Claude Code for product managers: research, writing, context libraries, custom to-do system, more

1. 0:00 – 2:10

   Introduction to Teresa Torres

   1. CVClaire Vo0:00

      Why has Claude Code become your buddy?

   2. TTTeresa Torres0:02

      I was writing my notes in my task management tool, and that was Trello. As time went on, I just started to get really worried about, "How am I ever gonna get my data out of Trello?" And so I was like: I wonder if Claude can help? And that was, like, one thing. Maybe I could just do this better with Claude. And by moving my task management to Claude, now Claude sees my tasks, and I can literally start my day and be like, "Claude, what's on my to-do list that you can just do for me?" I can say, "Hey, Claude, what's my sales pipeline right now?" And because Claude is tagging my tasks, it literally can generate a list of all my sales tasks and where they're at.

   3. CVClaire Vo0:35

      This has given me a lot of inspiration, because I forget a lot of things. There's a lot going on. [upbeat music] Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have a very practical episode with Teresa Torres, author of Continuous Discovery Habits, which we all know and love, an internationally acclaimed author, speaker and coach. Teresa's gonna show us how she uses Claude Code for basically everything, but especially to manage her huge to-do list, all the information she needs to do a great job, and builds a giant contacts library so she can be, as she says, lazy with her prompting. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Brex. If you're listening to this show, you already know AI is changing how we work in real, practical ways. Brex is bringing that same power to finance. Brex is the intelligent finance platform built for founders. With autonomous agents running in the background, your finance stack basically runs itself. Cards are issued, expenses are filed, and fraud is stopped in real time, without you having to think about it. Add Brex's banking solution with a high-yield treasury account, and you've got a system that helps you spend smarter, move faster, and scale with confidence. One in three startups in the US already runs on Brex. You can, too, at brex.com/howiai.

2. 2:10 – 3:00

   Why Claude Code became Teresa’s productivity tool of choice

   1. CVClaire Vo2:11

      Teresa, welcome to How I AI. I am so thrilled with today's episode, because we get to see what I love, which is good old Claude Code in a non-coding environment. And we were laughing before the show, you were just in every directory on your computer, straight in the terminal, like, this is how we're living right now. So I have to ask you before we get into any of it, why Claude Code? Why has Claude Code been-- become your buddy?

   2. TTTeresa Torres2:43

      Yeah, this has been a really gradual evolution. I started like everybody else, like, literally in ChatGPT in the web, and then I wanted to have an LLM help me with writing, and I gradually moved to Claude, 'cause Claude's a little bit better writer, although that might be changing. And then, you know,

3. 3:00 – 4:14

   The evolution from browser-based AI to terminal-based workflows

   1. TTTeresa Torres3:00

      I do code, and I mostly code in an AWS environment, and this is gonna be really embarrassing. I do most of my coding in the AWS management console. And my husband, for, like, four years, has been like: "Teresa, you just need to use a IDE."

   2. CVClaire Vo3:14

      [chuckles]

   3. TTTeresa Torres3:15

      And I was kind of afraid of a IDE. I literally had no version control. But I recently had a project where one of the things that I built is being integrated into a real [chuckles] production-quality product, and I was like: Oh, I gotta level up my engineering game. And that got me into VS Code, and then because I needed to use, like, Git, and, uh, be, like, a real engineer if I was-

   4. CVClaire Vo3:35

      Mm

   5. TTTeresa Torres3:35

      ... gonna have something I built go in a real product, and so, um, I had to level up my pretend engineering game. And my husband was like: "And look, you can just have Claude in the terminal right here inside VS Code." And then that was a game changer. And it-- I think the reason why coding with Claude helped me with all the things we're gonna talk about today is I feel like engineers pair program with Claude when they use Claude Code, and I think this idea of pair programming, I pair program now with everything I do, even if it's not programming. So like, I pair task manage, and I pair write, and I pair everything.

4. 4:14 – 7:52

   Demo: Creating a personalized task management system

   1. CVClaire Vo4:14

      Great, and so let's get into it, because you are gonna show us task management. And, I mean, the running joke is, like, every, every third startup is going to be a to-do list. Like, if you haven't tried to start a to-do list startup, are you really, like, an early-stage founder? But you have coded yourself a task management platform that works for you, and I'd love for you to walk us through it.

