claude Co-work, which is essentially code's sibling, if you will. So co-work and code both do the same thing. They are agentic systems that you use to give it like project plans, and it just goes off and does stuff and it comes back later and says, hey, I did the thing. Um in the five levels of AI enablement, they're level three, where you have an agent system that goes off, does stuff. You can chat with it and things, but but by and large, it will go and do things.

So, for example, Katie, you were working uh uh on rebuilding the websites. And you say, okay, co-work, here's the thing, go off and do it. The big difference between clawed code and clawed cowork is what it has access to on your computer. Co-work lives inside a virtual machine. It lives inside a little container on your computer that is locked down so that it can't get at things you don't want it to get at.

Um this little Linux virtual machine has its permissions locked down. It's it's a it's a phenomenal piece of software, it's very well engineered because it keeps the non-technical users safe from accidentally doing crazy things to their computer. At the cost of it doesn't have a full set of access to things like command line utilities. Claude code is operates in a terminal, so it doesn't operate, it doesn't have a shiny UI, but it has access to your computer's raw you know infrastructure. This is good and bad, bad because you can do things very badly.

Like if you use the dangerously skip permissions function, uh, it can just delete your computer. Um it's good in that it gives you full access to everything that's installed on your computer so it can pick up and use other apps, especially command line utilities. And we've talked about this in past episodes of this uh the podcast and uh the live stream and things. A real simple example on Unix based system, so Macs and Linux, uh, there's a command line utility that's two letters long, called the name of it's called Word WC. It stands for word count.

And what it does is you give it an input file and it tells you how many words are in it. This sounds silly, but something like that. LLMs are very bad at counting anything. So you can say, use the word count tool in Claude Code to count how many words are in this chapter that I'm working on, and it will say it's you know 8,600. The second reason you would use um you this is important for clawed code versus co-work is co-work is very usage intensive.

So all your clawed subscription plans uh come with a certain amount of usage in a five-hour period and in a weekly period. Uh and if you're in the Claude desktop app, you can actually see what that looks like. Um you can see uh in uh switch over here. So this is uh the reset limits all just hit uh and and that's weird. Um I have the right account because that's saying it's let me tell you because that's not what my usage limits looked like.

Yeah, I think I might be signed to the wrong account here. Oh no, mine looks the same. They must have just done a reset. Uh it was at 90% earlier today. Uh-huh.

You're welcome. You're like, uh, okay then. Uh they're like, you know what? You guys are doing it right. Let's just go ahead and give you a solid.

Yep. And co-work it uses uh uh a lot of this usage limit. So on the pro plan, which is the $20 month plan, you can burn your weekly limit in a couple hours of work. Um, yep. On the max 20 plan, which is what we're using, which is the expensive 200 month plan.

We can still uh pretty quickly burn the five-hour limit because you can see here there's a that's a four minutes and fifty-five seconds. Um you could see you will you will still we will still go through that. Clawed code, by contrast, gives you more fine-grained control over your usage. You can see how much any given tool is using, and so you can be a little more regulated with how how much you use. Plus, because it's on the command line, if you're using command line tools like the HubSpot command line tool, the WordPress command line tool, that uses no AI usage because it's a different piece of software.

And so you can be much more efficient that way. Um, I do want to acknowledge so Claude Co-Work recently added a feature. Um, if you want to bring that uh UI up again, Chris. So if you go to co-work, right, and then see where it says work in a project right next to it, it has this new ask. Uh that's new, I believe, as of this week, or at least I only noticed it this week.

Uh, now it gives you the option to sort of similar to code, you can just give it full control without it having to ask. I obviously still have ask before acting, but you can have it do the ask without asking, or act without asking, rather. And then also I was testing out Claude in PowerPoint. So now you can embed Claude in certain Microsoft projects and to your specific language about you know, act dangerously or whatever the phrasing is, that's part of the permissions in Claude in PowerPoint. Yep.

And these sorts of things, by the way, apply to all the different agentic systems. So open AI Codex, Google Anti-Gravity, uh, Open Work and open code, all the different systems have good reason usage limits on them because otherwise you would have people just burning hundreds of millions of tokens. With Claude Code, you get more visibility into your usage, you have more control over your usage, and you can very quickly understand what is soaking up memory and things, and you can uh adjust accordingly. So that's what those I wanted to start the show there today with saying why would why would you even want to use clawed code? Given that for a lot of people it's not as an intuitive a place to work as co-work is.

