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Podcast

Living the Claude-Centric Life

The Reasoning Show

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  • Claude Revived Dormant Side Projects
    • Brandon revived long-shelved side coding projects by pointing Claude at his existing code and ideas.
    • Tasks stalled for months became solvable in minutes, turning abandoned scripts into working automations and prototypes. Transcript: Brandon Whichard So I had a couple of those projects and I was like, they just kind of left them. Nothing was happening. I certainly got away from it. I was like, well, let me, let me just like crank up one of these agents and just see, like, see what happens. I’m just going to point it at like the code I have and the ideas I have and see if it can kind of, if you will, bring these to life again. And sure enough, like that’s where the light bulb really went off for me. Right. I, I did that and stuff that I had struggled with for months or years to the point I’ve kind of given up on, like suddenly I can make progress in a matter of minutes, things that would have Taken me like days, maybe weeks to figure out. I could basically, you know, if you will take my ideas, things that I had sort of been interested in. These are, some of these are very small things. These are like personal scripts that I’m using for my own little work life right you know automation some of these are like you know just let’s call them very uh high risk ideas but i’ve Always wondered like what it would look like if i could get something like you know kind of built out and that was sort of the moment of like whoa this is incredible right that’s where i Think i had the the light bulb go off and then i think the biggest thing and i’ve said this multiple times, maybe on this podcast as well, is like, it’s, it’s, you’re only limited by the Questions you ask. And it was just like, and that’s where I’ve kind of gone. It was like, well, what have I just started asking it to do like everything I’m trying to do? (Time 0:02:44)
  • Make Claude The Default Interface To Work
    • Claude is best framed as a general productivity assistant, not just a coding tool, because most jobs interact with software in some way.
    • Treat Claude as the default interface to software tasks and make exceptions only when necessary for non-digital work. Transcript: Brian Gracely Part of it, I think it’s just because like, they seem to have been very focused on like, I’m going to help you with work stuff. Just, I’m going to help you do work. And I’ve kind of, I’ve kind of come around to this idea that, you know, you just mentioned it and it kind of dawned on me. So like a chat GPT, you think of it and you’re like, oh, I chat with it. Right. I do some sort of interactive and it’s sort of a chatting, you know, it’s a chat bot. Cloud code, like you said, in your mind, you’re like, oh, this is for coding. Maybe I’m not a full-time developer. Maybe it’s not for me. And I kind of have this mindset now where I’m like, most jobs, most anybody that I interact with, unless it’s, you know, literally just like, you know, the guy who’s, you know, doing, You know, he’s a plumber or something like that, but even maybe not. But I’m like, you can, you could break down most jobs into saying like, there is a component of what you do that interacts with software. You don’t have to write software but it interacts with software it could be again something’s getting written on a thing in software it’s interacting with a system and i’m like when That light bulb went off for me i was like this thing should be the center of everything that i do because it it’s its job is to make interacting with software easier and my thing that i do At work again whether it’s for the podcast or it is like interacting with software doesn’t have to be a developer, but it’s interacting with systems and software and people via software. (Time 0:05:20)
  • Build Trust By Graduating Claude Responsibilities
    • Start with Claude as an assistant and inspect outputs before granting autonomy.
