Transcription
If you use Claude, you can build an AI agent. And in this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to build your first AI agent with Claude code. And even if you're experienced, I'm going to show you my latest system, which is the best way that I've ever found to do this. Step one is instructions. Step two is give access to our tools. And step three is to teach our agent. So you save more time, make more money. It is literally that simple. And you don't need any coding experience. And at the end of this video, you're going to have a working AI agent that will make you more productive, helping you build anything you imagine.
And if you're new here, my name is Jack. I built in some my last tech startup with a gazillion customers. Now I'm building my own AI companies and I just share here the stuff that actually works. So if you haven't yet, grab that beautiful coffee and let's dive straight in.
So your very first AI agent, let's understand what it is because if you don't understand what an AI agent is, you're never going to build one properly. Loads of people skip it and trip up because they don't understand this. So an AI agent actually only has four parts. The first one is its memory. So these it's everything that it remembers. It could be emails that you sent last year, meetings that we had before, information from experts. This is its brain if you like. And if you can come down here, you can see for example essentially it's just what has it learned? Standing facts and lessons. It's picked up and it lives in something called memory.m MD. The MD just means a markdown file. It's just a file with no formatting. That is it. If you understand that, you literally understand 90% of Cody.
All right. Second thing we've got is this loop. This is how your AI agent behaves. The heartbeat essentially. Think about it like this. There's a difference. A chatbot waits for you to say something. An agent prompts itself. It looks at where it is. It decides the next action. It takes it. Then it loops back over and over until the goal is done. This is the thing that separates it and actually makes it an agent. This loop, this way of it does an action. It sees the results of that. It asks itself questions until the end result is actually done.
Third thing is tools. So this is answers the question well what can it do? So what can it connect to? Can it send us emails? Can it create calendar appointments? Can it do deeper research on the internet? Can it find out different informations? These are the more tools that we give it relevant to our world, the more capabilities that it has, which is a really really exciting thing.
Then finally, we have context. Context, if you think about this, these are basically the rules. They answer the question, what should it do? Written by you. And we create those for every single project that we do. And if you understand those four things in the language I just yapped at you, you're already way, way, way ahead of most people on the planet.
Now, with that in mind, we can connect these and plug our entire world into these AI agents. Slack, notion, calendar, Gmail, LinkedIn, firecrawl, Instagram. There's so many things that we can connect, which is what makes them so freaking powerful.
Now, why do I care about this? Why why should I even be listening to this? This is really important. Okay, the AI agent market is expected to exceed $50 billion within the next four years. There are several people making well over a million a year using AI agents. I know some of them personally. And then we have the degree of knowledge work. But the most important thing outside of these examples is the fact that agents create what is known as leverage which is exceptionally powerful whether you want to do something for your own productivity system or your own individual business. Crucially 5 years ago building software needed a team but today one person agents can ship what dozens of people used to do. For example I don't have a technical background but I build software for my clients. I build software for my community that does incredible things um that only 5 10 years ago would have been inconceivable to do. This is what this physically unlocks. It gives you those capabilities to achieve that.
And this takes us onto the biggest misconception I see. And they would call this the driver and the race car. Okay. So these are two things that people confuse all the time. the model. In other words, this is Claude Gemini chat GPT is the driver and where that driver is, in other words, the race car is what we'd call the IDE, which is the integrated development environment. That is something like for example VS code or cursor or anti-gravity or what we call the terminal or claude code. So claude code is also a model and also claude is an app at the same time. So you have the model powering the car, the driver again that could be chat GBC cla and then you have where coding happens which could be the claude app, it could be viscode, it could be all these different locations. So we could use any one of these things here but use any number of models that we want. So really important distinction to basically understand why this connects the way that it does.
Now to show you how powerful these AI agents can be, I'm going to show you something that clients pay thousands and thousands of dollars for and you're going to have it functional by the end of this video. And to do that, we need to download only one application. And here I'm talking about Claude Cub. Both the app and then we've got the actual models that run inside it. If this is looking like Spanish, you're thinking, Jack, I have no idea what all this stuff is. I've got a full master class uh down below, I'll put a link for it in the community that takes you through how to use this memory systems, uh Hermes, Claudebot, building anything, design systems, uh compliance, and also monetization with this stuff. So, I'll put a link down below if that's helpful for you. But to get the Claude Code app, all you need to do is literally come in this link right here. And all you're going to literally do is just download it onto your computer. To use it, you need only uh the basic subscription, which is I believe only around $20 a month, and you'll be able to do Claude Code. There are free alternatives. You could go and download something called anti-gravity, which is excellent, and you can get started with that completely for free as well if you prefer. And the same principles apply in both.