That because it's going to be a lot in a very, very short amount of time. If you don't mind me interrupting you, I will try to do it as respectfully as possible. I will I will stop you. That said, you know, it is a live stream. And if people want to ask more in-depth questions, they can join our free Slack community at trustinsights.ai/slash analytics for marketers.

Um, or if you see this and you're like, you know what, I just need someone to do it for me, go to trustinsights.ai slash contact. Um so I mean, I'm guessing I'll need you to explain everything, but I'll try to sort of you know pick and choose where I have questions. All right. Step one, start a new folder and then open a terminal in that folder. So I'm that's where we are.

I've got this thing called live stream clawed code setup on my desktop. I've opened a terminal in that folder. And so now I have a completely empty folder ready to go. First things first, I'm going to use a custom built piece of software called Claude Setup that says, what are you doing, Chris? Are you doing Python?

Are you doing React? Are you doing WordPress, Chrome extensions? Are you writing songs? Are you doing fiction, business, whatever? Um, for today, let's do, I'm gonna I'm gonna choose, let's do 11, 12, and 13.

Uh yes. And I'm gonna pause you there for a hot second just to point out, Chris. You mentioned this is a custom piece of code that you built. So if you scroll back a little bit, one of the things that it does with this project setup is it creates the project structure. So all of your different folders, it includes the agents, the skills, the plugins.

We've covered this on previous live streams. Um, so if you want to go to trustinsights.ai slash YouTube, go to the soap playlist, setting up Claude Desktop, I believe is where we covered that. Um, so that's really what you're doing. Instead of creating all of these folders, you've built a piece of script that just go ahead and just does it. And then in terms of the what kind of project, this is specific to you, the kinds of projects you typically undergo.

So I just want to make sure people aren't looking for this when they go ahead and start a code project. You built this. Exactly. This is something that I built. And so we're going to say yes.

Now I've got this is step one of two. Next, I'm going to install the memory system. So I'm telling Graphify to install itself. Uh, and then we're doing a graphify update. And now I'm ready to actually start Claude.

And I turn on Claude, and here we are. We're we're now ready to get to work. So this is when we talk about setting up Claude code for success. That is what the final polished version looks like. I now have, if we look in my folders here, uh inside I have my lineup inside my documents folder.

I have all of the reference documents that I'd be doing for this kind of work inside my Claude folder. I have the agents, the plugins, and the skills. Uh you can see things like the fact check skill, the job to AI skill. But the fact check skill, by the way, is in the Trust Insights Academy, is a free giveaway that we have that you can check out. And if you download it, then we will then harass you by email to download all the paid products.

Um it's got skills plugins, documents, and then for this kind of thing, it also has references. So for example, when I'm doing slides for a conference, I have two things. I have a massive document that is hundreds of pages or dozens of pages long is about what good slide design is. And then it has a checklist of the 40 things that every slide presentation must follow, so that I'm presenting in alignment with neuroscience. So that's the setup.

Now let's go back to the beginning and explain what all these things even are. Can I ask a question? Yes. Okay. So first thing you did was you opened a new folder.

So you said this is my live stream folder, and you opened a terminal. If you didn't have your pre-baked script that set everything up, you can set this up yourself manually. You can create your folders, you can pull in your agents. Um, you know, can you ask Claude Code, what do I need to do to get started? It can it will it give you a list?

Um no, it won't because it hasn't you so this is this goes actually to the heart of today's episode. You have to have your own governance and structure mentally before you even start using the tool. So a big part of what I do, and I got this uh a hundred percent stolen from you, Katie. Uh actually, no, you beat me over the head with it, is have some process in place that's repeatable so that you're not reinventing the wheel all the time, and you're not forgetting things all the time. So, what I did was, and this is an evolution.

I got to this point where saying, okay, what do I keep doing over and over again? Oh, I should create some structure around it, and it would turn into a copy paste thing for a little while, and then I'm like, why am I copy pasting? That's stupid. I went to then at that point, I took I went to Claude Code and said, I keep copy pasting the same thing over and over again. Here's what I'm trying to do.