    • Progress from proofreading emails to drafting, then to placing drafts in Gmail and reviewing before sending to build trust safely. Transcript: Brandon Whichard Yeah, well, for me, I think it’s like, first you make it kind of an assistive technology where you’re sort of like asking it to do things, but you’re looking at everything along the way. And then over time, right, you get more confidence and you start to kind of let it do stuff on your own. And I think the way that I kind of do projects now is, I mean, this is maybe too detailed, but let’s just like say it is like everything that I kind of consider like a project, whatever, however You define that, right? Like this is the thing I work on. I create a folder on my Mac and I put everything related to that project in there, right? And the first thing I will do is I will literally go in there and start clod run a knit right and then read through everything because that’s the first thing it’s like you’re basically Grounding it and i don’t think we need to get into all the details of like rag or whatever else but you’re basically saying like read everything in here right and then because once you Kind of because that really grounds it really very very well i find that like i don’t think it like like if you’re telling i’m like working on whatever, I’m working on building a little Go program. That’s going to like help me like automate a podcast task for something simple, right. Or automate just the generating report. I have never seen it go off and be like, like it’s like starting to insert Disney characters or anything like that. You know, it’s like, I just don’t see that kind of weird hallucination. It’s sort of like you give it that information and then that’s what really starts to contain it. And then for me, I always start with like, you know, making it assist me. So it’s not send an email. It’s first it was, well, I’ll just type in an email, have it proofread it. And that worked well enough. But then I was like, OK, well, like, why am I writing this email? Then I would just say, write an email and then I give some context and it would draft the whole email. And then I would cut and paste it. And I was like, okay, that’s pretty good. But I’m like, that’s annoying. I have to cut and paste in the format and it gets wrong. So then I hooked it up to like my, my Gmail. And I was just like, write, draft the email, write it up. And when you’re finished, put it in the drafts folder, right? And then it gives you a nice, beautiful, you know, formatted email that all you have to do is click send. And then of course, like I sit there with the draft, I’ll just go back and forth. I’ll read it. Sometimes it’s wrong. Sometimes it’s better. But I just find like, you know, just the simple notion of going through and, you know, the drafting process, like I feel like I write much more concise emails. That’s the number one thing I think people benefit from. And two, I don’t have to keep doing like all these little things like cut and paste or cutting pasting. Man, I was like, this is incredibly annoying. This is an amazing how long this takes. And then you get to the point. And then now, like, if I do have to send out some emails that go to like a large group that are pretty much standard, I am now at a point like, that’s like set and forget. It’s just like, send it to everyone. Here’s the weekly status report. Here’s the newsletter. Here’s, you know, all these things you have to do. And it’s sort of like, but I did that only because I walked through the whole process and I’m very comfortable with what it did. And then, you know, (Time 0:09:31)
  • Ground Projects With A Project Folder And claude.md
    • Ground every project by creating a folder with its files and asking Claude to read them so the model is constrained by your source material.
    • Use a project-level claude.md overview that Claude updates to track progress and context. Transcript: Brandon Whichard Like this is the thing I work on. I create a folder on my Mac and I put everything related to that project in there, right? And the first thing I will do is I will literally go in there and start clod run a knit right and then read through everything because that’s the first thing it’s like you’re basically Grounding it and i don’t think we need to get into all the details of like rag or whatever else but you’re basically saying like read everything in here right and then because once you Kind of because that really grounds it really very very well i find that like i don’t think it like like if you’re telling i’m like working on whatever, I’m working on building a little Go program. That’s going to like help me like automate a podcast task for something simple, right. Or automate just the generating report. I have never seen it go off and be like, like it’s like starting to insert Disney characters or anything like that. You know, it’s like, I just don’t see that kind of weird hallucination. It’s sort of like you give it that information and then that’s what really starts to contain it. And then for me, I always start with like, you know, making it assist me. So it’s not send an email. It’s first it was, well, I’ll just type in an email, have it proofread it. And that worked well enough. But then I was like, OK, well, like, why am I writing this email? Then I would just say, write an email and then I give some context and it would draft the whole email. And then I would cut and paste it. (Time 0:09:53)
  • Never Start From A Blank Sheet
    • Never start with a blank sheet; always give Claude existing examples or artifacts to reference.