Now, what we're going to build together because I wanted to create something that once you know the process of building it, you can effectively build anything that you imagine. And this is just scratching the surface. So, we're going to build today an outbound agent. Okay? So, it's Monday morning. This agent, what it's going to do first of all is scrape our website, our own personal business website. Okay? To get a brand identity, a brand brief. And what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead online and we're going to find 20 rich leads based on our own specific clients. So let's say that we sell pool cleaning services or we're lawyers or whatever it is. It's going to ahead and find for us 25 specific clients based on everything that we offer. What we're then going to be able to go ahead and do is we're going to get a beautiful HTML document that's going to have the business. It's going to have their contact information. It's going to have a custom LinkedIn message that we can send. It's going to have a custom email that we can send based on what's actually viral and working. Then what it's going to go ahead and do once it's completed that is it's then going to connect to our Google calendar and actually insert in our diary next week all the times that we're going to be working on the specific outreach. So literally all you've done the AA agent's done everything. It's found the leads. It's got their contact information and it's added it all to our calendar and all we have to do is review and send. We're going to build this entire thing. So, you get these beautiful calendar slots. And if I want, this can even go ahead and literally set those appointments up for me. Honestly, it literally is, and this is what this channel's about. It's whatever you imagine, we can effectively build. And which is why this is so so cool.
So, we need to do this only across a couple of steps. And so, we're going to use what I call the blast framework, which is a universal instruction manual that you can give to Claude Code for any project you're ever doing. and it will walk you through all the specific things that it needs to do to hit your desired outcome. And all you ever do is copy and paste it and then you're going to be ready to rock and roll. So the first thing to do is come to this link. I'll put it down below for you in the school community. So you can grab that completely for free and effectively this is our universal claw.md protocol. Okay. All you're going to do is paste the prompt blow into claw code at the start of any project. Claude's going to ask you five discovery questions. Then it's going to create something called a claude.md file. These are just the instructions for CL. Basically, it's going to project Constitution at the root. It's going to follow what we call the blast protocol, the and the architecture navigation tools build. It is beautiful and something I've been playing with for a long time. So, I' I've refined it quite a lot. So, effectively this the first thing that it does when you give it is what we call an initialization protocol. Okay? So, it's basically going to create a couple different files. It's task plan, its findings, its progress, and its decision. So, if we're building something together and it says, "Great, Jack. actually I don't really want to target these specific customers. We record that in decisions so we can look at that later and as the project evolves we you it helps us guide it in a more structured way.
So once it's finished the initialization it goes through the blast framework. So to start with the blueprint which is vision and logic effectively what is the north star which is so important and the biggest hack if you take anything away from this video let it be this which is what is your stated intention. My stated intention is what I want to be true at the end of this is cuz you can overs subscribe AI but just tell it the end result and it may find a better and fast way to get there. Then we go through links. So what are all the tools it physically needs to make this happen? We have then after that we have the architecture which is as we know LLMs are probabilistic. In other words, if you ask it 100 times you get 100 different answers. So we want to be specific about that. We have the style. So how do you want it to physically look? Cuz style is important. And finally the trigger in terms of how will this actually be. So that's the overview and it's got some beautiful operating principles down here. And this by the way these operating principles are based on a gentleman called Andre Karpathy, one of the founders of Open AAI and they're called the Karpathy principles. Effectively the four or five biggest issues that sit with models. So we include this in our prompt to make sure that it's data first. It does surgical changes. In other words, only touches what we ask it to. It's simplicity first. So minimal logic, no speculative abstractions. It's going to be goal driven. So every change is measured against our northstar, which is really, really important. And per task rhythm, so you can explore, plan, code, commit, no skipping the process, and then we have some good file structure there.