Help me design a system that will do it for me. And that's when it came up with the whole menu items and stuff, and and it turned into this very nice useful thing. So that's how I got to this point. Gotcha. Okay.

There is a folder on my computer that all the prep materials are drawn from. I it can live anywhere. There's nothing special about it. Um, and in this folder are things, uh skill docs skills, references, plugins, my my setup script to actually run the setup, the manifest that is the data that feeds into that script, and then the individual pieces. And this is everything.

So if we look here, there's co-CEO Katie, of course. Uh, there's our CFO. Um, the massive number of skills that uh have accumulated. And by the way, if you're using newer systems like Hermes Agent that builds its own skills, you can copy and paste them from that into Claude and have Claude use those skills as well. And you can take these skills and move them into anti-gravity, codex, or any other system to support skills.

So it's a good idea to have this centralized on your computer because if you're using if you switch from clawed code to open code or quencode or whatever, all you got to do is change one little thing. I all I would do is change one little thing in my script to say, okay, instead of the clawed folder, put in the open code folder, and everything works j exactly the same. So I have a master repository of all this stuff, and then I have the script says what does each thing belong to? So there's the the PPTX skill, which is the same one in co-work that says make PowerPoints. That belongs in like my office tasks, that belongs in my trust insights tasks.

It doesn't belong in my Python tasks, so it's not in that set in that menu item. So governance and process, two things that despite using AI, you cannot escape. Correct. If anything, it's even more rigid now. Um let's talk about what some of these things are.

So in the documents folder, the things these are all the different rules files and checklists that I've built over time. And let me open up one of them so we can see what's in this. Oops. You go over there and you go here. And let's make you just a bit bigger so that no one is straining too hard to see.

These documents are the output of deep research. So one of the things that people do most wrong with all AI is they assume that AI knows what it's doing in the context that they're working in. And what AI knows is probabilities. But if you give AI the right information up front, then you don't have to rely on its background knowledge. So what I've done for all the major projects I do slides, keynotes, writing, Python, PHP, whatever, is I have a deep research uh process where I use the Trust Insights Casino Deep Research Prompt Framework, which you can get at TrustInsights.ai slash casino, has nothing to do with gambling.

Um to build deep research reports that all go over like what are the first principles? What are uh what are the things, the best practices? What are the anti-patterns? What are the design patterns? What do people screw up the most?

What are the hidden gotchas? Um, and I'll do this typically in three different tools. I'll do it, they'll do it in Gemini, I'll do it in Perplexity, and I'll do it in Alibaba Quinn, and then merge the three reports together to form a single rules file. So if I'm going to do a Python project, I'm in the midst of starting a Rust project, uh, which is a different programming language, and I have one of these. And what's in here is you know, first principles.

These are the things that you have to do or you should never do. Hard constraints, um, anti-patterns, design principles, all this stuff. So for all of the things in my master claude folder, there's there's stuff like that, or there's stuff that is uh whoops, I keep doing that. Uh there's stuff that is checklists. Alibaba at the end of 2025 published a paper saying that if you want phenomenal performance out of AI, always give it a validation checklist.

Um, no matter what task you're doing. Instead of saying, you know, make this sound better or make these slides nicer, you give it a checklist of here are the things that you must do. This, for example, is my lyrics uh checklist. When I'm having AI write song lyrics, this file is a reference file, and then when it generates a set of lyrics, it it then says, Oh, my instructions say to use the lyrics checklist and go through each item. And did I do all the things right?

Is it readable? Does it contain multi-level mnemonic stacking? Does it contain earworm dosages? Uh you are a strange human, Chris Penn. But what I like about this, and you're really highlighting the again to the purpose of today's episode is setting claudo code up for success.

It's not just setting it up, it's setting it up for success, which means you, the human, you still have a heck of a lot of work to do before you even get into the system itself. That is true of pretty much all software. That is not a new thing just for AI, but AI highlights where you've skipped over steps because it is very quick to sound authoritative with its mistakes. Exactly. And so this one was derived from 35 different academic papers.

I took the raw papers themselves, put them in notebook LM, synthesized in the said notebook LM to still me out a checklist of what is every hit song gotta have in terms of its lyrics to work. And so this is what it came out with. So in when you're setting up Claude Code or any project, you start with deep research, you build a complete compendium of best practices, and then you distill that down into a checklist. Say, here's the best practices, here's the checklist. As you work, use the checklist to validate your work.

