Weeknotes vol. 17: business, schmizness
By Garrett Winder,
Hello and happy casual weeknotes Friday!
I stopped writing these about a year ago when I began the transition into consulting (solving fun and challenging problems), and to say a lot has changed since then would be the understatement of the century.
In summary: Iain joined full time, we’re helping people solve operational problems and optimize their work across pretty much all aspects of business, and we’re having a lot of fun doing it. Iain has his masters in AI for Business, which has pushed me to go down the biggest rabbit hole I’ve been down since HTML/CSS in college (and we know where that led!).
What have I been doing, specifically, you ask? Great question!
The answer is mostly ‘Claude’. Figuring out it’s (his?) inner workings and how all of the tools in the Claude toolbox work together and can be used to solve actual business problems.
What I love about Claude is the ability to route prompts through a filesystem of standardized folders, files and instructions using a set of rules and naming conventions, and BOOM, you’ve got an automated process. It’s not coding, it’s just writing text like a robot wants it written (which we’re in luck folks because I’ve been thinking like a robot since the day I was born).
I use Claude Code for this, but it’s not actually code at all. It’s just writing robotic instructions that say go here for this and there for that and branch off for this and use your little (big) Claude brain to figure out the details. Then, out pops the pop-tart!
Figure out how to do that at scale for lots of different cross-departmental things without making the system too complex and unmaintainable and you’re in business (that’s the part I’ve been focusing on).
While the fact that you can ‘just do stuff’ is great, it’s also making the fragmented work problem 100x worse for people who aren’t careful. We all have data all over the place (dozens+ of specialized Saas apps, for instance) and now we’ve got Frankenstiens of all of the above on every employees desktop (Thanks, Obama AI).
The future is figuring out how to normalize all of that data into a structured brain that can help you and your AI agents and skills and all of that jazz do your work together more efficiently and transparently.
What a world to live in!
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