I've been avoiding Claude code for months. It seemed too technical and too complicated. However, my friend Mark has been begging me to start using it. He is hands down the best person to learn Claude code from. So I brought him on this episode to teach me how to use it from scratch. And I'm gonna be honest, after this episode, I went down the Claude code rabbit hole and spent the entire weekend building a system that literally used to take me twenty hours every single week, and I'm using it right now. Here's what nobody told me about Claude code. It reads your files, it remembers your preferences, and it learns how you work. So the more you use it, the smarter it gets. And it doesn't just give you answers. It actually builds things for you and saves them to your computer. So by the end of this episode, you're gonna know exactly how to set this up, start using it yourself even if you've never written a single line of code, and begin automating all aspects of your work. Believe me, if you've been meaning to try Claude code and start using it yourself but it seemed too technical, this is absolutely the best video you should watch on how to get started. So with that being said, let's get into it. Alright. What is going on, guys? I'm stoked for this episode. Personally, I've been wanting to use Claude Code for quite some time now. So I wanna bring on the goat of Claude Code in my eyes, Mark. So, yeah, I'm hoping today we could, a, get me up to speed using Claude Code, get my audience up to speed, and build something cool in this podcast. So, yeah, happy to have you, Mark. Yeah. Of course. Uh, it's a pleasure to be here. I know it's been a while since we last touched base. We were probably
more in the vibe code world before, and now we're getting into the real code y world now. So that's good. Yeah. 100%.
So I'm stoked to see what we could build with Cloud Code. I've never actually been able to build anything with it. So to kick start this, I wanna ask one question, and that is Claude Cowork just dropped literally yesterday before we were gonna film this podcast. So for my audience, what do you think? Is Claude Cowork something that replaces a need to learn Claude code? Do you think it's like an entry, like, gateway drug thing? Like, give me your rundown on that. Because I like to use you as a filter for AI tools to see, like, should I pay attention to this? Is it overrated? What not? So give me your rundown. Yeah. For sure. You stole my description, first of all. So let's make that disclaimer. Uh, it it is the gateway drug. Up until now, the average person looks at a terminal, and no matter how many times someone like me shouts and screams and cries,
we can't convince people to hop in a terminal because there's, like, this mental block that terminal equals code, code equals I don't know how to do it, so I walk away. So this gives you this kinda, like, top of funnel taste of what Cloud Code can do. So Cloud Code or Cowork rather is
is a decent, like, adjustment
to dealing with more hands on agentic workflows without dealing with all the setup, the download, the, uh, blinking cursor on your screen if you're using a terminal. It's still full of bugs, but it's still, like, one big step up from using the normal Cloud AI. Gotcha. So we're not using inside of an IDE, for example. Where are we using this? We're using this inside of the Cloud desktop app. Right? So that's something that's, like, more accessible for most people because a lot of people might have Cloud desktop downloaded. You could just toggle between chat and co work mode instead of having to go into IDE. So I think it'd be helpful to show kind of a little rundown of what the UI looks like real quick, and then that'll segue us into our next section of actually using Claude code to build something. For sure. So this is what it looks like. So on cloud desktop,
you have chat, you have code, and now you have co work. So the whole point of co work, like we said before,
is they basically took the most common nontechnical
things coming through Cloud Code and made them available as one click buttons. And when you click on these buttons, instead of you having to think about the prompt,
it does the prompt engineering for you. So if you say organize files, which is the main use case everyone's going off on on x, you could just say go and fix this folder. You would tell it which folder you wanna work in, and then you wanna specify if you want, how you want it to organize it, or specifically what the name of the folder is. They give you some defaults like my downloads folder, my photos,
some old projects, etcetera. And then when you go through the process, you can pick one of the language models of choice,
and everything that's happening will appear on the right hand side. In the world of Claude code, everything is very monotone.
It happens one thing at a time. So if you do need that aesthetic
artifact look, then this will help you keep track of exactly what's happening. Okay. So you're saying we could make edits to our folders, organize folders, all this stuff, create presentations from folders, and then even spin up, a UI, kind of like a vibe coded user interface directly inside of the Clawd desktop app now using Cowork. Right? Exactly. So before, you could already create the vibe coded apps with artifacts on their own, but now they just made it that much easier to be able to keep track of all the files, all the context being used. Mhmm. And you can still use connectors and ad connectors. So you don't lose that MCP flare.
You can layer it on, and not everyone's gonna need to reorganize the same folder 10 times. So we need to find better use cases. Right? These are just some examples that people can wrap their head around. But when you go through the experience, for example, I tested the crunch data.
