How to Automate Your Work with Claude Code (Beginner Breakdown)

If you are not already using Claude Code to automate parts of your life, then you're being left behind in 2026. So today, I wanted to bring on one of the leading experts in helping beginners to understand Claude Code for automating your work and life, PDang, who's going to be showing you the step-by-step process of installing Claude Code, getting it set up, identifying the first workflow that you want to automate, and then showing you the exact steps in order to build your set of prompts that's going to do that task for you. So, this is an absolute must-h have skill for 2026. And I'm excited to be sharing this method with you all. Hey, Peter, thank you for coming on the channel, man. It's great to have you on here and thank you for your time. I'm super excited to get into Claude code and automating your life because I think a lot of people at this point don't realize just how much can be done by these agents because claude code feels a little bit out of their depth. So, we want to make it really simple in this video for you guys to get your feet wet with claw code and just start by automating one of the boring things and unnecessary things you're doing in your life today. So, Peter, uh, thank you for coming on, man. And, uh, what are we going to be going through today? — So, one thing about cloud code is like it seems like really intimidating, right? is like all about code, but in reality, it should really be just like claude general agent or claude agent is a real name. At the end of the day, you're just chatting with somebody. You think about you just have a chat thread with an AI that can actually do things for you, right? So, the way I

think about automate your life with cloud code is make an inventory of like your week and what takes up the most time. So, for this uh tutorial, let's use a example, right? So you and I know as a YouTuber like trying to come up with really good thumbnails and titles is just like a huge pain in the ass. It takes up a lot of time, you know, to make it great and and having really good copy for those is like really important to actually get people to watch the videos. So, um, what I built before is just kind of like a researcher that looks up a bunch of other channels and then, uh, what it does is it finds the top performing videos like the titles and the thumbnails for those. Um, and then it uses that and my channels of videos to give me advice on what videos to make next or what videos are trending right now, right? And you can also generalize this to researching, you know, other competitors, you know, for your newsletter, for like your company, like basically cloud code and like claude has like online search capabilities, right? So like being able

to get it to do research for you, it's just saves me a lot of time. The great thing is that it's very extensible and that if you've got this research component and you have some uh context documents within clude code about who you are and the kind of businesses you run or what like your messages or what you typically talk about, it can very easily be extended from there to a script writer where given the context you know about my channel and this other information and this transcript that we can pull in from maybe you copy paste the transcript in from the uh from a YouTube transcript scraper or you set up a tool to do that then you can very quickly move from just research search and ideation into say content writing if you wanted to start a personal brand. So I think just well maybe you aren't necessarily trying to start a personal brand if you're watching this. This is just a framework for applying that to any this kind of thinking to any problem that you have in your life. So uh Peter let's uh let's jump into it. — So what I have here is basically the clock website right. So how do you even install clock code? So uh they have a link here that you can just cop copy and all you got to do is open up like your terminal. So terminal is just like uh like a command shell that you can use to type stuff. You can just pasting this command to basically in install cloud code on your computer. I already have it installed. So to open cloud code after you install it, you just type cloud and then uh it will basically open clock. So clock says a little crab or what whatever and you can just talk to it. You can you know for example I can just say hello, how are you doing? and it can respond. So it's almost like using chat GBT or cloud on the web interface except uh cloud is cloud code is much more powerful. So you can talk to cloud through like these terminals but what I like to do is I like to use cursor and cursor let me just open up cur cursor. So cursor is just like a very popular uh interface that people use to like you know get AI agents to write code and you know it looks pretty intimidating right it has a bunch of coding it but the only reason I like to use cursor is because like I can actually see the files that clock ho is making for me so I can actually browse the files and review the files myself to use cursor you just download it and then you open it um and then you just open a full folder so let's just open the YouTube demo for f folder that I made and it's just like an empty this is what you see when you open cursor. So how do you open clot code inside cursor right? So uh you can talk to the cursor has its own agent that you can talk to but like you go to terminal and uh type in you know claude and that is how you know you kind of open up cloud in cursor. So basically like a chat window uh that you can have with claude to get cloud to start doing stuff. So how do you actually build this YouTube researcher thing that we want to build right? So, let me uh open the same. And I have a pre-made command here, but hopefully it's pretty self-explanatory. So, basically, like I want to build a tool where I just typing /youtube and some channel name, and then it outputs some sort of a research file that has all the information from that channel, like the top recent videos, uh, plus a key insight about what content is working for the CH channel, right? And I have no idea how to do this. So, I'm just going to ask Cloud Code, how do you get started? Like, what are three different ways to do this and what are the pros and cons? — Okay, guys, very quickly, if you're an aspiring entrepreneur and want to start your own AI business and you haven't already joined my free school community, it's down there in one of the links in the description below. Has my full free course on how to start your own AI agency as a complete beginner and you're surrounded by over a quarter million people who are also striving towards the same thing. There's no better place on the planet right now to be surrounded by like-minded people and you get free weekly Q& A with me where you can ask questions directly to me about how to start and scale your business. I'll see you in there.

