Transcription
In a recent video, I showed you how we built this PKA demo folder here. So, this is essentially just a folder that we created using Claude where we ended up created a personal knowledge base with an inbox with a team of agents and all this and even having an interface just built for ourselves this way. So, this is the current state of it. And if you haven't seen the video, feel free to watch it afterwards. It's there's no need to watch it to what I'm showing you today. But if you want to get to the same stage, you can watch the previous video. I will link it in the description below.
And today, I want to show you two things. First, how you back up your local folders so you can actually be sure that nothing gets lost, but also how you can access it from different devices this way and even use Claude to access this local folder and work on it. So, let's dive right into this because it's pretty easy actually.
As we are working here on a local folder, we can use cloud services that you might already have. iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive. So all these services allow you to have a local version of them. In my case, as I created this on desktop, it's already synchronized with my iCloud Drive. However, as you can see, there's nothing else when it comes to my real businesses on desktop. This is where I actually use Dropbox. So we have here the team paperless movement Dropbox where we have all the folders where we work together as a team. So for example administration accounting right this is where I upload the invoices and the accounting team can take over from here.
But the thing that I want to point out here is that even that it is Dropbox and it is online. I can have this local version of Dropbox going on which allows me now to decide what should get downloaded and what not. Because if I right click, I can decide make available offline or make online only because the thing is we have I think more than four terabytes of data in the meantime in this thing just for the video editing. If you look into the YouTube thing here, there are different channels and that's the main channel now. And since January 2025, this is the folder, but there's also the archive. See this all going all the way back to 2023 where there are all these videos that I made on this channel that you're watching right now and obviously this takes up a lot of storage and instead of deleting it I offloaded it from my local machine and make it online only and in case I would need it in the future I can simply make it available offline.
So that's when we look into my personal Dropbox folder. There's this key elements folder and this is my personal assistant. That's my personal PKA system that you have here that I'm building and that you might have seen in other videos where I shared parts of it. But obviously this is very personal. That's why I created this PKA demo for you that replicates just exactly what I'm doing and how I build things up. At the same time, there's also the Larry folder. This is actually the AI team that you know you know Larry and the other animals that I'm using in the company who is working for my AI core and helps me coding and all these things they are in a separate folder and I'm launching them separately as I want to keep things more separate this way and this is exactly how I'm safe and sound having it set up this way.
This being said, if I open now my Larry folder in VS Code, and if you're now confused what this is, I made a video about this, it is essentially just the tool that I use, which is for free. Instead of using Obsidian, this is what I'm using. I have the convenience to have several terminals open, all working on the same folder, and I have perfect control over the folder. Nothing gets changed, unlike in Obsidian.
Another big advantage is that in here I can connect it to a repo. And now you might if you never heard about this you might get confused. So I will make this simple. You might have heard about GitHub already. And this is something that coders used uh in the past a lot obviously and it is still the main purpose uh to use this. However, this also perfectly works with your agent setup. And why would you use something like GitHub in addition to using something like Dropbox or G Drive? Because you already have the backup. Well, the big difference is here I have versioning. So this means whenever I have any changes on my team or even also the the changes inside my knowledge base and so on, those get versioned and I need to commit and push that's how it's called to my repo which is on GitHub. So essentially you're just uploading things to your cloud storage. Okay. And the thing is here I can visualize this in this way. Here I can always go back to any sessions. So you see how many commits I did and I created to the very first thing initial commit it was 11th February where I created the very first Larry agent setup and what this allows me is to roll things back if things are not working correctly but also there's not even always a need to roll back because you can tell your Claude hey a week ago things worked perfectly but now things go off rail why is this and this is where you allow now Claude to go backwards in time to and each individual commit and push is the full database that you had at this point. So it has the full context. It can look into this and find everything that was was set up and can compare it with your current situation and then extract something from the past that worked to fix something that is currently there. So it's not about rolling back and losing all the information, but it is more of a track record of all the incremental changes that you made over time. And this is why I would recommend to use something like GitHub in addition to a cloud service that just backs these things up. And obviously you can also have with cloud services versioning and so on. But it's not so easy for Claude now to go backwards and find it. It is just Claude perfectly knows because it knows how code works and how all this works. It can perfectly live in there and perfectly understand how to go backwards via GitHub.