And if you fail validation, then go back to the reference guide to figure out why and what you should have done differently. In a lot of ways, it you know, as we've said for a while, it's no different than training a human employee. Like, here's your here's the handbook, here's your checklist, do the task. And if you screw up, look at the handbook to figure out why. Well, and it's you know, your first principles are based on software development, and this is what this is, and so you should have that validation checklist in software development.

You should have the first principles, call it what you want, it's basically best practices of your specific organization, your working style, whatever it is. And it's things like when to go in scope, when to go out of scope, when to ask for help, like in terms of like software development. Um, you know, when to branch off code, when to integrate it, when to, you know, uh bring in QA, those are sort of some of the software development best practices. When you're talking about coding in AI, you want to bring that mindset into this so that you can say, I mean, this is this was always my criticism of things like the the concept of vibe coding, where you just kind of like see what happens. You skip all of these things, and then you burn down all of your usage, trying to iterate and figure it out.

When if you just took the time up front, which yes, it takes time to do all of this prep work, you're not gonna burn down your usage because it gets really expensive really quickly. It does, it gets very expensive, and you end up doing a lot of rework. And after a while, you probably will just end up burning the whole thing down and starting over, uh, which we've done. One of the things that Claude uh Anthropic themselves says when you're doing projects is um, in general, there's a there's a file they they always create called Claude.md. This is a file that uh rules for that project and anthropics advice is put in there what you know Claude has done wrong and tell it what to do instead.

So it doesn't need to be a complete compendium of the project. You basically have to say, Hey, language model, here's where you keep screwing up, don't do these things. And so that's one of the best pieces of guidance for that particular file. Now, the other thing that I did on setup after I ran my script to choose what skills and things I wanted was I ran uh an installation for a piece of software called Graphify. Graphify is a knowledge graph for LLMs and humans.

Uh and what it does is it provides uh you can get it, it's completely free. Uh it's an open source source project. It creates a knowledge graph and it creates a knowledge graph of your code base, whatever it is, that you can then traverse to understand what's in your project. So a lot of the time when you're using clawed code, if you don't have a knowledge graph in place, you'll say, Oh, I need to fix this function. And then it just starts doing find replaces all over your code, and it's looking for this, it's looking for this, and again, you you hit your hourly limit really fast.

If you have a knowledge graph, it goes to the knowledge graph and says, Hey, I'm looking for this function, knowledge graph. What other files in the fun in this code base use this function? The graph says this, this, and this, and here's the context, it uses it. And so it's a very fast, efficient way of finding content inside of a knowledge graph. Um I have a quick question.

Um, in terms of setting up Claude Code. So you're using the terminal, which is what you're comfortable with. There is also you can access claud code through desktop. It's one of the three toggles, and then you can also access cloud code through the web version. And so, can you just sort of at a high level go through?

So, your preference is the terminal. I feel like I could do a lot of the same stuff that you're doing through Claude Code in the desktop. I don't know if that's true through the web browser. The web browser is substantially limited. It operates in its own little virtual machine and you need to connect it to be useful.

You need to connect it to a GitHub repository to get the value out of it. It's not without value, but it is kind of pain. The desktop version, when you switch over to claw code there, again, you could specify local, you could specify, you know, a cloud repository work in a folder. This one does contain it integrates with like all the connectors and stuff that you have for cowork and stuff, which is handy. But again, it doesn't give you direct access to your machine in the same way that the terminal version does.

This operates very similar to cowork. It has basically a similar architecture. So if you're doing something that's appropriate for a sandbox, this is a great way to do it. This is very this is very appropriate too when you want to hand stuff off to the web and back because it's very good at that. So you can do what's uh they call it teleport, where you can start work on your machine and then pick it up on the web.

So if you are working on something, you can go uh go onto your phone and immediately go right back into that project from your clawed code on your phone to continue working. So if you want to ensure that you have no work-life balance whatsoever, um, this is the best way to do it. This version here on the web is still not as powerful as the terminal version because the terminal version is directly on your machine. And it also has the ability to do what's called remote control, where you can again control it from your phone and it actually operates on your desktop. It's almost as if before you even get started, you should run through something like the 5P framework to figure out what the heck you're doing, why you're doing it, who's involved, and then your process.