— So like ba basically like at a high level the way you want to do it is there's kind of a few steps. First you want to explore a few different solutions with Claude, right? Then working with Claude, you pick a solution. And then step two is you want to make a plan like a spec or a document that kind of lays out what you want to build. Step three is you get Claude to just build the thing that you want. And then step four is you got to review what it comes up with and it iterate and make it better. — For people who are unfamiliar with the claude commands because that's what it's kind of all based around here, right? If you scroll up in that initial prompt that you had, you're asking it uh we can explain the prompt here. slash YouTube and then you're adding in essentially the parameter that comes after it to use a really technical word but uh Peter wants to be able to go slash YouTube then at say Liam Mley and that's going to be the input that is passed into what Claude's going to write out here. So this whole like slash command is your way of building sort of repeatable workflows uh into Claude which is uh is the really powerful thing that's been unlocked recently uh with this and Claude skills which are very similar. So just a bit of a clarifying on that. — That's a really good point. So slash command is it looks kind of complicated but it's literally just like a command I want to build so I can type into clock ho so that it can do something for me right so this is a slash YouTube command but you can also do like slash research command or what whatever you want to come up with okay so let's going so it came up with three different ways to get the data that we need right so number one is to use the official YouTube API pros are is reliable is there's a free feed tier cons that it requires some sort of a API key setup which sounds pretty comp complicated uh option two is it can just use web scraping. So you can like you know basically go to the youtube. com page and try to scrape the titles which sounds pretty complicated too. And then option three is to use some sort of third party services like social blade rapid API endpoints and so on and so forth. It's recommended a YouTube uh official YouTube API but I think uh it's actually pretty complicated to try to set up an API key. I don't want to kind of get there. — Google makes it more difficult than most unfortunately. — Yeah. It's like you have to go to this like weird site that Google has. — So, you got to do some more research. So, you can be like, you know, I don't like any of these options. I actually did some research before this and there's this thing called YouTube. DLP, — uh, which is like this free thing that you can use, this free API you can use to get like the latest data for a channel. So, we just say like, what about YouTube? I heard that's pretty good, too. — and it's like not it's like not super technical prompts but like but right now we're just kind of exploring the solution uh step with cloud right so let's see what it comes up with on this — and I suppose a tip here for for beginners this is where we're trying to use APIs across the internet to pull data in and get Claude to be able to pull that data in like the issue we just ran into here is that in often cases if you can ask Claude for a way like is there any free or like easy setup versions of this that don't involve me going to a provider and setting up billing and putting my card down and doing all of this back and forth. If you can push for in this case like YouTube DLP, I've built stuff with that before. If you do push for those kind of free alternatives or easy uh quicker setup alternatives, it will give them to you. So, this is when you start to build some of these skills around building and automating your life is okay, if I want to do this faster and easier, I can push for uh push cla to look and search the web for things that are more aligned with what I'm trying to build and keeping it short and sweet. Just as a recap, like if you want to use this thing to automate your life, step one is think about what's taking up the most time in your life right now that you don't want to do like you know given on a given week, right? And then step two is just like just try to explore can I actually make this simpler just like ask cloud like can I hey I'm spending a lot of time on titles and thumbnails is there a way to make this simpler or like do some research and make this simpler and kind of explore the space of quad which is what we're trying to do right now. It's so exciting for any knowledge worker particularly if you're working remote especially and that you could just be sitting at home like it's the golden era of remote workers before things really get scary maybe in the next couple of years but where you have these tools and the futures future's right here in front of us if you just get a little bit curious and build your skills slowly with uh automating the most basic workflows in your job with