   2. TTTeresa Torres4:36

      Yeah, and I'll explain why I did this. I, I actually think the reason why there's so many task management apps is that how we manage our tasks is so idiosyncratic, that this is exactly the type of thing that you should build for yourself, 'cause it can work exactly the way you want it to work, which is part of the magic. But what got me here was, I'm a huge note-taker. Like, instead of thinking out loud, I think by outlining and writing notes. And I was writing my notes in my task management tool, and that was Trello. And this is kind of nightmarish, because now my notes are locked into a third-party tool. They weren't very searchable, and, like, as time went on, I just started to get really worried about, how am I ever gonna get my data out of Trello? And so I was like: I wonder if Claude can help? And that was, like, one thing. Like, maybe I could just do this better with Claude. And then the second thing that got me into this was, as I started to get more involved in AI, I forced myself every time I did a task to ask, "How can AI help with this? Can it automate it? Can it augment it? Do I like doing it? Do I want AI to do it for me?" And by moving my task management to Claude, now Claude sees my tasks, and I can literally start my day and be like: "Claude, what's on my to-do list that you can just do for me?" Or, "What's on my to-do list where I should be thinking about how you can help?" And then it's not all on me to figure out how to use AI. Claude's kind of my pair AI buddy.... So what I've built is I have a slash command, slash today. Are people familiar with slash commands? Should I describe that?

   3. CVClaire Vo6:12

      You should definitely describe them.

   4. TTTeresa Torres6:14

      Okay, so a slash command is just a Claude Code shortcut that we get to define, so I decided it was called slash today. I wrote a really detailed prompt, which we can look at, um, that tells Claude exactly what to do every time I type slash today. So every single morning of my life, even on Saturdays and Sundays, with my cup of coffee, I sit down, and I literally just type in /today. And if I run this, it's gonna overwrite what I'm gonna show you, but we'll run it real live in a minute. But what it does, you can see the summary from this morning's output, it checks my Trello board, so I still use Trello to coordinate with my team. Says there were no new cards, nothing new to add to my list. It generates a today file, which is what we're looking at here in Obsidian. This is- it's gone through all of my tasks that are just marked down files and told me what's due today. We're late in the day, so I've done a lot of my to-do list. I am like every other human, I have a long list of overdue tasks that I have not done, and they always end up at the top of my to-do list. And tasks are things that have due dates, right? Like, they're things I have to do by a certain time. I also have a whole folder full of ideas, just things that I wanna get to someday. And you can see I have four ideas that are currently in progress. These get added to my to-do list every day, so that when I make it to the end of my list, I can be like, "Okay, what should I be working on that's more long term?" And then we're gonna talk about this, I think, next, but I do have this kind of plugin that I created that does research queries for me every day, and then every day on my to-do list, I get, uh, my research digest to review and save papers that I wanna, um, summarize and, and learn from.

5. 7:52 – 12:56

   How the task system works with markdown files and Obsidian

   1. TTTeresa Torres7:53

      And that's... It's, it's such a simple workflow, but what's behind the scenes, if I go over here on the left, I just have different folders. These are literally marked down files. We're in Obsidian. When- I have a Bugs folder, I have an Ideas folder, I have a Tasks folder, and then if we look at a task, a task has some front matter. So front matter is an Obsidian concept. It's just like field type and then value.

   2. CVClaire Vo8:18

      Mm-hmm.

   3. TTTeresa Torres8:19

      Um, it's a- it's YAML behind the scenes, for people familiar with that. And so I have type tasks, a, a task has a due date, and then there's tags, and every single one of my tasks has this. And so what's happening when I run my today command is Claude is just searching my Tasks folder for anything that has a due date of today.

   4. CVClaire Vo8:38

      And I have to ask, just behind the scenes, is the Trello data being pulled via the Atlassian MCP, or how is it actually accessing all this data, data? Is Obsidian stored locally? Like, how does this all stitch together?

   5. TTTeresa Torres8:51

      Yeah, so I actually don't use Trello anymore at all. I'll tell you why I have a Trello MCP server, but I don't... Like, when now when I wanna create a task, I don't go create it on my Trello board. I literally- we can demo this. New task. Send thank you to Claire.

   6. CVClaire Vo9:10

      Oh, very sweet.

   7. TTTeresa Torres9:13

      How I AI was a blast. And then Claude has, like, has all the context for how my task management system works, 'cause I'm-

   8. CVClaire Vo9:22

      Yeah

   9. TTTeresa Torres9:22

      ... Claude is open in my Tasks folder-

   10. CVClaire Vo9:24

       Yep

   11. TTTeresa Torres9:24

       ... and you can see here, it's creating a file in my tasks.

   12. CVClaire Vo9:27

       Got it.

   13. TTTeresa Torres9:27

       It set the due date to today. It hasn't added tags, which is kind of a problem. We'll see if it figures it out. Oh, it's being very smart. So because it added something to my Today list, it knows it needs to update my Today... This file that we're looking at.

   14. CVClaire Vo9:43

       Mm-hmm.