    • Load similar presentations, drafts, or designs so Claude can adapt them rather than invent from scratch. Transcript: Brian Gracely Like I’m always, you know, and this is, I think what you were getting at, which is like always grounded in something. And so, you know, I think when I, started doing stuff with, I don’t know, whatever AI tool it was, I was always like, okay, now we’re starting and we’re going to do this thing. And this is what I want to do. And the more I’ve kind of thought about it, the more I’m like, somebody’s already done, I don’t know, 99.9% of whatever I’m going to go do. And they’ve probably done it really well. Maybe it’s not the exact same context or whatever, but I can go grab stuff that it’s just like anything. Like you get inspired by something and you’re like, oh, that’s really good. Or, oh, that’s, I like that concept of it. And so I’ll just go start pulling stuff that other people have done. And again, you know, you could argue like, oh, well, that’s kind of cheating or stealing. It’s like, you do that today with what you do. Like, you know, if you wanted to look at a presentation and you were like, man, I was in this, I was in this keynote the other day and they did this cool thing with graphics. Like, I mean, you’re borrowing an idea and people have been borrowing ideas for thousands of years. But like, yeah, I found that as soon as I stopped starting with a blank sheet of paper, I started with something that it could look at, or at least load up into its memory, sort of have for Reference. And then I could start bouncing ideas, even off, just be like, look at that thing. I want something like that. And I’m going to kind of do something like this. What do you think of this? It moves it so much faster. (Time 0:13:38)
  • Fix The Cold Start By Dumping Rough Drafts
    • Use Claude to overcome the cold start problem: dump rough, unedited thoughts and let it produce a solid draft.
    • Iterate with Claude as a story editor to reposition leads and shape structure quickly. Transcript: Brandon Whichard I don’t want to start it. I’m going to walk the dog. I’m going to do all these other things. And it’s like, what I find though, is like, I open up a Claude, put everything in there and just start. I just will start to be like, I think I need to write a paper. I need to write 2000 words on this. And then I will just like literally type in like 500 words, no editing, bad grammar, misspellings. And I will just like throw it all in there. Right. It’s awful. Right. And then I’ll be in the cloud will go through and it’ll look at that. And then it will start to come back with me with another draft. Right. And then, of course, that draft starts to really starts to click in my mind. Right. What I’ll find is like, oh, that wasn’t right. But then now I’m moving, you know, like we’re making progress. And I think the same thing, you know, I saw someone say like on some product management groups, I’m on someone’s like, you know, if you as a product manager, what have you built? And that’s another great example of like, don’t like write the requirements, like just build the thing or build some version of it. Right. Cause you start walking into the people and be like, here’s what, here’s what I think it should do. And here’s a prototype or like, here’s like a pretty well drafted thing I’ve been working on for two hours. That probably would have taken me three weeks if I was by myself. Right. And, and then, and then the idea too, it’s like, I love to make it, to go from like editor, like grammatical editor to story, story editor. It’s always like, cause like a lot of times I’ll get something to like, I think it’s pretty good. Right. But then I’ll almost ask it more like a story editor or something like, like, like what’s not good in here. Like, have we lost it? Right. And I think one of the things like editors always talk about is like, you know, you buried the lead and like, why is that such a cliche? Cause human nature is like the act of writing. It takes a while for you to almost figure out what your lead is. And then you think it’s really good, but like you have all that history and it’s like three paragraphs down and it goes right in. It says, this is your point. (Time 0:15:51)
  • Use Terminal Sessions And GitHub For Project Flow
    • Prefer the terminal UI for repeated coding workflows and open a Claude session per project tab for focus.