And all you're honestly going to do, guys, is come to this document, control A on all of it. Crl + C, and then we're going to head over to Claude. Now, what I'd recommend that you do is pick a project environment for this. I could just make it in the chat, but ideally, if you have a project, think of this as just your folder. So, I can click on add a folder. And as you can see, I have folders. So, I'm going to come down here. I'm going to call this one leads 2.0. Why 2.0? I have no idea. But leads 1.0 didn't exist, but this one is really cool. So, this is how powerful it is. It even skipped level one. Now, when this is done, I'm going to come down and see what model we're using. We can check our usage down in the bottom rightand corner, which is cool. So, I've got everything I want here, which is decent. Extra high is probably the best way to go about this, just because Mac sometimes can send it around in circles a little bit. And then when you come back over to Claude, simply paste all that information in.
So, now it's going to ask us the question. So let's give it the first thing we want. What is the singular outcome that means that we won? Cool. So uh this is what I would like to happen. I would like a beautiful HTML dashboard. I want you to go to my website. I want you to extract the HTML. I want you to extract the brand identity. And then from that I want you to build for me a beautiful HTML dashboard in that style. Then what I want you to do is go ahead and find for me 20 leads um that'll be perfect for me. And I'll tell you what they are. and I'd like it to grab for me their email address, any social media profiles that exist on their business. Then what I would like to happen is I would like a column for a LinkedIn outreach message. I would like a column for a email draft. And when all that's done, I'd like you then to access my calendar and time book out next week a few hours where I can action those emails, do a bit of research, and actually go ahead and do some cool stuff. That's what I would like to happen. So, we've explained our end goal, and we just send that off.
So this leads us very nicely on to step two of our blast framework which is connecting claude to our world. So there's a couple of things that we're going to need to connect to. Okay, four in fact we need fire crawl to do the search which is optional but it will enhance it. We want ampify to scrape and then we want the Google suite. Sounds complicated actually dead straightforward. So what I tend to use for internet search is something called fire crawl but let me start with the Google suite. So on the plus down here come down to you'll see plugins you got connectors click on manage connectors. Okay. Then effectively this just helps you connect to your world. So if I want to connect for example Google, I type in Google and you can see it just pops up there. If I want to connect Google Drive for example, I'm going to disconnect this just so you can see exactly how this works. I'll disconnect. So then to connect it, I'm going to come down and type in Google. You can see Google Calendar is not connected. So we click on this guy. Then we click on connect. We'll open up a brand new window. You pick the email that you want. We go ahead and we approve what this looks like. And then we should be fully connected to Gmail. And we can now ask it any question you want to within Claude, which is awesome. We go back and then we're done, which is great. So, we do the exact same process if you haven't already for Gmail. Now, we've done calendar. As you can see, mine is connected.
But then, what if we want to use something like Fire Crawl, which will basically cut our cost down massively by about 80% and it's designed to search and get information, especially if you want to extract things like brand identity. So, what I do for Firecrawl is you need to add in a custom MCP. So, let me show what that looks like. And this is a great skill to learn if you ever search for something and you don't see that. You see I type in firecrawl. It doesn't exist. So sometimes you want to connect to things that you just can't find that. And this is helps us do that beautifully. Okay. So when you can't find it, you can click X off that for example. You click on plus add in custom connector which basically means if it exists we can probably connect to it. Let's name the name which is going to be firecraw. And then we just need to give it a unique URL with our key. That's all we got to do. So all I'm going to do is literally I'm on firecraw here. Here's my API key. It's free to create an account here. But if I come over to say for example this page here and you can grab this. You can also speak to chat GBT accord and say, "Hey, I want to connect to this MCP. What is the right link?" That's literally all you need to do. You come back over and the reason I'm showing you this because when you know how to add custom connectors, you can connect anything that you want to. It's that simple. Then all we got to do is replace this with our API key. So I come back over, come over here, and I literally just copy this bad boy. I come back and then I just replace it. You click on add and then you'll see that it's all populated there which is fantastic. And then we do the exact same thing with appy. If you haven't added appy yet, we come back over. You can see mine's already been added in. It's a custom connection. It's the exact same process. Appify is I would describe our willy wonkers of scrapers. Appify is the thing that will let us scrape Google maps and the internet and Instagram and Tik Tok, anything you could possibly imagine. And it's completely free to get started. Then in Appify, all you do is click settings in the bottom left. And then you'll see here you click API and integrations. And once again, you copy API key, then head back over. And now we've connected our world. We just confirm all the stuff that we want there. Yep, that sounds great. Let's use firecrawl to do the scraping. Um the qualified leads, what you could do is also check their website as well as use ampify if you find you can get further information. That'd be wonderful. Email, that sounds great. LinkedIn data sounds awesome. I'd love to understand some personal things about them so that I could actually craft a unique outreach message. I think that'd be wonderful. there's no need to book um meetings with them, but I would just like to diary block out maybe for Monday and Tuesday next week just based on each of the individual businesses um some time for me to go ahead and work on that and make that decision based on the information that I've got and just use my connected account, the one that's connected to this account, please. Um and then once you've done that, I'm going to give you the information that I want you to go and get for the brand identity of the dashboard. I would like you to go ahead to glido.com and find that brand identity and then build me a beautiful HTML dashboard in that style. And now we've answered the second question and this is really cool. All you have to do is yap. But we're following a very clear structure. Now GL.com is the thing that I'm using to do the speech dictation and it's got a very unique style and I'm just doing this because this is the way that I want to see that data and the features definitely going away from text and more these beautiful interactive HTML presentations.