   15. TTTeresa Torres9:43

       I actually don't want it to do it this way, 'cause it's gonna remove all my checklists, and I like feeling like I did my stuff. So I'm gonna just tell it to just manually add it. Um, so that's this script that it just tried to run. It's kind of telling you the behind the scenes of how this today slash command works. There is a Python script behind this that, like, does that. It's- it, that does that, like, search all the tasks for anything that is due today, search for anything that's past due. And you can see here that, like, now it just shows up on my to-do list. And this sounds so silly, but I didn't have to open a web browser. I didn't have to click through 14 different buttons in a GUI that is constantly changing. I didn't have to, like, click on a date picker, and then click a label, and then move it to the right list. Like, I literally just typed, like, off-the-cuff notes to Claude, and because I work in Claude all day, every day, this task window is always open, and then I usually have a second session open for whatever project I'm working on. And so I can always just bounce over and be like, "Hey, a new task," or, "Hey, a new idea."

   16. CVClaire Vo10:48

       Yeah.

   17. TTTeresa Torres10:48

       And it's just, it's, it's the speed of it is what I really love about it, is that I don't have to think about anything.

   18. CVClaire Vo10:55

       And then why put Obsidian in the loop? It's something you already had. It has a lot of context. It's structured the way you want it. You know, these could be just raw markdown files, and you could just X them off the way they're shown above. What do you think that extra layer is for you?

   19. TTTeresa Torres11:12

       I was not an Obsidian user before this, and I'll say, I wasn't even comfortable with Markdown at the beginning. Like, let's go back six, eight months, like, I was not a comfortable Markdown user. I- there's a few things I like. I like the really tactile... Like, it's silly, but I like checking the box. I know I can put it-

   20. CVClaire Vo11:28

       I was gonna ask. [chuckles]

   21. TTTeresa Torres11:29

       Yeah. I know I can put an X in a box, in Markdown, it's not quite the same. Um, really, what I like is the file browser on the left, and if you'll notice, my vault is not set at Tasks, it's set higher than that. So I have... And we'll talk about my LLM context, but I have, like, my LLM context, all my notes across everything, some podcast files that I use to work with my podcast. This is the research stuff we're gonna get into, all my tasks, some skills that I've been trying to experiment with, my writing, and so I kind of think about Obsidian as my file browser, and because it's all in Markdown, it makes everything I do super accessible to Claude.... And then I can do things like I can say, "Hey, Claude, what's my sales pipeline right now?" And because Claude is tagging my tasks, it literally can generate a list of all my sales tasks and where they're at on the fly. So like for most task management, you're limited to what views they create, or you can use tags, but who, who manually tags things? I, I'm optimistic I'll do that, but I never do it. Whereas in this system, Claude does all the tagging. Anytime it generates a task, it'll think about what tags to add, and then in my Claude MD for this project, not for my global one, for this project, we keep a taxonomy of what tags we're using, and we kind of manage that. When I see things I don't like, I update that Claude MD so that, like, I'm co-creating it with Claude, uh, but Claude's doing all the heavy lifting.

6. 12:56 – 14:13

   Quick recap

   1. CVClaire Vo12:56

      So I wanna recap this before we go to the next workflow, which is you've created a slash command in Claude Code to look at your tasks and assemble-- basically assemble your tasks from today. You have a structured s- task document format in Obsidian that every task goes into with, like, a title, a due date, some tags that automatically get populated, and some context. And then you have a couple, like, known commands you can use in Claude that allow you to add, remove, update, whatever, those tasks on the fly. And this just gives you the personalized experience you want for your to-do list connected across all your sources. And then in case it slipped by people, I do wanna call out, you noted that Claude can have sort of like project-level instructions and global-level instructions, and I think this is something that people don't take enough advantage of, is context scoping their Claude MD files to the right area so that you could have one for your task management list that's really focused, you have a global one for all your properties, et cetera, et cetera. So I think, I think I have your flow. This has given me a lot of inspiration because I just... I forget a lot of things. There's a lot go [chuckles] there's a lot going on.

   2. TTTeresa Torres14:12

      Yeah! Okay,

7. 14:13 – 15:54

   Taking notes within tasks for better searchability

   1. TTTeresa Torres14:13

      I'm gonna show you, like, here's the real value. Like, let's say I'm doing this task. This is, uh, too simple of a task. Let's do I'm working on launching a course, right? And of- if, if... As I get onto this, like, let's say I'm, like, right before this, I was, like, half done updating the sales page, and then let's say I find a bug in my course platform, and I need to document this bug. I take all my notes literally while I'm doing the task, and it, it's all embedded, and again, it's all text. So if later, like tomorrow, I come back and be like, "Where in the world did I log that bug?" Because I did it lazily in my notes, and I didn't actually create a bug, I can be like: Claude, help me find this thing, but I don't know where it's at.

   2. CVClaire Vo14:55

      Sure.