this uh obviously um trying to make sure you're not getting in trouble at the same time but this is a very exciting time to be uh to be alive if you're doing any kind of particularly remote uh knowledge work. Exactly. Okay. So, we talked about exploring solutions, right? So, let's say we landed on this YouTube-dlp solution. So, so now it's asking me, hey, like, you know, I can just build this for you, right? But I like to have a step in between like the step two, which is to get claw to write some sort of a spec or like requirements document so that I can review the plan. It's usually not a good idea to just like, hey, go build this thing because it it's going to make a bunch of assumptions that you actually don't want, right? So here's like a very important thing. When you're coding with AI, when you're vi coding with AI, I estimate that like 70 or 80% of the time, you're actually just like writing documents with AI. You're making the plan because the actual coding step, AI will actually do it for you, right? They will do it. So the how good it is at doing that comes down to how good and specific your plan is, right? So don't get intimidated by this vibe coding thing. Like you're not actually writing code. You're literally trying to write in English what the requirements are for the thing that you want to build. — Yeah, the planning step is is massive. As I've got deep prints like aentic engineering, the plan is everything. And Claude code is so good at it because it can read every document you provided it to provided it with and then it's writing that really comprehensive spec sheet breaking down each chunk of the build that it can go and look back on and execute. So asking for plans rather than I think that's the difference between like a complete new beginner or like user of claude code and like the first step is realizing that the value is in the plan. So the spec or the brief is a is everything. So let me uh give you a command about like some highle requirements right. So okay. So first of all uh very important thing to remember for cloud code is you can press shift tab to switch from accept edits that you see here to plan mode. You see this is plan mode. So you just keep pressing shift

tab until it gets to plan mode. And the reason you want to be in plan mode is because you don't want it to actually start writing code. Like the model likes to write code. But like in this case, we don't want it to write code. We want to write a plan. So in plan mode, it can't actually change your code. Well, we don't have any code here, but we don't want it to start actually producing code, right? So press shift tab to enter plan mode. And then I'm just going to give like a very high level requirement. like make me a spec which is like a document for this YouTube command. The command is just fetch uh let's say 20 recent videos and then show the top 10 by views with title view count and duration and then above the top 10 list uh include some sort of key insights uh with like you know specific performance patterns and let us say what is working well for the channel. Okay. And then I also asked it to include like the ideal output format in the spec. Okay. So it's going to go off and make like a word document now and let's see what it comes up with. And you know like I I've been a product leader for a long time and uh usually like I manually write these documents, right? Like you know it takes a very long time. Nowadays I always write the documents with AI like I always get AI to write the f first draft and then I review the document, make some changes and then we go from there. One tip with this shift in workflow like you just said to being more of a re reviewer is uh using something like Whisper Flow or any kind of uh transcription tool. I've got it on my Mac and it's it must save me like hours or like maybe tens of hours each week of of typing uh manually. It's just a simple thing that you can add to your Mac or whatever computer you're using and allows you to just speak into it. And so I'd highly recommend if you guys are getting into this, not only getting familiar with flawed code and trying to automate your workflows like this, but trying to shift more so to transcription uh to just speed up how quickly you can input data into the computer because when you could just be reading over the response or the plan in this left panel and be talking and giving a feedback and then just dumping that in and it will automatically paste the whole transcript in there has been a massive improvement in my overall productivity as I've started using these tools more and more. — I totally agree. Yeah, like I my my seven-year-old doesn't even know how to type to the computer yet, but she can like voice dictate to Cloud. — Yeah. — So, yeah, — I think it's one of those things this year that people are going to race ahead if you can learn to use these more heavily and combine that with the speed of being able to speak into it. I feel like I'm like 10x than what