Do you have those repeatable processes? And then pick your platform. So do I want the web version? Do I want the desktop version? Do I want the terminal version?

Because that's going to give you very different results and a different experience. So, you know, always start with why you're doing it. What's the question you're trying to answer before you say, okay, I'm just going to open up the terminal and play around. Yes. It'll cost you.

Exactly. So Graphify will give you a knowledge graph of your project that then this the software knows what to do with. So if I go into my Claude projects here, and let's go into our thriller book that I'm working on. If I just bring up the knowledge graph for it, this is it explores the semantics, uh, so the topics and concepts within in this case a mystery thriller uh book. And you can see that there's a couple of different webs here.

One is code, right? So there's the readability software and all the things that link to it, which is part of the project. Um, because to write a really good book with AI, you need to uh have AI be able to understand whether it's doing a good job or not. And so there's code that you can build that can measure AI's writing fluency and say, like, dude, you're just not doing a good job. Keep trying.

And then over here is the actual characters and you know, uh, settings and props and the murder weapon and stuff. Um in this section. What this graph does tells you is it tells you conceptually what's inside your project. And you can see now how easy it would be for AI when it's coding to look in this graph and go, okay, I'm working on this file. What does this connect to?

Oh, it connects to these functions and it connects to these parts of the system so I can navigate and find in the code base what I need to access. When you install a graph network or any kind of knowledge graph inside your clawed code system, which is this again, this is free, you will reduce your token usage by like 90% because it's not inefficiently just reading every file over and over and over again. It just goes to the library and finds the specific thing that it's looking for. So say again what it is they need to install to its graphify. It's called graphify.

And what you can do, the easiest way to do this is copy this URL into your clawed code, say install this for me, please. Uh, and we will put that URL again in our free Slack group, analytics for marketers. Um, go to trust insights.ai/slash analytics for marketers, post live stream. Chris will provide that URL uh for our users. Exactly.

So the first thing I would do in a project like this, it would be to say, okay, you know, assuming that uh this is a new uh green field project, is have it actually go and uh build its first knowledge graph. And you don't have to pay attention to this part, you can literally just say yes to everything because all it's doing is analyzing the current state of the project and will build that network. What this does behind the scenes is as you're coding and things like that, it will update itself at the end of every major turn, and it will keep that knowledge graph up to date. So it keeps your your project on the rails. This is super important as your code gets bigger.

And by the way, I'm using the word code to mean any form of data. It could be a novel, it could be an academic paper, it can be a piece of software, doesn't matter. Um, but this keeps that knowledge base, that knowledge graph up to date. So one of the things that AI coding agents have a real bad habit of doing is writing a bunch of stuff they don't need. Um and it's called dead code.

In a great in a knowledge graph, once you build that knowledge graph, you can look at it and go, there's a whole cluster of stuff here that isn't connected to anything. And that's a really good indicator that it's built some dead code. So you can say, hey, Claude, check the knowledge graph for dead code. It'll look at and go, oh, I made a bunch of these things that you didn't need. Like, uh-huh.

Delete it. So, fun fact that is not just an AI problem. Just thought I'd point that out. Yes. Um now what we've done.

So we've essentially now have our knowledge graph set up. We have our documents, our reference documents, which are all built with deep research. The next step in any project before you get going is to create three documents in sequence the PRD, the spec, the work plan. In that order, PRD is product requirements document, spec is the technical spec, and then the with a work plan. Paraphrased in another way, it's the why, the what, and the how.

Why are we doing this thing? So we have user stories and stuff in the PRD. What are we doing, which is the technical spec, which is the ingredients of the thing, and then the implementation plans, how you're going to do the thing. And in a in any kind of project, and by the way, this applies to everything. It's not just code.

If you're going to write a marketing book, you can do a PRD, a spec, and a work plan: the why, the what, and the how. Question. Where's the measurement plan? The measurement plan belongs in uh the at the end of the PRD and at the end of the spec. The PRD has uh outcomes and the spec has KPIs and milestones.

Perfect. Because why are you doing something if you're not measuring whether or not you did it, or if you're not setting yourself to setting yourself up to measure success further down the line. So make sure those are things included. While there's not a specific measurement plan called out, make sure it's included in one or all of your documents. Yep.