   3. TTTeresa Torres14:55

      And I don't know about you, I don't know if you've used Trello, but I think any task management tool that I could say this about, the search is not that good, and it's not that good at searching all the context in the task, and that's what I really love from this, is that, like, I can't figure it out, but Claude will try every permutation of searches till it finds it. Even if I'm remembering the words wrong, I'll be like: Hey, I have a thing called new blog post tomorrow. And it'll be like: I can't find anything called new blog post tomorrow, but I have this thing that says article Wednesday. Is that what you're looking for? And I'll be like: Whoa, Claude, that is what I'm looking for.

   4. CVClaire Vo15:29

      Yeah, I don't think we say it enough, that these are really great local search engines for-

   5. TTTeresa Torres15:34

      Yeah

   6. CVClaire Vo15:34

      ... for code. I mean, we use it so much in code all the time. I'm like, "Hey, can you remind me how XYZ worked?" Or, "I think I shipped this feature. Can you remind me exactly how it was implemented or who did it?" But you'd apply that same framework, that same, like, search framework, to kinda any text-based tool, and these, these tools are really good at grabbing that

8. 15:54 – 19:32

   Demo: Automated research digest workflow

   1. CVClaire Vo15:54

      context. Well, speaking of finding useful context, you have a second workflow around research I would love for you to walk us through. So how do you assemble all this research that helps you do your job?

   2. TTTeresa Torres16:06

      Okay, so I aspire to be an academic, which is weird, but I do, and I really wanna keep up on academic research on a lot of topics. In fact, we can go over here and look at my topics. So, like, I do a lot about... I'm lo- I'm really interested in this research around, like, synthetic users and should we be letting AI do interview synthesis for us? I'm interested in team collaboration, creativity, discovery skills, whatever, lot- education, 'cause I teach, personas, 'cause it's a super hot topic. And I really wanna know, like, what are we learning from academic research? I happen to have access to a university library, which is great, but I never have the discipline to, like, go search for things. There's never a moment in my day where I'm like, "Oh, I'm bored. I should go do this." But I wish that I did, right? And so what I did, and this is also one of the nice things about using Claude as my task manager, is I can integrate it right into my task manager. So I'm gonna start by showing you the output of this, and then I'll talk about how I built it. So every day on my to-do list, I get a little research digest. It's giving me the search results from a daily archive search. So archive is a pre-print server. It's where most papers now, thanks to COVID and post-COVID, get published before they're published for real. What's nice is they're free, and they're, they're fast, they're real-time. What's not nice is it's before they're edited, edited, so you have to be your, your own filter. Um, it does a search, and then I get a markdown file with all the results. So this is like... This is literally today's file. I have not gone through it yet. But then, when I go through it, if I open a PDF and I download it, I save it to these topic folders, and in each of these topic folders, there's a source directory and a notes directory. So my PDF goes in sources, and this is gonna matter in a second. And then, um, what happens the next day after I've saved a PDF, is on this research today digest, I get summaries of every paper I saved the day before. And I get really detailed summaries of, like, not kind of the half-baked, "Here's a paragraph of what the paper is about," but I wrote this skill to, like, very, um, to focus on, like, the methods of the paper and the effect size, things that, like, are gonna-- because I have to be the editor, there's no editor for these papers yet.... things that can help me decide, is this worth reading? Does it look like it had a big enough effect size? Did it look like it was a, a good study? And I have a funny story about this. The day I built this, I was reviewing my daily digest, and I saw this paper on purchase intent. And I read this, and I had it summarized, and I read the summary, and because it was, like, in this nice summary format, I realized this flaw. I was like, "Oh, they used this purchase intent so- survey that's not very reliable. Like, it's not an accurate measure of purchase intent." And the next day in L- on LinkedIn, I saw Ethan Mollick shared the paper, and I was like, "Oh, this is kind of a crummy paper, Ethan." And I re-shared it, and I basically said, "Here's why we don't have to care about this paper," and I outlined, like, a very critical review of the study. And the only reason why I could do that is because I had this system, and I'd already looked at the paper that had just come out. I had already, like, analyzed it and critiqued it, and like, is there something we can learn from this? And then I wrote a really detailed LinkedIn post about it, and it's honestly one of my most best-performing posts on LinkedIn

9. 19:32 – 24:43

   How the research plugin searches and summarizes academic papers

   1. TTTeresa Torres19:32

      ever.

   2. CVClaire Vo19:33

      [chuckles] Well, there you go, and what I have to ask is: how does this get triggered?

   3. TTTeresa Torres19:39

      Yeah.

   4. CVClaire Vo19:39

      Is this automatically... Is this triggered off that today command?

   5. TTTeresa Torres19:43

      Yeah.