I was the summer last year. — Okay. So, uh it's made a spec for us. So, this is a spec. And now, it's very important to actually review the spec. And AI tends to want to do too much. So, usually what ends up happening is I like to cut out some requirements. Okay, so here's uh the command line. You type this thing and then it works and then um it's going to fetch the videos. Yeah, this makes sense. Get this date data for us. Output format. Okay, here's uh some key insights content opportunity. And then here's like the information. Okay, this sounds pretty good, right? Um so why don't we just tell it to go ahead and implement the spec. Let's go go slash YouTube command now per the spec. So hopefully it will make the slash command and then we can test it on chat channel. While we wait, let me make a new file called channels. md. And this is a file. Why don't we run on your channel, dude? Like should we run channel? Let's put your channel here. And why don't we put my channel too? Yeah. Okay. So I'm I'm just making a list of channels. All right. So it's it claims that it's done implementing the thing. So let's go ahead and try it out. So let's do YouTube and let's do Liam Artley. If we pull up the YouTube command, uh the prompt on the left, the actual spec, uh we can kind of walk through and explain what this is doing. So in these specs, guys, this is breaking down like step by step as if you were handing this over to a human to go and fetch all these things. Claude code has the ability to do a lot of the stuff in the background. So it has a web searching tool. It has the ability to read and write files as it's been doing here. And so kind of has this basic cluster of tools or abilities that a kind of junior like an intern or something or a knowledge worker would have which is how when you feed it just a set of instructions like this, you're kind of outlining how it should be using each of those tools and it's able to link them all together and think in between which is really been the big leap forward with this. So when you

write them out like this, you give it a format and tell it what to do. It's able to go and search the web, pull the information back and then execute on uh the steps you provided in there. So this is really just scratching the surface and we already have our first YouTube research report which would have saved uh I mean if you was to go on a channel and do that might take 15 minutes, 10 minutes to go through and analyze it, pull all the data and get it formatted and put it into a nice report. — The great thing about these requirements is like they're like anyone can understand them, right? Doesn't have a bunch of like pseudo core or anything like that. like anyone can understand what this stuff is trying to do. So anyway, now let's kind of pull the research. Let's take a look at the file that I generated. — You're going to leak my whole YouTube strategy here, man. — Yeah. So did the research and uh yeah, I mean, you know, I think you're doing incredibly well. Obviously, top performer is how I build beautiful 5,000 plus dollar websites in minutes with AI. So that's top performer. I don't know how to feel about this to be honest with you, but it does seem like putting the money the money in the title like drives clicks. — Yeah. Well, my audience is very business and make money focused. That's what it's always been. So, I wouldn't be surprised there. — That makes sense. Okay. So, then you know how AI how I do this and money and more tutorial stuff. Uh and here's like the top 10 tutorials. Uh I'm sure the one that we're going to publish soon is going to be our number one hope. Right. There we go. — Yeah. So, uh so yeah. So, so now let's kind of make a quick improvement. So now let's say uh let me actually add a few more channels. Let me just add like maybe Greg and Greg, Tina, and Jeff. So it's kind of like a pain ass to have to like do this one by one, right? So now we just made a new file with channels MD and you can call it whatever you want. MD is markdown guys and that's just a specific way of writing files. Um so all kinds of AI LLMs and agents really like reading in uh MD or Markdown. Um it allows you to put headings in and so on. So, if you need any questions on that, just ask JGBD like what is markdown and how does it work. But you'll see a lot of like pound symbols or hashtags to denote headings and that's just a very easy way of communicating um between different types of text to AI. So, just uh if you're wondering what the MD means. — Yeah, exactly. And now since you mentioned whisper flow, let me actually use whislow to try to voice tictate this like hey Claude. Um so now I made a channels. md file and I've listed like a bunch of YouTube channels, right? And now what I want you to do is when I type slashyoutube, I just want you to update the research report with the same information for all five ch channels. Okay. Okay. I don't know what the hell this is. Okay. — I don't know. Whisper flow has got