    • Use GitHub repos as storage even if you don’t interact directly; have Claude create and manage them. Transcript: Brandon Whichard Yeah, my take on it is like, I’ve played with mostly with CloudCode, but a little bit with co-work. I just think you kind of have to pick the UI you’re more comfortable with. I would gravitate towards actually just using the terminal and I’ll just, you know, one little free plug here for, the terminal I like is Ghost TTY, super nice. It’s just a nice viewing experience. And like, what i do is just a simple before it’s like i will literally have right now i’m looking at i have tabs open for every major project i’m working on i’ve got a cloud session going For for each one of them and like i said before and i what i do i take everything for that specific folder and i put it in there and that’s like step one and then i have started to connecting Because i’ve gotten a lot more i guess confident whether it would be the right thing or is I have connected it to like my email as well as my Google Drive, as well as it has like, it will mostly Prompt me for different access. But I’ve kind of gotten that kind of figured out where it’s like, well, I just put most of the files in the folder. It’s working. It’s fine to do that as well. So that’s sort of like, to me, like step one. And then the other thing that I do for all of the ones that I’ve i’ve started is like i do create like a claude md file and when i say i claude creates it with some level of overview of the project That i’m specifically working on right so that’s sort of if you will gives claude some context of like this is what we’re working on here this is what all these files are and then i start To actually use that to, if you will, kind of, as we go along, I have it update itself. Like, okay, where are we at with this project? What was the last thing to do? And then, you know, I have, this is funny for me to say, I have long since gotten away from using all types of source control. Like I was just like, I don’t really want to learn GitHub. I’m never really, I don’t like really care, but I will say I love GitHub now because everything now, because I don’t really interact with it. I just tell it at the first time. I’ll be like, create a project, you know, create a repo for this, put everything in there. And I started, I just used that for source control. Not so much that like I interact with GitHub, but it’s just like, oh, I’ve got everything there. So even for non, like, if you will, quote unquote, coding projects, that’s a really simple thing too. And again, like I’m someone that never liked GitHub. That was always like, this is too complicated. But like the fact that like Claude can just do all the commands, that’s a perfect interface for me. It’s like, I don’t even care really where it is. So that’s sort of like the basic stuff that I think pretty much everyone should be able to do. (Time 0:20:45)
  • Manage Tokens With APIs And Command Filters
    • Monitor token usage and prefer API access over MCP sessions to save tokens.
    • Use command-line utilities that condense verbose outputs to reduce token consumption during iterative work. Transcript: Brandon Whichard And now there’s some other stuff as you get more into it because the more you use it, the more you’ll learn like, oh, these tokens are going pretty fast. So there’s some optimizations you can do around like, you know, maybe we don’t have time for this today, but like MCP servers are like a big, they take a lot of tokens. There’s like a lot of stuff between them. So it’s like, I started to learn like use API access versus MCPs because it won’t eat up your tokens as well. And then there’s some utilities that actually will even kind of take the command line and kind of sit in front of it. And again, you don’t have to do anything. You just say, use this version, and it will really condense how much text the commands are spinning out, which really give you a way to manage your token. So people are like, if you haven’t done it, you’re like, this is crazy. I would never do all this. (Time 0:22:55)
  • Claude Acts As An On Demand Career Coach Team
    • Claude can serve as an on-demand multidisciplinary team: coach, editor, interviewer, and resume advisor.
    • Example: feed it your LinkedIn, resume, and work docs to run mock interviews and rewrite resumes for target roles. Transcript: Brian Gracely And that’s, and that’s one of the things that I’ve, I’ve found I’ve been, I’ve been digging into more and more is the thing where you, you know, you kind of ask it like, okay, let’s say you, Let’s say you wrote something for work and you were like, okay, like who would be the audience for this thing? And you’re like, all right, well, if, if the, you know, like, you’d be like, okay, cool. Well, suppose you are my boss, what would you think of this thing? Or suppose you’re presenting to an audience of a bunch of people and maybe it’s a mixed batch of like some business people and some technical people or whatever. You’d be like, okay, cool. Give it to me from this perspective. Okay. Now give it to me from this perspective. How would you go about, and, and just the ability to sort of like AB test stuff and to have it take a different perspective than you would normally do. It’s again, one of those things you’re like, yeah, this isn’t, this is no longer searching. This is no longer just like chatting with something. This is like, yeah, I got a whole bunch of experts just inside the box and I just got to know how to like unlock them or how to, you know, ask it to do some