   6. CVClaire Vo19:43

      How does that work?

   7. TTTeresa Torres19:44

      So I did integrate it into my today command, um, but the way it works, I built this as a plugin. It is available as a public repo. I will say it's still being tested.

   8. CVClaire Vo19:56

      Okay.

   9. TTTeresa Torres19:56

      It has a- it has one user. My husband is gonna be the second user.

   10. CVClaire Vo20:00

       [chuckles]

   11. TTTeresa Torres20:00

       Um, and if you want to be the third user, we can make it available. It is a public repo, but use at your own caution.

   12. CVClaire Vo20:06

       Mm.

   13. TTTeresa Torres20:06

       It's still in development. Um, it's... What's funny about this is the only part of this that really requires AI is the paper summaries, but the part... I would not have been able to build this without AI.

   14. CVClaire Vo20:19

       Yeah.

   15. TTTeresa Torres20:20

       So I basically just explained to Claude, like, "Here's what I want. I wanna run a daily search. I want a digest on my to-do list. Like, how are we gonna make this happen?" And what's happening under the hood is I have two Python scripts. One of them, every morning, searches archive, and then every Sunday, it searches Google Scholar, and it's keeping track of what papers we've already seen, what papers are new, and it's searching based on a config file of my personally defined keywords.

   16. CVClaire Vo20:45

       Mm-hmm.

   17. TTTeresa Torres20:46

       And then every night, I have a second script, and these are cron jobs. They just run on my-

   18. CVClaire Vo20:51

       Yeah

   19. TTTeresa Torres20:51

       ... computer, like, on a schedule, and then the, at night, it's... That second script is looking through my source directories in my research directory for any new PDFs, and it's creating a to-do list for my today command, um, that w- to take all the papers in that list, trigger code- Claude Code agents to generate the summaries, and then the summaries get added to this research today file.

   20. CVClaire Vo21:16

       And do you still have to download those PDFs manually?

   21. TTTeresa Torres21:19

       I am downloading those PDFs manually, and I, I could... Like, there is enough information in the, um, the search results that I probably could download them automatically, but I don't... It's... Even by hand-selecting what papers I wanna summarize-

   22. CVClaire Vo21:37

       Yeah

   23. TTTeresa Torres21:37

       ... it's, like, already a fire hose.

   24. CVClaire Vo21:38

       Yeah.

   25. TTTeresa Torres21:38

       So I want a filter. Like, I don't... If we look at my digest, like, I don't need to read, I don't need to read all of these papers, like-

   26. CVClaire Vo21:45

       Yeah

   27. TTTeresa Torres21:46

       ... I- there's, there's some of them that are gonna pop out as like-

   28. CVClaire Vo21:48

       Oh

   29. TTTeresa Torres21:48

       ... "Oh, that's really relevant to what I do."

   30. CVClaire Vo21:50

       Yeah.
10. 24:43 – 29:00

    Filtering overwhelming information sources

    1. CVClaire Vo24:45

       You've shown two things, which is your to-do list is so overwhelming, you need a way to filter and aggregate and work through it, and then your sort of inbound knowledge, you know, sources are-

    2. TTTeresa Torres24:58

       Yeah

    3. CVClaire Vo24:58

       ... so overwhelming, you need to figure out a way to filter, summarize, and operationalize this. I really like this, but then I'm guessing at the end of the day, you have a bunch of tasks you've done and you haven't done, and a bunch of research that you've read or you haven't read, and you, I mean, like all Obsidian, uh, users, or like all extreme note-takers, which I expect you to be, just have a lot of information to go through. And so have you thought about organizing, using that local context, that memory, um, to make something like Claude Code do a good job on your behalf?