And also the other beautiful thing is that using VS Code, the moment something gets changed in your folders, you get these indicators. They just show there's something that changed. This is the file that just changed and so on. And this all looks very complex if I look at this, but it is not. If you do this with your own codebase, you will perfectly understand what you see here because it is just the typical folders that you would have also in your finder. So if I open up the finder, you see it is exactly the replication again. Automation, automation, BKM, BKM, and these are the subfolders and so on. And that's the same thing that we have here, but visually presented in a different way. If you're using VS Code and you wonder why does my things look different? Well, in VS Code, you can download extensions too. And I in for my case, I downloaded a theme, you know, and the the individual icons. I installed a VS Code icons things and so on. It doesn't matter if you want to get started and not getting overwhelmed. That's no need for you to use, but you can go fancy. You can make light mode and all these things.
So, I just clicked on this and this is the source control. Whenever I or the AI team does any changes on my folder content, they will all line up here. So these are all the changes that were made. And if you open this, you see that this got deleted. So this is really very detailed information about what's going on in your folder and gives you much more control of what go is going on. And I mentioned already commit and push. And all it does is you commit to these changes and you push it to GitHub to your cloud storage. So what you essentially did actually is you created a new version that is now there. So you see now we are currently in this uncommitted changes 147 uncommitted changes. So all I would need to do now I open up Claude and I will say commit and push all changes in repo. So you don't need to say this. The reason why I'm saying this, I'm working on several repos with this team. So it doesn't get confused what I mean. So uh it knows it is meant this Larry repo here because it's called Larry. And it will now do this. Okay. So Larry is now checking out the all the changes. You see it's now committing all this. See and now there is sync changes. So it will even do this. And all these are just done by the commands. And now you see it pushed it automatically. The push was the sync button here and now changes are all gone. This is empty. It moved everything to the top and now we are in this current check out here.
There's also the option to actually check out individual points in time to roll things back. Or there's even branching. So if I want to experiment things with my AI team, I could create a new branch that runs in parallel to this in order to experiment and then merge it into my actual version. But this is already more advanced things that you can do. The beautiful thing is all the things that I told you here is so easy to do because all you need to do is to talk to Claude because it's running inside VS Code. It has direct connection to your repo and to this connection and knows perfectly what to do in order to do this. And that's the big difference to using it inside Obsidian. There you don't have it. And that might be one of the reasons why people use Obsidian and VS Code in parallel to have these synchronizations options there too.
So I hope you get the point about the repo and I will show you now how to set this up. As for my personal one, I don't have a repo set up yet. Okay, see there's nothing. If I go here, there's nothing. So I could now click initialize repository. It shows you how to connect things together. And that's where I don't walk you through how you sign up to GitHub and set this up because Claude will help you to do that and is really straightforward. So all I need to do now I launch now Claude in my personal PKA system here and I will just tell it to set up a repo for it.
One thing before I move forward to understand is you can set up a local repo, a repository as you have seen, right? That's something that can be just local only and you already have this versioning without even the need to sync it to GitHub. But I prefer to have it synced to GitHub online because this way I have another backup of the things going on. And as I show you later, it makes this even easier to access from other devices. So, I could click here the button now, but I want Larry to do that. So, you see it's actually working this way. Please set up a repo for me. I think, you know, it's very vague and for these videos, I really want to make it as vague so you actually see how far AI gets. And as I'm here in a German version, my PKA is in German and I'm communicating in German. It asks me now questions in German. So it's just essentially asking me if it should create a git here locally, if it should create a new one online or anything else. Okay, so that's exactly it because if you're too vague, it will ask you follow-up questions. And if you really want to be sure, you would just use shift tab and switch to plan mode. You can also hit /pl in order to get in this mode. And then you say, for example, please set up a repo for me. And I also can say switch to English for this session. So when I share anything it will understand see and now as we are in plan mode it starts already exploring and so on. All this we don't need for this example. So I will just tell it init repo here and we'll sync later. See it runs now git init. So it is in this folder and it makes a git init and it calls it key element and it says now lots of large data that shouldn't be tracked. Let me set up the repo with a proper git ignore. So the git ignore is just information of the things that shouldn't get uploaded or the versioning being tracked. So this is not for you to track the images and things like this because as you can see here there's already more than 8 GB in there. In the archives it's 10 GB. That's not what GitHub is made for. That's where I need to use something like Dropbox or G Drive to keep things in sync and backed up properly. But when it comes to improving my agents or building the interface like this and you want to change something over time and you're not sure, this is where this becomes really a good thing to have because now you can change things and roll things back if they don't work the way you like. But also the same applies to the AI agents that you that we create in this. Yes. So now it initialized it. See it added now all the changes in here for initialization. Now it asks me if it should initialize and I said yes and now it's initialized but again still it is local.