Um, I forgot one other thing. There is uh there's a whole plug-in ecosystem and marketplace inside Claude code itself. Uh and I would say, in terms of the plugins, uh, the one I would start with. If you so if I go into uh plugins by typing plugin command, go into the plug-in marketplace and look at the Claude plugins official. Um you can browse the plugins and they have a whole bunch of these.

The one plugin I would say you should install is this one here called Superpowers. It is by far the most useful plugin in all of Claude. Uh, it's all free. And this one contains like 12 or 13 different functions: brainstorming, writing plans, executing plans, sub agent-driven development, dispatching parallel agents, and all those things are things that you really want to do with Claude. Claude doesn't know how to do these things independently or it does it inconsistently.

When you install the superpowers plugin, it has all that built in. And so um, and they're very, very, very good. So let's get out of our is that a plugin that Anthropic built and provided. So funny enough, it was built by a guy named Jesse Obra and Anthropic acquired it and said now it's an official Anthropic plugin. I bring that up because there are so many plugins and skills available in the marketplace that you definitely want to do your research first in terms of who created it, um, so that you're not accidentally installing something that is going to open up your entire company ecosystem to vulnerabilities.

Just you know, a little PSA from me to you. Um so plug-in, that would be the the one plugin. If they if there was no other plugin that you installed, that would be the one. Uh, it is very token efficient, uh, which is always super nice. Um, a couple other things that Claude does that's built in that are that are success adjacent things.

I'm gonna start a separate Claude instance here because that one's still working. Um, number one, there's a few commands you should know. One of those commands is usage, which gives you the exact same chart of like here's how much usage you've used. The second is a command called context. Context tells you what is occupying Claude's context window.

So you can see there's a bunch of different MCPs there. 23,000 tokens are taken up by these different MCPs. So in if I don't need them for this project, I should turn them off because they are consuming part of the context window. Um and this goes through and it tells you exactly what's what's eating up all your memory. Superpowers, for example, very uh code of view 247 tokens there.

The skills, uh, these are the the a lot of these are skills like the brainstorming 56 tokens, those you know, that's all very reasonable. So you knowing those things exist is is super helpful to us to judge, oh, here's where here's where all my my budget is going. Especially if you are like us and your team is sharing a single Claude instance. Um, you know, myself and Chris and Kelsey can all be working on things at the same time, but we can also run into our usage limits a lot faster if we're not careful of what we have turned on and turned off. Mm-hmm.

Exactly. And that holds true for both uh code and cowork. If uh everything that's turned on consumes context window, and that and that's is in every single conversation turn. So if you turn off one thing that use that you know saves you 10,000 tokens, like an MCP, that is savings that occurs in every single chat turn. And that is that can add up very, very, very fast.

Check your settings. Please. Um, the other thing that Anthropic introduced recently, which can be somewhat confusing, is you can choose the level of effort. Um, how hard it should work. So you type in effort, and there's a little dial there.

You can crank it up uh or down. Essentially, the lower it this dial goes, the faster it responds, and the more likely you're gonna get nonsensical responses because the model is not doing thinking in the background. If you crank this all the way up to max, um it thinks very hard. It does very good work. Um, but boy, do you burn through your usage limits real fast with it?

That seems like a trap. Yeah, it can be a trap. Um what to change models, you type in the word model, and it will tell it will give you so uh it they they recommend, and this is what the models choose is they recommend Opus 4.7. That's a good way to burn through all your quota real fast. Um the one you want to use is called Opus Plan Mode.

Opus plan mode is uh an interesting little variant where if you're in plan mode, it will use Opus, and if it's in execution mode, it will use sonnet, which uses your which uses your usage level much lower. So if you hit shift tab, you will see it. This is in edit mode. This is in plan mode. So now it's gonna use, and you can see the little opus, uh, the sonnet opus uh model indicator which model you're on.

Got it. Yeah, can you do that again slower? So which which is which? So this is edit mode. You can see it's SON 4.6, and it says accept edits on.

And if I hit shift tab to plan mode, and now switches to opus 4.7. And now it's it's ready to, it's ready to spend some budget. Uh not to add more to our to-do list, but perhaps we should create a cheat sheet of terminal commands. Yes, you could do that for sure. Um, in general, what I have done to be that is very successful is I will use Opus and I'll have it write its plans to uh the output folder in our project, and then I can even open up a different coding tool, say uh open code using Minimax, uh, which is the Singapore-based model.