    4. TTTeresa Torres25:35

       Yeah. So I definitely have overdue tasks, that's why I went back to my to-do list here. And actually, this looks like a really nice, clean view. If we went to my Ideas folder, you know, like, there's just too much to do, right? And so one of the things that I've been really playing with is, I have this mantra in my head of, like, automation or augmentation. So, like, when I... when, when I have a new task come up, can Claude just do this for me, or should Claude be helping me do this? And I love this because it's helped me be really reflective about, like, what do I wanna keep doing? What do I want the robot to do for me, right? I mean, not literally a robot, but you get the idea. And I realize the more context I provide to Claude, the more Claude can do for me. And so I have a Obsidi- Obsidian vault that is literally just for Claude, and I call it LLM context, 'cause sometimes I switch to Codex. It doesn't matter which model you're using. And I just have, like, a ton of information defined. This is gonna look overwhelming. I did not create this all at once, I did it very iteratively over time. The way that I built it is, as I was finding myself just describing things to Claude, I'd be like, "Okay, Claude, what did we learn today that should go in a context file?" And Claude has written these context files for me. So the first one I did was a writing style guide. So I just sort of told Claude, I said, "Hey..." I actually didn't tell Claude who I was to start this. I just said, "Go to Product Talk and tell me, um, what you think the author's writing style is. Who's the audience? What's the philosophy? Like, what's the tone?" And Claude actually went to my blog and read it, and started writing stuff. And then I looked at it and I was like, "Yeah, this is kind of right. That's not really right. Let's fix this," and so we co-created a writing style guide. This is super long. I did not write this myself at all. Like, Claude did all of the heavy lifting. But bec- there's so much in here, like, there's a section on how my book writing is versus my blog writing. We have a section on headlines, we have a section on subheaders, we have a section on, like, key phrases I like to use, never do this, always do that. And what it means, I don't let... I rarely let Claude write for me, but Claude critiques all of my writing, and by having a really detailed writing gu- style guide like this, Claude's critiques are spot on, right? Because it knows my goals, it knows my audience, it knows who I'm trying to write for, it knows how I'm trying to write. And then I do the same thing for... I have a business profile, a personal profile, I have a ton of business context. Uh, for marketing, I have, like, w- who my audience is, brand guidelines, my marketing channels. Uh, I don't know what that content architecture one is, that's probably something Claude created. Content, assets, like, just there's a ton here, right? The metrics I track, my publication schedule. I probably should not open partnerships. [chuckles] All of my products, right? Like, all my individual courses, my subscription products, whatever. Um, and then each of these files just has content about that. And here's what I learned doing this. At first, I started putting everything in my Claude MD. Like, literally everything went in my Claude MD. But then I realized, like, Claude loads my Claude MD every single-

    5. CVClaire Vo28:59

       Mm-hmm

    6. TTTeresa Torres28:59

       ... time.

11. 29:00 – 32:58

    Using small, focused context files instead of one large document

    1. TTTeresa Torres29:00

       I don't want all this context in there, right? And you'll notice, like, I have a business folder, but I also have a personal folder. I have a business profile and a personal profile. One of the most common things I use LLMs for are, like, "Holy crap, my dog just ate this. Is she safe?"

    2. CVClaire Vo29:15

       [chuckles]

    3. TTTeresa Torres29:16

       Claude does not need to know what my marketing channels are, or my blog post archive, when it's telling me my dog's not gonna die, right? And so it got me thinking about, like, to do context well, it's not just that we have to document everything, we have to document everything in teeny-tiny files, so when we ask Claude to do a task, we can give Claude just the context it needs to do that task well. And then, I don't ever tell Claude when to use these files. Like, if we look at my business profile-

    4. CVClaire Vo29:46

       Mm-hmm.

    5. TTTeresa Torres29:46

       ... this is just an index. It's telling Claude, "This is what's available to you. You can find my company overview here, you can find, um, details about these courses here, here's some other products I have," so that whenever I ask Claude to do something, it says in my global Claude MD, "If I ask you for help with something related to my business, use my business profile. If I ask you for help with something personal, use my personal profile." So then, based on what I ask Claude, it will load these profiles, and then based on the content of what I asked it, it'll pick which of these context files to add to the conversation. And then that makes sure I can be super lazy in my prompts. I can be like, "... Claude, blog post review, give me feedback, right?

    6. CVClaire Vo30:32

       [chuckles]

    7. TTTeresa Torres30:32

       And it'll just look at the topic of a blog post and, like, pull my audience file and look at who y- what, what the product I'm referring to is, and it just helps.

    8. CVClaire Vo30:42

       Yeah, I, I think this, um, file, this index file strategy is something that we hear a lot from How I AI guests, which is, you want any individual context, space, or information to be relatively short and relatively focused, but you want to give the LLMs a map to those places. And so I almost think of this as, like, if you had a filing cabinet, and you had to take a random person, an, an intern off the street, and you said, "Here's my task. If you go in this filing cabinet, you'll be able to figure out how to do it," how do you structure... You know, what do you ta- what's the instructions you tape on top of the filing cabinet [chuckles] that says, "This is how this filing cabinet works"? But then, like, how easy can you make it to discover exactly what context, what task, and the, like, the step-by-step workflow you want somebody to follow is really the mental model you wanna set up when working with something like a Claude Code on a wide variety of tasks. And then you can be very lazy and be like, "Go write me a blog post on X, Y, Z," um, and, and it can discover pretty naturally how to get there.

    9. TTTeresa Torres31:48

       I think there's one piece I would add to that, which is, I think it's really easy to think about, like, we gotta give the LM a lot of context, but I think there's a corollary to that, which is, if we give it too much irrelevant context, it's still gonna not be very good at its job. And so, like, it was a big leap for me to realize that this needs to be a lot of small files. Like, I don't want one file with all my products, because if we're working on one product, it doesn't need to know about the other products.