If I go now to my GitHub and you look at this site there are quite a few repos that I already uploaded and they are all private. They are just to me and there are different experiments and tools that I created and so on. And we see here is Larry. If I go in here, as you can see, it is just the same folder structure. And that's what people then think it's so complicated if you download these open-source things to work for you. And essentially, all they provide to you is just some folders with some files in there. And this is where I always would be careful. You never know what was created there if you start using it, if it is just a niche thing. But here it is backed up this way. But what we don't see here is the key elements. There's nothing. So I can go back here and say now sync to remote and it might do it now. And it does it now for me. So you see now it pushed it automatically to this repo because what it does it realized I'm authenticated as Tom Solid already and it created a repo for me. So if we go back now to my thing here and I reload, we see now here my key elements and there we go. Everything is in here and this is the folder structure. It already pushed it up. And now moving forward, it will create new versions that I can then check in the history here. But I never go to GitHub directly. I usually only interact inside here. I can check them the different versions and so on.
So what's important here in order to make it so easy to work it it it makes it all for you. If you work with Claude inside VS Code it will install a GitHub CLI. Don't worry if you get confused here. It just allows it to much easier interact with your GitHub and that's it. And this is how you now have versioning set up for your local folder.
So for the sake of this video, I show you now how we can do the same for our personal knowledge management demo. We said it's already backed up in the iCloud. So I can be sure that if anything happens here, I still have the backup inside my iCloud. However, as I said for the versioning, we cannot right-click services new terminal at folder. And now I'm inside this folder with this terminal. I just show you the same thing that we just did in VS Code, but now just in a terminal, just next to to this folder. So I show you it works there too. And I can say init a Git repo. And now you see it did it here too. It created this .git folder. It's done. Want me to create an initial commit with the existing files? Yes, please. And now that's the thing. We are not doing anything online. It's not connected to any cloud service yet. It is just local. And what this allows you is to have local versioning of your files here. Again, if you run into any issues with your agents and you feel there's something going wrong, now you now have the option to go backwards in time to find exactly the spot where it still worked. And now it done. It initialized it. It created this git ignore again. And all these details here, they just keep track of this local folder. And now again I can say sync to remote. And now let's see what it will say. See no remote configured yet. Want to create one. Public or private repo name. Private doesn't matter. For the repo name it will use the PKA demo. And now it created this repo. It gives me the link where the repo is accessible and then commit and push. But you see what is missing here is the easy overview of my git status. The changes they are not committed yet. So I would need to ask now Claude and so on and that's where VS Code becomes so helpful.
I will show you opening up this PKA demo here again we have now the same thing see archive and so on it shows here and now we see already it is already down here the main branch we see here there's the first commit initial commit we have here access to the changes all this is already set up something we haven't had before it is now there because we did it in this terminal so you see there is no difference it is really just again local folder information.git which is not showing here. You can set this up in the settings if you want to see it, but I don't need to see it. And this is where it keeps track of all these things. And this is what makes the VS Code really the all-in-one solution for me to not only create my knowledge base and so on and have access to the folders, but even manage these things like versioning via Git.