Then it's come back with confirmation. I'm going to say yes, that is absolutely correct. That will be the source of truth. We're going to have the HTML locally just for me to keep track of everything that I'm doing. And we'll just grab all those leads as well. Thank you.
And this brings us on to the fourth step of a fivestep framework, which is delivery payload. So the final result is actually three artifacts, not one pinning down exactly how which one lands. So the project folder, we'll say, "Awesome. This is the right project folder. The HTML dashboard can live in this project. I want you to open that up when that's complete, please. Calendar events, go ahead and create them. You're not inviting anybody. It's just for my own time management. next week. Email drafts. No need to create any email drafts. In fact, you know, you can create a draft email if you wish. But ultimately, I think it would be great just to have it in the HTML dashboard for me to copy and paste when I'm doing my time management. And for LinkedIn DMs, just send them just save them for me and I will be able to create those personalized ones. Remember, connection request with something personal and short always does best. And what I'd also like you to do is just research best practices for the highest converting LinkedIn messages and the highest converting email so I can get a beautiful email to send out.
And then finally, we have question five or five, which is the behavior rules. Remember, this is just how do you want this agent to behave. What does it look like? So, what I would like you to go ahead and do and, you know, just calibrate the tone based on everything that you know about me. Keep it short, keep it professional, friendly, um, yeah, not too cringe. And, yeah, I'm glad that you got everything else. and everything else from here looks absolutely fine. Go ahead and build it. And then finally, we'll just tell it who we're looking for. Go ahead and find me roofing companies in Texas. That's going to be the person that I would love to work with. And the offer, the value prop that I've got is going to be I'm going to build them a beautiful website completely for free. Um, no strings attached. And just say, "Hey, we help businesses basically grow and get more clients." That's the whole thing. And the value prop is is a free, beautiful, high converting website based on basically all the best, highest converting websites that exist. And yeah, that'd be wonderful. And we just send that one off.
And what I can tell you now is what this does for us automatically is stuff that used to require honestly like hours of building and connecting things. The fact that we can speak in English now is really incredible. Not that we were speaking Spanish previously, but you get the idea now. And this will literally architect this entire system based on this free framework that I'm giving you. And it will go ahead and build and connect everything together. And what's really cool here, guys, it's come back with even further clarificatory questions like brand fidelity. How how closely do you want it to match your brand guidelines working hours? What hours are you working? It's asked for ra LinkedIn URL so we can actually use that to calibrate our tone which I think is incredible. Texas granularity the whole state of Texas. Do you want Houston, Austin, Dallas, San Antonio? If you're from Texas down below, let me know down below in the comments. I'm thinking about a move in the future. Texas is a beautiful place. I got to check it out at least. Then overfetch. Are we okay with more candidates? So you can see just how this improves based on the questions. And also guys, if you open up the folder that it's working in, you can see it has everything we want. It's got the claw.md that describes instructions. It's got memory, findings, decisions. So, for example, if I double click on decisions, what do I see here? There you go. Look, it's everything that we've basically agreed to right there describing everything, which is fantastic. So, now it knows this. If we do further work in the future, it will all be there ready for us.