It will go to the folder, come up with a plan, and you'll notice that when you click on them, you'll get this prompt here that says ask any clarifying questions. So they're trying to encourage you, to encourage it, to think and plan before doing things to lower the likelihood that you break something. Because in Cloud Code, if you don't know what you're doing, sometimes you can completely nuke your desktop if you're not actually prompting correctly. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. So now let's segue into actually using Claude code because, obviously, Claude co work is good for super nontechnical people. I've been playing around with it. It's been great so far. It's been a good entry into Claude code, but I wanna know, like, does this get you, like, 90% of the way? Do you think it gets you 50% of the way? Where do you think it kinda leaves nontechnical people when it comes to Claude code? Like, should we still learn Claude code? If we extend the analogy of the gateway drug, key emphasis on drug, this to me gives you 30 to 40%. This is not even close to the firepower of Claude,
and it's full of bugs. Why? Because they use Claude code to vibe code it in the span of a week. So the actual Anthropic team admitted that on x. So with any vibe coded app, as you'll be familiar and unfamiliar,
you're gonna have tons of bugs, especially when you go to production, go to thousands and millions of people. Tinker with it, play with it, know that there's bugs,
but this is only meant to be the taste of what you get with full firepower. Got it. Makes sense. Cool. So I wanna move on to a couple questions before we actually go ahead, show you how to download Claude code, and then actually build something with it. Um, Mark actually built something for me, a cool use case I've been wanting myself, and we're gonna go through kind of the step by step process how we did that and then also the the finished product of that. So my first question for you is, like, what's the biggest misconception
with Claude Code? Because when I hear that, I think, okay. If I'm not coding an app or using it in my coding environment, what's the point of using Claude Code? So kind of break down what the biggest misconception or, you know, few misconceptions you see are. Yeah. So, obviously, it was a platform originally designed for developers, which is why they called it Claude Code. But over time, a lot of nontechnical people and a lot of nontechnical
use cases popped up, which in my opinion, I talked to lot of people. I say they should have called it Claude creates because then it can create code and artifacts. But the misconception is that you only use it for development or building code or vibe coding. In reality, because it has access to your desktop and your files and you can create a local, uh, database that runs on your computer, which we will show you today, it can do whatever you want. Like, the limit is your imagination and your ability to just, like, learn by osmosis. So when you ask it, here, go to the Nano Banana API, make an a thumbnail of me for YouTube. It can go research, look for the Nano Banana API, tell you, hey. Listen. I need an API key. Here's the URL to go with the API key. Give it to me, and we'll go from here. You're gonna see Python on screen. You don't have to engage in that Python. You just have to be aware that something's happening to make that functionality work. So the less you are worried about what's happening on screen, and you kinda take a peek at it, even if you're not technical, you will start to see little patterns by osmosis, and you'll be surprised. In three, six, nine months, you'll be able to upscale yourself by accident. Okay. Yeah. I love that. And then I guess my next question would be, do you have any, like, non techy success stories of, like, somebody because you run a pretty big I wouldn't call it a Claude code community, but your community is built like, a a lot of your users in there or your community members are wanting to know everything about Claude code and all the use cases you find for it. So do you have any, like, nontechnical,
like, whatever? Just somebody who might be a bit archaic when it comes to technology
going from complete beginner to actually being able to build useful things with it. Yeah. Yeah. So, obviously, I have a mid tier kind of size community, but we get a lot of nontechnical people coming in that have decided, that's it. I am going to dig my heels in. I'm paying for the max plan, and I'm gonna build stuff. And we recently had someone that's actually 70 years old, retired, basically built a full mobile app in the span of three or four months using any den and Claude code. And stuff like that gets me as a, like, a super nerd, super excited because I love seeing that progress and people shattering limiting beliefs. Because people will always come in who are not technical and say, hey. Listen. Do you got something for me that's not Claude code? Can I just use, like, chat you could see better? Because they're just so afraid of like, leaping in and running into those first issues. But as soon as you get past that hump where, one, you've downloaded it. Two, you go by trial by fire. You try to build something, and something doesn't work. And then you realize that you could technically ask Claude code in a virgin window to help you fix Claude code, and you understand this little feedback loop, then they're unchained. And then once the imagination is open, they start building from very minute use cases to things that they're proud of, and then just stacking those skills on top of that. Yeah. I love that. And that you just literally explained me. I haven't used Claude code because it just whatever. I have the like, this mental barrier about it. And I had that in the beginning with AI in general, and that's why I created this YouTube channel to, like, show nontechnical people you can use AI tools and actually become, like, a speaker of that language, so to say. So, yeah, I I love that. Going on a little bit, like, I guess my last question here before diving into showing how to download Cloud Code and then actually building out our use case for this. What do you think a downside or the downsides of not using Cloud Code are now? Because it seems like this is where the AI space is going. And just like if you wanna be able to, like, 10 x your productivity, a 100 x whatever, like, do you think we're if we're not using Claude code, we're missing out on opportunity here? And it might not be just Claude code. It could be things like anti gravity. It could be kind of like a transferable language we could use for these other tools. So what do you think the downsides of not learning this is? Yeah. Uh, it's good that you gave that disclaimer because I was gonna give that disclaimer to your audience. One, this is not a Cloud Code chilling video. I like to use Cloud Code because I've tested multiple products. It's the one that I resonate with the most with my development style, but you do have Cursor. You have windsurf, you have open code now, which is becoming competitive. I think they have a million active users that are using open source models. You can use whatever you want. It's the idea that you use language models in a terminal