    10. CVClaire Vo32:15

        And that... I mean, I think that is the difference between, like, throwing a, you know, 2,000-page user manual [chuckles] -

    11. TTTeresa Torres32:21

        Yeah

    12. CVClaire Vo32:22

        ... on someone's desk and saying, "Somewhere in here is the answer," versus an organized set of kind of like files and folders with little labels, like, "How to write a blog post," or-

    13. TTTeresa Torres32:32

        Yeah

    14. CVClaire Vo32:32

        ... "What our products are." And so I do think just the form factor of how you store your context allows you to be, as you said, what we all want to be, a little lazy when-

    15. TTTeresa Torres32:42

        Totally

    16. CVClaire Vo32:43

        ... finding tasks.

    17. TTTeresa Torres32:44

        And I'm lazy even in how I create these. Like, if the way that I create context files is anytime I'm finishing a session with Claude Code, I just go, "Claude, what'd you learn today that we should document?" And I make Claude do it.

    18. CVClaire Vo32:57

        Yep,

12. 32:58 – 35:34

    Claude as a writing partner: review, research, and refinement

    1. CVClaire Vo32:58

       I love it. Well, I have to ask you one last thing, because you are such an exceptional writer and put out excellent content, but I know you use a little Claude to do a little of that, and I'm just curious how you get Claude to be an effective writing buddy. Maybe it's exactly what you said, which is, it's a reviewer, it enforces your style guide. But have you found... This is, like, the million-dollar question for everybody: Have you found a way to make AI writing less terrible?

    2. TTTeresa Torres33:28

       Yes and no. I... Okay, I love to write, so I really... Like, this is... When I asked that question about augmenting versus automating, I don't wanna automate writing. I will share, I have written two blog posts where an LLM did the bulk of the writing. I've been very transparent about this. The first one is, I interviewed 11 people about how they're using Lovable, and I had, um, ChatGPT turn those transcripts into individual stories that I shared. So, like, I didn't write those individual stories. I wrote the intro, I wrote the conclusion, I made sure they sounded normal. And then my blog post that's coming out tomorrow, actually, is themes that are coming out from my, um, podcast, Just Now Possible, and I had Claude do a lot of the writing on that. That was a little bit more heavy lifting. Um, but for the most part, I still do all my writing, and what I rely on Claude for is, um, while I'm writing, usually in Obsidian with Claude open in a terminal right next to me, I'll be like, I'll realize I wrote something and wonder if it's true and be like: "Claude, I think this. Is there any evidence that this is true?" And Claude will go off and research, and I'll go back to writing. Or I'll write my intro, and I'll be like: "Claude, I wrote my intro. Can you tell me how to make the hook stronger?" And it will, like, read my intro and tell me what it likes and doesn't like. Or, um, I'll write a section, and I'll be like, "Okay, Claude, review this section. What's good? What's not good?" And then Claude's not just giving me generic feedback, right? Because I've written this style guide, it knows how I w- how I aspire to write. So then when it tells me what's good and what's not working, it's doing it based on my own goals that I've told it, like, "Here's how I want you to critique my writing." And then my favorite is, it just fixes my typos as I go, so then I can type really lazily and not care that I'm spelling everything wrong.

    3. CVClaire Vo35:13

       Um, yes, I have indulged in fancy nails lately.

    4. TTTeresa Torres35:18

       [chuckles]

    5. CVClaire Vo35:18

       Other people who have watched this podcast have seen me type terribly with my fancy nails, and it has allowed me to enjoy fancy nails without having to fix my typos-

    6. TTTeresa Torres35:27

       Nice

    7. CVClaire Vo35:27

       ... which are, uh, very abundant these, [chuckles] these days. So I think that's great.

13. 35:34 – 43:12

    Recap of workflows and lightning round

    1. CVClaire Vo35:34

       Okay, so to recap all of your workflows, which I think is great, we went really deep on your to-do list. Um, I kind of agree, everybody just has this particular way they wanna manage themselves, and they wanna manage their list. It's the perfect, perfect use case for building something yourself. So if anybody out there is looking for a personal project, highly recommend getting started with a customized to-do list, maybe here in Claude Code, like you've done it. You showed us how you can do a daily automation and summarization of information that you find useful, which allows you to engage in broader market conversations that you wouldn't have the time or capacity to do in an in-depth, in-depth way, and that's driving, I'm sure, great things for your business, as well as just making you a more informed leader and voice in the market. We've gotten really organized around your local context and memory system. You clearly love a structured file in a structured folder, so I have to acknowledge that. That's amazing. And then, while you rarely write LLM first, you've found that Claude Code, in particular Claude, is a really great writing buddy to keep you sort of like-... on the rails, do research for you, get you feedback, like make incremental fixes, and fix typos and grammatical errors. So just that.

