Getting started
All the screenshots in this book are from Claude Code in the terminal. I’m an engineer, the terminal is where I work. You don’t need to use it. Claude Code has a desktop app: you download it, install it, open it, and start talking to it the same way you’d talk to ChatGPT.
You can get it at claude.ai/download.
That’s the whole setup section.
Once you have it running, start with the manual process that causes you the most pain. The one that costs you time and attention and mistakes regularly, not the one that seems easiest to hand off.
[do we need a how-to-start guide?]
For me, that was conference management. I’m bad with dates and numbers. I was managing 18 events planned for the year, and for each one: booths, speakers, travel, vendor invoices, budgets in different currencies, deadlines, follow-up emails. New sponsorship requests coming in through email, LinkedIn and Slack. Event data spread across Notion, spreadsheets, and my head. The mental effort to keep it all straight was ridiculous. We even considered hiring an event coordinator just to take this off my plate.
That’s exactly why this was the first thing I turned into a workflow. Not because it was a good candidate for automation in some abstract sense. Because it hurt.
When you start from pain, you already know what the workflow needs to do. You know what goes wrong, what takes too long, what you have to repeat every week. That knowledge is what you turn into instructions for the agent.
But pain alone isn’t enough. You also need to be an expert at the process.
This is the first engineering principle: only build workflows around things you already do well.
If you can’t define the steps precisely, you can’t write good instructions for the agent, and you can’t validate whether the agent followed them properly.
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