Because Opus already wrote the very expensive, very thoughtful plan, Minimax just has to execute it. Um, and it's again it's a great way to save on a lot of budget. All right, so our next step in any project would be to walk through the 5Ps and say we're gonna brainstorm together what the five Ps are and and to build this project. Um so let's go ahead and do that. And um the piece of software, by the way, I'm going to be using is a completely free open source software package that I discovered recently called Type Whisper.

Uh Type Whisper is it's a Mac app. There's a Windows version. Um what I like about this one is it is sort of you you press the hotkey and you specify what and you just talk and then it pastes the transcript into whatever application you're in. This one I love for two reasons. One, it's completely and totally free, and it uses an on-device model uh Nvidia's parakeet, which means that your data never leaves your computer and it works without internet, which is a lovely thing.

Um, so that's typewisp.com. You can find that totally for free. So we're gonna say you framework by trust insights, which is purpose, people, process, platform, and performance. Let's brainstorm a new application today that will take any description and turn it into ASCII art. In the 5P framework.

Purposes, why we're doing the thing, which in this case is because I want to make something that makes ASCII art. People is who's going to use it. And that's technical nerds like me. Uh process is we're going to brainstorm this, develop a PRD, which is a product requirements document, which contains user stories, needs and pain points, uh, functional requirements, domain requirements. We're going to then create a technical spec as the second document of what is in our project.

And then we're going to create an implementation work plan, which is a step-by-step implementation. For platform, we're going to use Python 3.12. And in the docs folder, you'll find all the information you need to know about how to write a great Python application, including the Python rules file. In terms of performance, 100% test coverage for unit tests is required. 100% of uh end-to-end integration tests coverage is required, and 100% passing tests is required.

These are your performance outcomes. And so I ripped through that real fast, but what it basically turns into this nice long paragraph here. We we go into uh our tool and it's in plan mode. And we've said we're going to do brainstorming, and now it will start to ask questions. Well, do you want to do this?

Do you want to do that? And so we're essentially now ready to start using Claude Code. So that's setting up Claude Code for Success. It will take you a while to build all those libraries with deep research for the kinds of projects you do, but I promise you it is worth it because you will have the best of the best. Um, and every project you use use, when you use these tools, these libraries that you build, you'll have consistency, you'll have high quality, you'll have vastly reduced hallucination.

Um, it is it is such a time saver. Build the skills in advance. The claude code has skill builders and things. So you can anything that you do more than three times, turn it into a skill. And then use the PRD spec and work plan, the why, the what, and the how as your three guiding documents.

So you can see it's already starting to ask me questions. What would you like to do? I want to do a pictorial ask ask ER, and so on and so forth. And if you want to learn more about the Trust Insights 5P framework, you can go to trust insights.ai slash 5p hyphen framework. Um, Chris, in your preparation, so you mentioned you always have these three files.

So you have your PRD, you have your specifications, and you have your um Work plan. Work plan. Do you have templates of each of those, like a blank template or an example in your preparation files that Claude Code can look look at to say, oh, this is what you want. Uh no, I actually usually dictate it because it varies wildly. So, like the PRD spec and work plan for a Python project is gonna be very different than say a novel.

Um the PRD always has the same sections, yes. Well, that's what I mean. Is like, so it might the information might be different, but a PRD is fairly straightforward in terms of what it has to include. So that's what I'm wondering, just as like another preparatory step, so that you're not spending your time saying, no, that's not what I wanted in a PRD. Because to your point, you're making assumptions about what Claude Code knows, and you're assuming that it knows what a proper PRD entails.

So is that just another opportunity? It is absolutely an opportunity, especially if your organization has coding standards and you know, obviously the things like brand standards for design stuff. Any kind of standards you have, those should be in the documents folder. Makes sense. And just a friendly reminder if people have questions about what we're doing, you can feel free to throw those in the comments of the platform that you're watching this on.

Um we try to get to as many as possible. If not, again, go to trustinsights.ai/slash analytics for marketers, our free Slack community for any follow-up questions that you might have on what we're doing today. Um we've covered things like PRDs. We've covered actually recently, uh, we talked about the different models that you can use in conjunction with Claude so that you can save on usage. So you can find those at our so what playlist if you go to trustinsights.ai slash YouTube.