Now I tell you another advantage that you have now having it set up this way because now you can actually use Claude desktop and now you might have seen already in the Claude code here a confusing thing down here where we already see my key elements Larry my AI core these are the repos that I can access from within here and that's where people get confused where and prefer co-work also co-work is just Claude code in a much more simplistic gray. And if you switch to code here, you can now access not only the repo but also have the plan mode that I showed you previously. So now I can have access from anywhere else to my repo. This means I can now also open up my mobile phone, open up the Claude app, go to code, and here we are. I create a new session and now I can say here I can go down here and now I can pick again the different repos that I was working in. So I can use this one. And now it works inside this repo online not on my local folder. However, if I change anything here. So I can say create MD file with test text in it and provide in owner's inbox. Well inbox but it get it. So you will see now that it accesses now the repo on GitHub. You can open this up to see the details. See it tries to find the things and now he created it and now he commits and pushes it to the GitHub online. Okay. So if I open up the local folder here you see there is nothing yet there. However, if we go online and we look into this we see now here that there's this file that was created and it had recent pushes and it's not appearing here and all this becomes very confusing. Now if you compare everything with each other. So now I can say compare and pull request and here is the the file that was created. See I can now review and bring this in. And this is all over complicated. Again let's open this up inside my VS code. I see here in Tom's inbox there's also nothing. So I need to on on mobile say create PR which is pull request and all this becomes too cumbersome. That's why it's much easier to forget about all this uh you know trying to access your repo this way and so on because there's actually a much easier way. I will just be in my VS code working on this local folder. And now I just say here slash remote and go to this remote control. And you see now remote control is active. And you don't need to do anything. All you need to do is now go back on my mobile, go to code, reload and you see there is already the remote control conversation coming up and here we go. The whole history of the conversation that we had here in the terminal is on my mobile. And now I can interact with my local Claude from my phone directly. And I say hi and you see it immediately pops up here. And now I can work on my local folder via my phone. And this is how I do it actually. So all I need to do I have the GitHub set up so it's actually syncing properly locally. I never had any issues to go to GitHub and and merge things together this way. I work just on my local folders if I need to have access to my local folders. I would do it this way using remote control and you can have open several terminals all in different remote control sessions that you can switch on your mobile app of Claude in order to access your local folders. And this is where I currently run this on my main machine, but I also have a Mac Mini here. I just didn't see the need right now to set it up because it works perfectly for me. But if you want to have access all the time, you can go to a Mac Mini or even a VPS, a virtual server, something. I don't I don't care actually to be honest. I just want to have these things local and set it up this way. Set up the remote control. And now I can perfectly access these terminals from there.
So what's your takeaway from this video? Well, while in the previous video I showed you how to set up your PKA and have a local folder and that is all you need to have a local folder, obviously you want to have things backed up properly. I showed you the easy way that actually is already very sufficient using a cloud storage like iCloud, Dropbox, G Drive, OneNote, you you name it to have it run locally thing and then you have access to it. This way also I could now have my Mac Mini set up and have Dropbox installed there and just have now my folder opened on Mac Mini and then they can work on parallel. I can access this same folder from both places and both work on the local version of this folder. So this is how you would share the things between devices if you need to.
Then I showed you in this video how to set up a Git repo which allows you on top of your backup that you already have with the cloud storage to have on top versioning of your setup right whenever you change anything on your interface that you've built or any changes on the team that you made or anything like this. And you have full control over time letting AI go backwards to figure out what was happening and bring things back to work. That's another layer of security whenever you build up these folders. I told you that you can have this perfectly local only. So if you for example have just Dropbox, have it here and have it set up on a Mac Mini and you have the Git repo installed locally, it works perfectly too. No need to push this to Git. I also showed you that you can sign up for free to GitHub to have an account there and let Claude create an external remote version of this Git and then you have now full control over this repo that you even can access Claude code on Claude desktop on your mobile but as you have seen things get a bit confusing this way so that's why I don't care about these options I rather have it locally open I use VS Code I use the / remote command if I need to access it from a mobile device and this works perfectly for me and no other things are needed.
So let me know in the comments below if this is a way how you actually set up these local folders too for yourself and in the next video I will show you how you can build up persistent memory for your AI team inside these folders so they not only keep in mind what you said but they keep self-improving themselves over time. That will be a really interesting video. So if you haven't subscribed yet, make sure to subscribe now or join us in my.com to stay up to date. And there we also have workshops and weekly coaching to help you to make your things work for your version too. So either I see you inside the community or in the next.