things. Brandon Whichard And I think a real tangible example, let’s just give like simple examples. Like, hey, put your resume, put some of your work documents in, give it your LinkedIn and be like, if you know, if you’re in a position in life where you’re looking for another job, I mean, You have a career coach right there, have it read everything. And you can have it be like, you can have it be very nice to you and be like, how can I like maybe, hey, I just want you to touch up my resume, some basic stuff. Or you can have it like pretty, I’ve done like role play. It’s like, you could do kind of like, pretend you’re interviewing me for the job that you want, right? What questions would likely be asked? And then you can sit there and like answer them. And it could be, I mean, it’s like, careful what you ask for, but it’ll tell you like, this wasn’t good or this lead with this. And then you kind of get to the point of like, you know, just to kind of show sometimes how these expand, it’s like, well, then at first you’ll be like, well, I should update my resume based On some of the things that they said. That makes total sense. Right. But then you’re like, wait a minute, why don’t I have Claude go through the whole thing and rewrite it in a way as, cause resumes are a great example of where oftentimes people like they Don’t want, well, some people don’t want to like brag or they don’t want to take credit for everything. It’s like, like you’ll see something like, I worked on a team that did this, but like the hiring manager wants to see like, I led the team and I did everything, right? So, you know, you don’t have to accept all that, but you can have it go through almost as like someone, like, I don’t know, like a coach pumping you up. It’s like, don’t just say you were on the team, say you led this or don’t say you led this, but like say the thing that you specifically did. And it’s like, that kind of stuff is like, again, like everyone’s probably looking for jobs now, or some people are, it’s like very helpful. And again, you do that on cloud code inside a terminal, it’ll start to make the edits and go back and forth with it. (Time 0:25:07)
  • Adopters Gain A Lasting Productivity Exoskeleton
    • Early adopters gain outsized productivity advantages that permanently change their working style.
    • Brandon describes feeling like an ‘exoskeleton’ that lets him deliver much faster, implying long-term workplace divergence. Transcript: Brandon Whichard I’ve had that, that I feel like pretty frequently. And so, you know, just a day to day, and especially in the circles that, that, you know, cause I think everyone’s at a different place and I was there too. Like I sort of was kind of slow or I didn’t adopt it as quick as I wanted, but it’s like, I’ve, you know, I was at lunch with somebody and I was telling them what was going on. And, you know, I felt like I was like, I don’t know. I just kind of became this Claude evangelist. Right. And like what I was finding is like, and it kind of goes back to like so much we talk about is like the human mind tries to reject all new ideas. It doesn’t want to, you know, because we know from evolution wants to protect itself. It doesn’t want to be bombarded. So most of it is like we have a lot of filtering mechanisms in place to like, so we can keep our sanity. Right. And this person was doing the whole thing was like, you know, I’m not a developer. You, you tech people, you’re always talking about this. And he was, he’s a tech person, but he was like, I don’t, I don’t want to do the command line or I have, my company doesn’t let the security stuff. And it’s like, so to where you’re getting at, it’s like, if you haven’t done this at all, like you are putting yourself at such a disadvantage. Like, I’m not even telling you, you have to like it. Like, are you, that is going to work for you? I think it will. I mean, let me say that out, you know, directly. But I think, you know, to your point, like everyone needs to be like downloading one of these agents. We’ve talked a lot about cloud, but if you want to use the other ones, that’s, you know, they’ll get you going. Right. But like, you need to like experience to know like what you’re missing. Right. And to know what other people are coming into the room with. Now, you may decide it doesn’t work for you, but you do. So to your point about like, I think just working in white collar America for, for a while, like you definitely need to have these chefs. And also too, I think there’s a tremendous opportunity. Those of us that sort of like grab onto it, there’s going to be this period of time of adoption where you’re going to look like, and I hate this word. I hate this idea of the 10X employee. Like I am the first to say that doesn’t exist. But like, it’s like I was telling my son or something. He was, it’s like, I feel like sometimes like I just have like, like it’s like an alien, the exoskeleton. Like I’ve walked in, like you’re just a human being walking around and I’m walking around in this giant armor suit where I can just, I can lift boulders, right? It’s just so powerful. And I think it’s really important to everybody, like at least go experience that for what you want. And like, who knows, is there an AI bubble? I almost feel like that’s a separate discussion at this point. It’s like, I don’t know how much people are spending on data centers. I don’t know exactly how it’s going to play out, but I do know no one’s going back. Once you kind of touch this, there’s a group of people that are never going to work the same. (Time 0:30:47)