    2. TTTeresa Torres36:55

       Yeah.

    3. CVClaire Vo36:55

       Do you- Okay, so now I'm gonna go to lightning round questions, 'cause I do have to ask you a few other things. Clearly love Claude Code, but are- what else [chuckles] do you use anything else? What are some other daily drivers for you? Are you always in dark mode terminal?

    4. TTTeresa Torres37:12

       I am often in dark mode terminal. I do use VS Code, so when I'm writing code, I do still prefer to be in a IDE and have, like, colorful diffs. As far as other AI products, it's funny, everybody asks me, like, "What about Cursor?" I actually have never used it. I know it's amazing. I try... Like, the way that I deal with the overwhelm of just the fire hose of information is I try to only seek out a new product when there's something wrong with what I'm using. So, like, I uncover a gap, I'll be like, "Okay, now I gotta go find to fill this gap." And a lot of this setup of, like, Claude Code with Obsidian or Claude Code in VS Code just works really well for me, that I haven't tried a lot of other stuff. I would say the only other, like, big AI product I'm using on a regular basis, I still occasionally use ChatGPT in the browser, usually 'cause, like, I'll be doing something else in the browser, and it's just easy to pop over to ChatGPT. Or I use, um, Descript for video editing, and I... It is one of the... Like, I can't think of very many, like, non-Foundation Lab AI products that I love, but I love Descript.

    5. CVClaire Vo38:20

       Yeah, we use it to edit the, the podcast, and what a delightful change in user experience from what you used to have to do to what you can do-

    6. TTTeresa Torres38:31

       Editing-

    7. CVClaire Vo38:31

       ... today

    8. TTTeresa Torres38:32

       - video by editing, editing a text transcript is just the most magical thing that exists.

    9. CVClaire Vo38:38

       Yes, and if you missed it, um, the founder of Descript did a early How I AI podcast talking nothing about their AI product, but did [chuckles] talk about how he opened a, which I think is open now, a East Bay, I think it's in Oakland or Berkeley, um, a board game, [chuckles] a board game business-

    10. TTTeresa Torres39:00

        Oh!

    11. CVClaire Vo39:00

        - using basically ChatGPT as, as a co-founder.

    12. TTTeresa Torres39:03

        You know-

    13. CVClaire Vo39:04

        So don't miss that one.

    14. TTTeresa Torres39:05

        I listened to that, I listened to that episode, I don't think I realized it was from the Descript guy.

    15. CVClaire Vo39:09

        It was, and I got the funniest text from a friend who said, "This is the most Bay Area thing ever."

    16. TTTeresa Torres39:15

        [chuckles]

    17. CVClaire Vo39:15

        Two guys that don't think that they can arrange a board game without putting AI in the middle. [chuckles]

    18. TTTeresa Torres39:20

        Yes. [chuckles]

    19. CVClaire Vo39:21

        Okay, so, um, my second question for you, we've already asked for the LinkedIn API MCP. We're fine being advertised to.

    20. TTTeresa Torres39:28

        Mm-hmm.

    21. CVClaire Vo39:28

        So any of you LinkedIn PMs out there, we are fine getting inline advertisements, as long as we don't have to log in, so we can read, read our content in the terminal. What else do you wish was out there to power your tool? Maybe it's not an AI tool, but maybe it's a data source.

    22. TTTeresa Torres39:45

        You know, LinkedIn is pretty high on the list. Like, I just... I hate AI-generated content. I think this is why I still do my own writing, 'cause reading other people's AI-generated contents, comments, kind of breaks my soul a little bit.

    23. CVClaire Vo40:01

        Yeah.

    24. TTTeresa Torres40:01

        Um, so I think LinkedIn is probably the big one, although there's probably 100 times a day where I'm like, "Why can't I just do this thing?" But I don't know. I get pretty far with Claude. Claude can teach me how to do anything, which I really like.

    25. CVClaire Vo40:14

        Okay. LinkedIn, these are, these are two, two people who- [chuckles]

    26. TTTeresa Torres40:19

        Yeah

    27. CVClaire Vo40:19

        ... uh, wanna reach a business audience. Because I once... I've, I've solidly told everybody, "If you wanna run a business like I run, I'm sure if you wanna run a business like you run, you gotta live on LinkedIn."

    28. TTTeresa Torres40:30

        You-

    29. CVClaire Vo40:30

        It's just a reality.

    30. TTTeresa Torres40:31

        There's a second one, and I know this is getting better, but it's still not good. I really want text to image where, like, it can close the quotation mark on the quote in the image.

Episode duration: 43:12