ads now. I don't know that ads. — Yeah, it's got ads. I don't know. Okay. So, yeah. So, like it feels the same. — And I mean, this is a pretty shitty This is pretty like casual instructions, right? This is like what you tell your friend. So, uh, let's see if we can understand my spitballing here. All right. So, it looks like it's going to do it. And yeah, this might take a while. But, you know, while we wait, um, look, the the key unlock here is um, just like if you have a problem, just ask Claude like, hey, how can we like this is waste of my time, this workflow, like how do we automate this or how can we solve this problem in the simplest way, right? and then give me a bunch of other options. — And the cool thing is as you guys can see here, we're starting to layer functionality on it. We created a research capability to scrape and research a channel. And now we're putting another layer on top of that, which is like taking that function and being able to run it multiple times. And this can really just scale and scale until you have like layers and layers of commands that are all kind of chained together and passing data through. um to the point where I've gotten uh a sort of agentic engineering set of prompts and claw go commands that I've been able to let run for like 13 hours straight and code overnight for me and build out an entire MVP. So, there's like levels and levels to this and it's so exciting once you start feeling that traction of like the level of autonomy you can get uh of handing off work to these agents. So, if you're I mean it's so accessible now if you can get over this hump of this looks kind of scary. I feel like I'm in a code editor and I'm a developer now. And you you're able to not get too scared by the bash cars, then uh then you're in a really good spot this year. — Yeah, man. Don't be scared, dude. It's just like you're just chatting with the AI and who can like do work for you for you. — I feel like there is a I guess that's where Claude's going with Claude desktop and bringing Claude code in there. I'm sure they're going to do it. But taking this exact experience, but just skinning it in something that seems way less intimidating, I feel would uh would really hit with my I suppose just like a chat GPT experience, but it's able to do all this stuff in the background. Um that's probably where it's going, right? — I think people using cloud code is like at the cutting edge. They just simplify it for everyone else. But, you know, before they do that, if you can get familiar with this interface, you're going to be ahead of the curve. — What do you think? Is this going to create an explosion of essentially claude code being the method for people discovering different like uh product opportunities or is this going to be kind of a generalizing tech where it all pulls into one? I think that's pretty uh interesting to get your thoughts on. — I feel like this is like the first like people keep saying like agent and a agents and blah blah and I feel like this is like the first general agent that actually can do like whatever you want it to do. Do you think we're going to be pulling this say into a a existing application or new application would pull this functionality in and this kind of becomes the core user experience to you know what I mean it's like so regardless of what kind of app you're building this kind of becomes the core and everything else that you build from within the software this getting a bit technical but everything else you build within the software people can expect this kind of experience as the new interface for everything they do on their favorite softwares. My feeling is like we're moving from uh like more application interfaces to just like it's almost like you're like hiring a team, right? Like you're hiring a team and you're training each person on your team like how to work. Uh like you know like I use like workday or Twitter or whatever that that's like an application, right? And you can only personalize that to so much. You can like follow different pe people. You can change the set headings. But for these agents for like you know for this stuff that we're building ourselves like I can make it like hyperpersonalized to whatever I wanted to do and like it's very difficult for I think like some offtheshelf application to compete with this because this is like personalized to like my particular use case. — Yeah. I suppose the functionality of a lot of these applications can become accessible like via how MCP was available or whatever the next iteration that is that anthropics eyeing up but allowing these applications that actually do something highly valuable for you but just making this the kind of central uh central operating system for accessing that functionality. — Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So it built the command. So I think the command is somewhere uh and now let's try it out by doing YouTube. Right. So then you can do the research on all five