I remember we did cover that one most recently. Uh we did talk through the uh Mini Max and other open models that you can use that can supplement the work that you're doing in Claude to save you some money. Exactly. Yeah, in fact, I've got another project running right now in another window for a client that's using Minimax to implement a Claude thing. And it has chewed through uh 930,000 tokens just on on this particular trend.

I think the whole project as a whole is somewhere around 100 million tokens worth. Um, so that would have destroyed our weekly usage on Claude. Mm-hmm. And look, here comes the the plan. Uh it it it has uh all the bits and pieces and stuff for uh I think it's doing the spec right now, uh, but it's following the 5P framework.

As a um as a a hint of where things can be going and what people should be thinking about, you really, really, really should use the 5P framework. Um because inside the 5P framework is uh the structure of how to do age if true agentic um AI. And I'll show you an example here. Um for fun the other day, I was frustrated with my local my local newspaper. Uh it was filled with not helpful stuff.

So I used uh Hermes Agent, uh, which is uh what an open claw like system. And I said, following the 5P framework by Trust Insights, let's have you design what uh an entire system to replace my local newspaper with a newspaper that is suits my needs. And a 13 pages later, and you can see the headings people, process, platform, uh performance. Uh this is all based on the 5P framework. I set it up and ran it, and in the afternoon I got my first newspaper, and it was actually it was what I wanted.

It was a custom newspaper. So again, if you want to learn more about the 5P framework, go to trustinsights.ai slash 5p hyphen framework. Uh Chris, we have a question. Um Do you have advice about folder structure management? For example, if you copy an existing structure, does everything carry over?

Is there a good way of standardizing how folders get created each time you start a new project? Uh, before you get into that answer, uh, just a friendly reminder if you go to our YouTube playlist of So What the Live stream, we covered in depth getting started with Claude Desktop, which includes chat, co-work, and code. So we cover a lot of it there, but Chris, go ahead. Uh the answer is yes, and it depends on how you work. Uh, so your folder structure should represent how you work.

The way I have my stuff set up, I know Katie looks at it and goes, nope. No, and I have a lot of the same information, but the way that Chris thinks about how to organize that information is not how I think about how to organize that information. It's a very the nice thing about Claude Desktop and these like co-work and code is it can be a very personal experience, very much tailored to how you work. The best practices are the best practices. Like you really don't want to skip those.

So you should have a folder structure. You can copy folders over into new projects like that can be part of your process, but how you set those up, what they look like, what they're called, is going to be unique to you. Mine looks Chris would look at mine and go, I don't, I can't find anything. And that's okay. I don't need him to get onto my desktop and find things.

I would prefer he did not. Um to answer the second part of the question, uh, have Claude help you with a setup script for that. The magic word you want to use in the conversation is the word idempotent. Idempotent is a weird little computer science term that means um state doesn't change when you rerun software. So if I ran the same setup script a hundred times on the same folder, it should not blow away or break stuff that's already there.

Right. So I could be able to, I should be able to run that script once, twice, 10 times, and every single time I do what's there is preserved, anything new is added in. So that is the magic phrase that goes with that particular task. Um and pro tip, I've also had Claude clean up my desktop folders. When I got a little bit lazy about setting up the different structures for each project, I gave it one master folder, constrained it to just that, and I said, within here, let's just get it all cleaned up by project and let's get it organized.

So you can certainly have Claude help you do that. That's something that I would reserve for if you look at your usage for the week and you're like, oh, we have a use it or lose it, and we have a little bit left. That's when you should probably do something like that. Not at the beginning of the week when you're trying to figure out all of the different things you have ahead of time. Exactly.

So that's uh that's gonna do it for setting up Claude Code for success. You'll notice that in this episode, we spent very little time in Claude Code because most of the setup occurs outside of it. It is the the deep research, the documents, the checklists, the references, the setup scripts, the gr the knowledge graph. All uh all those things are things that by the way work in every system, not just Claude Code, uh, and are best practices for everything you do. If you do them, you'll you'll increase the likelihood of your success.

So until next time, we will see you all. And thanks for tuning in for this episode of So What. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at Trust Insights.ai slash TI podcast.

At our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack group at trustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.