Transcription
The hype around AI agents and no-code tools is out of control. And I've spent many hours bashing my head against their significant flaws. If you're struggling with these, it's not your fault. There is a much easier way.
The brutal truth is that they all kind of suck. All of them except for one that nobody's even talking about. And this tool is quickly becoming my go-to for building more advanced automations and getting real work done quickly.
Before I get into detail, I want to talk a little bit about the problems with these no-code agent tools. They're basically built on a house of cards. You need to wrestle with API connections, debug mysterious code with zero visibility into what went wrong. And when the platform updates, your entire workflow can break overnight. I learned this the hard way and it cost me hundreds of dollars. So, this promise of a simple drag-and-drop automation just did not match the reality where I was actually spending more time fixing the automation than the automation was even saving me.
I was recently watching a YouTube video where someone was building an automation that would search the web and send an email summary update each day. It went on and on with all these steps writing JSON code. And I kept telling myself, "There is a much easier way to do this." And it turns out there was.
With Claude Code, I was able to create that same automation in less time than it took me to watch that video on double speed. Not only that, but I have complete control over this automation, and I don't need to pay one of those fancy services every time I run it. Let me show you how I did it.
The first thing I did is I just opened up a new terminal window. And if you're new to this, please don't be afraid of the terminal window. It's just another way to access these chatbots. If you're on a Mac, an easy way to find it is just Command + Spacebar and then type in "terminal." And there you go. You've got a new terminal window.
And then I fired up Claude Code by simply writing "Claude." C-L-A-U-D-E. I hit enter. You have to have Claude set up. I'm going to show you how to do that at the end of the video. And in fact, I have all of it in an ebook. I create an ebook for every single video that I create. There's over 155 now, available instantly to anybody who joins my Patreon that supports this channel. This channel is 100% supported by you, Patreons. So, thank you so much.
In this week's ebook, it has every single code and step that you need to copy and paste into terminal to get Claude Code set up and running. Again, this is just copy and paste. Super easy. Once you've got it installed, you are ready to rip. I love this thing. I love seeing this little bot show up right here because I know it's time to get some work done.
"Yeah."
So, yesterday I fired this up and I asked it, "Hey, can you search the internet?" I wanted to make sure because not long ago you couldn't search the internet with it. And it says, "Yes, absolutely, it can search the internet." And so, I just did another quick test. "What are the most recent generative AI updates from Google in the last 48 hours?" And it pulled a bunch of stuff in there. Then I said, "Hey, can you send this to me in an email?" and it said, "I can draft an email, but I can't send email."
So, all I had to say is, "I bet you could create a script that would run and search for these and send me that every single day." And it says, "Yeah, I could definitely do that." So, here we are building out that automation, just using natural language. Again, once you've got Claude set up, you can just start talking with it and letting it do all of the work, all of that creation of JSON files, figuring out APIs. Let Claude Code do it, man. You don't need to figure that stuff out.
I gave it my email address and answered a few questions here. Uh, you'll see how we iterated on this, but it really just walked through, created this Python script, and uh, basically got this thing up and running very quickly. I had to do a little bit of back and forth. Had to follow its instructions because there were a few things that it needed to do to be able to use my Gmail, to be able to have that script access my Gmail. And it even created a complete markdown file of setup instructions of how to get this thing up and running.
But I said, "You know what? Why don't you walk me through setting this up?" I didn't even want to open that. I want the AI to do the work. It said, "Sure, let me help you set this up step by step." First, it checked and installed any of the dependencies that it needed. You don't need to understand any of that. It's just loading in different pieces of software that it needs to run this script.
Then it walked me through creating a Gmail app password, including exactly what websites to go to and what it was looking for. And anytime I got stuck, I could be like, "Hey, I'm not seeing that." And it just helps me get right on the path back to creating this automation. I dropped that stuff in there. It sent me an email. It set up this cron job, which you'll find out is not the best way to do it. It then walked me through some permissions I needed to add in my macOS in order to get this script to run on a daily basis.
There were a few things I didn't understand. Guess what? Claude Code is your buddy. It says, "No problem. Let me walk you through it." We did some quick debugging. It was really amazing how it could crunch through any of these errors. Even when it had me copying and pasting things back and forth, I wasn't exactly sure how it should work. And it walked me through exactly what to put where. Really simple. You just got to follow the directions. And within a few minutes, I would say less than 10-20 minutes, I had this beautiful test email in my inbox.
But you might be saying to yourself, "Oh, I've heard Claude Code is so expensive to run. Claude is super expensive." Whatever. This costs less than $4 to create. And we're not even done with all the bells and whistles this thing added.
And before I get into those, you might be asking yourself, "What are these big spikes where I was spending closer to $20 a day building an incredible SaaS template?" And this is a product I'm really excited to share with you. By the time you're watching this, it'll probably be available in the description below. This is a thing of beauty. I am super happy about this. I built it in just a few days. I had spent a lot of money buying these different SaaS templates. This is exactly what I needed. This is what I'm going to be using to launch all different types of startup ideas that I have. Takes care of all the stuff that every startup needs. This user authentication, which is a pain in the butt, and these Stripe payments. So, check that out if that's something you're interested in. There's a link in the description. You can learn more about that. That's what these big spikes are. Me geeking out, creating an amazing SaaS template. But back to our daily email update automation.