Okay, beautiful. And just like that, it's created it. Now, if it doesn't appear for you, you can just say, "Hey, open this up in a local host." All local means is you don't normally get to a website which is www do that's hosted somewhere on a server. Local host is just a file that lives on your computer. That's what localhost means. It's running on your MacBook or your Windows. Now what's really cool here is you see this brand guideline guys. Does this look at all similar to this cuz this is what it took inspiration from the black and the green and the typography and how this all connects. That's exactly what it's pulled together. But obviously guys we don't want to just data based on a Tinder profile. But we got to we got to take her out and see what she's like. So let's have a look what we're dealing with here. Texas roofers, 20 leads, free website outreach, one personalized LinkedIn DM, which is cool. So let's take a look. So it says here that it's created a schedule for us on how basically we can automate our time in terms of how we want to actually go ahead and do this. So I've actually pulled up my calendar and as you can see when I pull my calendar up, you can see on Monday and on Tuesday, it's literally said, Jack, you're doing outreach from 9:00. It's giving me a bit of a lunch break. Okay, it's giving me 30 minutes lunch at 12:30. how kind of it. Um, and then we can get straight back to it, but literally Monday, Tuesday, it's put the put the calendars in for us so we can do it, which I think is fantastic. It's organized that. Probably shouldn't have overwritten my gym. I'll probably tell it not to do that next time, but you get the general idea. I've had it said, "Hey, avoid my gym appointment, but I can move it around now." And now I have real specific times to do that stuff, which is really cool.
Now, I'll come down and have a look. So, we got all 20 leads. We got Clark Roofing. Oh, and by the way, I also explained to this what I want you to do is do another version of this in a slightly different style. And it did this one. So maybe you prefer this style. And again, 10 blocks booked by Monday. 20 operators ready for action. And I can look here. I've got their email. I've got their phone number. I've got their company LinkedIn profile. So let's see if this is in fact Clark Roofing. And would you believe it? It is a Texas roofing company. Awesome. Very, very, very cool. If a roofing person's watching this uh video, by the way, awesome. That's fantastic. So now we've got drafts as well. So if I click on show draft, look at this. I've got a LinkedIn out message. I've got an actual email here um that I can just have a look at. Obviously, the formatting needs to be changed a little bit, but I've got that there. And I just paste this in. You can see it's now got everything ready to rock and roll. So, I now have personalized email outreaches and personalized emails um for literally all these 20 leads that I've got down here, which is crazy.
And so, now you've got all the data. The next thing we want to do is think about, do we ever need to do this again? And if we do, we can actually turn this into a skill that happens whenever we want to. So, there are actually two ways that we can do this. So if you can see for example Texas roofers ranked we've done 30 candidates 20 leads LinkedIn DMs calendar blocks and hopefully you can just see whatever we imagine we can build. That's my basically whole philosophy on YouTube and everything I do for my clients. So all we're going to do now is one of two things. I may want to turn this into a skill which means that at any point I want to just find 20 more leads. I can do that. All I would do to make that happen is say hey there now I'm happy with the result. I would like you to turn this into a skill and every time I use this skill, make sure that we're not duplicating the same leads and that you keep track of all those leads in a database on my computer so I'm never double dipping. Thank you. Now, when you've done that, this will then turn it into a skill for us automatically, which is fantastic. And we can invoke that anytime you want to. And then whenever you want to summon that skill, all you do is come down here, you do slash, and you can literally pick any skill that you've got, and it will work there for you.
Now, you may also be wondering, Jack, why are you using Claude code instead of Claude Cowork? Codework is just a userfriendly version of code. And honestly, when you use codework, you will hit limitations eventually. Code is like complete Willy Wonka level. Do anything you want to. And if you just follow the simple things I showed you in this video, you're going to be uncapped. You're going to be unlimited. I couldn't in good conscience recommend to my my audience and people who follow me that to build everything in coowork. Co-work is great and it's awesome for getting started and I highly recommend it to get started. But if you're going to build for the future, you want the full unlimited access, which is why I honestly believe that code, even though it's cool code and off-putting, isn't a way to do it. But this does bring us on to one really key question, and that's the fact that we built it, which is fantastic, but what if we want to have this run regularly? What if we want to, you know, expand it out to do a,000 leads and we want to get more complicated? Well, to do that, what we need to do is deepen our skills in Claude, which you can learn by watching this video right.