channels. — If you're a business owner who's interested in what generative AI can do for your business, you can get in touch with me and my team at Morning. AI in one of the links in the description below and we can start your entire AI transformation process going all the way from the education and training of your staff to the identification of the best AI use cases for your company all the way through to development and beyond. We've worked with some of the world's biggest sports teams and also publicly traded companies. So rest assured, you are in good hands. — All right, so uh we saw there's some bugs and we had to save in a new file. Let's be honest, but the information is here now. So, we have your channel, right? We already looked at it. Uh, and then for some reason for my channel, maybe I give the wrong name, but it does not have the information. Um, for Greg's channel, it does. So, Greg is another uh he does a lot of AI tutorials and yeah, he's very good at breaking the news. So, he probably has a lot of time on his hands. So like when this company's launch something new, he does like a exclusive demo. And let's see who else we have. Tina. Tina does more I think beginner tutorials and like a pattern that I kind of copy from her is like you know — here's like everything you need to know in like x minutes and that seems to work well. — Yeah. — Y — um and then Jeff is uh also does a bunch of this stuff and yeah now that we have this research right like we can continue building in this project. we can build uh a new slash command or something else where um you know maybe it looks like my channel's v videos and all this research and what's hot right now and then it can actually suggest the video to make next and like I said it can even maybe write the transcript. It can do a bunch of searches and write a transcript. — Yeah. adding in just a a new file in here that would be like uh pdang like core context is how I usually call it like the who you are what you do uh what sort of stuff you like to talk about what your businesses are what your objectives are with creating content uh then you'd be able to go to Claude and say hey I have this new file which explains the context of me and the kind of content that I create and my goals here can we uh integrate that into the YouTube command prompt that we had there or create a new slash command which would be slrite and you'll be able to pass in a video idea who had taken that information from who you are and taken the example of what that person gave and be able to start to write some draft scripts for you. So that's just one example of being able to automate small parts of your life. And I think the challenge for people is to one download code get access to it like install it via terminal and then get in there and start just throwing questions at and say hey these are the things I do. Is there anything what's

the lowest hanging fruit for me here? what's the easiest thing that I could build out here as just a starting point for building a workflow within claw code to automate the part of my life. So uh Peter, I appreciate you coming on. Um I'm sure there's a lot of other uh great pieces of content on your channel that people can be checking out around these kinds of things as well. So I will link your channel in the description below, but u really appreciate you coming on. Is there any last minute tips you want to give to people heading into 2026? — Yeah, I mean I think my best tip is, you know, I think Liam and I are good teachers, but I think uh we have to admit that Claude is probably a better teacher to us. So just if you have a question, just ask the AI how you can do this stuff and they'll probably tell you. — I think it's it's such a good mental kind of habit to build up this year. I think it's really going to separate the winners from losers this year is one not only just asking questions but two thinking like I have a problem. Can I build something for this? Because building is now accessible to whether it's building a automated workflow like we have there or it's actually building a small app for you to use personally. All of this stuff is available to you guys now. So u the world is your oyster. Hopefully we'll be able to to bring some new source on cloud code um in the near future. Pedro will have you back on the channel. But it's been great to chat with you, man. And um I'll leave your links down in the description. — Thanks so much. Yeah. Cheers. So that is all for this episode of the podcast, guys. If you want to see something similar that I really think you'd like, you can click up here to watch another one. And remember, if you think you have a story worth telling and some valuable insight, you can share with the community. You can fill out my podcast application form in the description below. I'd love to have a chat with you and get some exposure for your business. Aside from that, guys, that's all for the video. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next