And there are a couple things you need to watch out for. Number one is you want to tell Claude Code exactly what folder you want it to build your script in so that it's all in one place and not scattered randomly wherever Claude Code decides. You can do that very easily by creating a folder, probably for all your code, and then inside of there for each different project and automation. You can see I've created this one, this "Google AI updates," where all of this stuff lives. And once you create that folder, all you need to do is right-click on it. And then if you're on a Mac, you need to hold Option and then copy this path name. And when you copy that into Claude Code, you tell it, "Hey, we're going to be working in this folder." That way it knows to put everything in that folder and not just randomly throughout your computer.
Quick side note there is you can use Claude Code to help you organize your computer. If you have a bunch of different files kind of spread out in different places, you can say, "Hey, I want to move all the files with this name over here. I want to rename all of these files XYZ." It can do a lot of powerful things when it comes to just organizing the files on your computer.
And that brings me to another big important topic, which is context engineering, which is just basically making sure that you are keeping tabs of all the data that you're creating with these AI tools and you're organizing it, keeping it up to date in various ways using AI like Claude Code to do that. That is a very powerful skill. I've got another video that goes into context engineering for project management. I'm going to link to that right now.
So, some breaking news while I was getting ready to publish this video. Anthropic just released this Claude on the web, which is really exciting. Um, a lot of the stuff we're going to be going through and talking through on today's video, you can now do directly in the web version. So, here's, you know, the Claude you probably are used to, but there's this new "Code" section here that you can fire up, connect things to GitHub, and do everything in the cloud. They also added these "Skills," which are these folders of scripts and resources that Claude can load dynamically to improve performance. It's important to note what we're talking about today is all living on your computer. And there are some advantages to doing things on your computer. There are some advantages to doing things in the cloud with this web version. So, make sure to subscribe. I'm going to be covering this stuff in detail in future weeks after I have a chance to play with it a little bit more. Okay, back to the program.
Some other really cool things that I learned by building this email automation is that you can push Claude Code to really improve upon what you've created. So, the way that it had built it originally was by using this cron job, which basically just runs this script once a day. But on my laptop, if my laptop's asleep, it's not going to run that job. So, I worked back and forth with Claude Code to improve it. It said, "Hey, there's this thing called `launchd`, which is already in the Mac." And what it does is it will just naturally run this software as soon as my computer opens in the morning. It'll only run it once a day. And if the laptop's closed at 9:00 a.m., it's going to run it as soon after 9:00 a.m. as the laptop wakes up. So, I had no idea that that was just native, living in my computer. So that's just one more major point towards Claude Code versus these drag-and-drop tools that would never be able to do that. These other tools are going to require you to learn a ton about all these different API endpoints, etc. Claude Code can do all that research, figure that stuff out for you, figure out the simplest flow to get this done.
But you might be saying to yourself, "But I'm a visual person and I love these visual layouts of these automations that I see in these different tools." Well, no problem because Claude Code can see these different visual documents as well. I'm just going to take a screengrab of this. I've created a new folder for this automation and I've dropped that screenshot right into that folder. I'm going to grab the path name. I'm in my terminal firing up Claude. Then inside Claude, I'm just saying, "Hey, in the following folder, I have a screenshot of this automation. I've described that automation. I've said, 'Let's recreate this and save all of our work in that folder.'" And here we go. "I'll help you recreate this automation."
So, it's going to start asking me for all these different things that it needs. Access to my Google Workspace, access to my ChatGPT OpenAI API keys, the same stuff that you have to gather for these other AI tools, these other no-code AI tools. And then it will just start working through testing it itself. So you don't have to be the one sitting there testing those workflows. So you can take screenshots of the different automations that you may be struggling with in these different AI agent tools. You can take screenshots from other YouTube videos and describe what they're trying to do and put that into Claude Code to recreate those. You can sketch this stuff out on a napkin. You can even ask it to create some sort of a visual representation of what its plan of attack is, if that visual interface is really helpful to you.
But the ebook I created for this is over 20 pages long. It takes everything that we've discussed here to the next level, including the step-by-step instructions for installing Claude Code, which are right here. Not very difficult at all for Windows or Mac. You just need to copy and paste these. Then it gets into 20 other different workflows that you can work through and a bunch of other different ways you can push Claude Code to the limit when it comes to building these automations. And guess what? Now you're on the threshold of becoming a true AI coder and building your own SaaS empire.
Again, check out this SaaS template where you can start to take these automations and then put them out there into the world where people can start to pay for them. Again, this ebook and over 155 are all available instantly to anybody who supports this channel on Patreon. I've got another video here all about using Claude Code for project management and context engineering. Check that video out. I will see you over there.
"Make your dreams come true."