where you are devoid of all these little pretty icons
on a UI, and you go straight to the source. That's the theme of this episode. So I think that if you don't opt into the terminal world, not necessarily the Cloud Code world, you are missing out because you are going to the source. So when you go to the source, you realize it's kinda like waking up from a dream. You look around at, like, 90% of AI tools, and you're like, oh, I don't need these. I can cancel hundreds of subscriptions. And I canceled a few months ago $1,200
a month worth of subscriptions
because I literally realized I didn't need it anymore. If I wanted to compress videos, I don't need to pay for the service that does it. I can just tell it, and it creates a Python script that does it for me. You can start to tackle each subscription of your time, which is why I can justify my very expensive subscription to Claude Code. So it's a matter of using it from day one for ROI heavy activities. Got it. Last question. I lied. My last one is not my last one. So what's, a use case that you've built yourself that you use for Claude Code that, like because your hands off, it saved you a bunch of time. I know you and I have talked off camera about it. Yeah. So what's, like, one thing you've built where you're just like, this used to take me hours or used to take a team member hours, and now it's just kinda done with Cloud Code? Yeah. There's one thing that not wasn't possible, but would be super painful for me to do with the little time that I have, and there's one thing that was a major unlock. So the major unlock was I have a YouTube command center, which is unbelievable now. It's taken me probably I've put in a hundred hours into this command center where I go back and forth, and it goes and looks at, like, things that are trending, things that are new. We have a bit of a conversation. And then once we land on a topic, I kind of give it my ideas where I wanna take it and where I wanna go. And then from that idea, it goes and creates 15 thumbnails, very high quality. It takes images of me, transforms them to go with that thumbnail, creates a thumbnail brief. It creates an editing and a script brief for my editing team and creates SEO tags, titles, descriptions, everything from one input, which is why for me, once I started on this drug, I got addicted because once you can have one input and you have not infinite, but many outputs as a result of that one, that is the very definition of leverage. So once I did that, every part of my life, I started creating what I call command centers. So this is my copywriting command center. I started on LinkedIn, so I wanted to understand how do I write copy on LinkedIn without using AI, but, like, understanding the principles. How do I do a crash course on everything? Let's create a command center. So creating those command centers helped level me up because even as a developer, I get to learn things I would have never been exposed to otherwise. Yeah. 100%.
Being somebody that makes YouTube videos, literally, I spend fifteen plus hours a week probably on this, and that bottlenecks every single other thing when it comes to, like, my business. Like, my creative mind is not working because I have to go and I have to come up with these thumbnail ideas, title ideas. I think one thing, and I could be wrong here, but what sets it apart is you're not just, like, saying go off and do this thing and it does all of it. You have to play around with it because if you didn't come to that, like, idea
or, you know, whatever the title was gonna be, like, you had to kind of play around with it to get that title. You know what I'm saying? Instead of just saying, hey. Go create a title for me on whatever whatever you think is gonna work well. So you have to have a little bit of that back and forth. But I think once you have that solidified, it then could take it and run with it and go ahead and, you know, create those thumbnails for you and whatnot. So It's really important for your audience because you just made an amazing point. There's this trend right now about this thing called a Ralph loop. Right? It's a very mind numbing thing for most people that are not developers.
Basically this fantasy that you just give tasks and you walk away, go to the beach, and you come back, and a bunch of tasks have been executed. It's one thing to execute a 100 tasks. It's another thing for those tasks to be meaningful and drive actual value. So if you spun up and you said, make me a thousand thumbnails and a thousand titles, but 80% are garbage, that's like a net loss. You lost the money on the token usage. You lost time and wasted effort and electricity. Human in the loop plus Cloud Code is the most OP combination. Combination. We're gonna clip that for for the intro video because that yeah. That's fire. Cool. So now that's a perfect segue into showing what we're gonna build because we're gonna build something pretty similar. I guess real quick before doing that, we should show how do you quickly download this if you're a nontechnical person. Where do you do this? How do you do this in, like, two minutes? But show that, and then we're gonna go into the build and show what Mark built us. Alright. Sounds good. Okay. So when you go to the beautiful domain claw.com/product/claw-code,
you'll see something like this. And, yes, it is a terminal. Uh, resist the urge to cry. All you have to do if you're nontechnical
is you just use this one command in your terminal.
And if this immediately gives you an error, most people, many people, paste this. There's some form of error because maybe your computer's different, your environment's different. There's something that needs to be reorganized to make this possible. If that is a barrier to you, you can install something called warp. Both of us, not affiliated.
It is a terminal that you can run pretty much for free. It has some AI in there with a little a free tier.
You can just tell it that same command. You copy paste this specific thing right here. And then if there is an error, it'll say there's an error. But instead of passing it back to you to figure it out, it will go and figure it out for you on your behalf, ask for permission, and then install Claude code for you. And then once it's done, you will see your little Amigo,
and it will pop up. You'll see something like that, and then you will be good to go. You'll see a screen just like this. Perfect. Easy enough. Yep. So this will be your highway. Again, not affiliated,
but it's a free way to, one, use a terminal if you ever need to install Cloud Code, remove Cloud Code, update Cloud Code. Really good way, and you can do it for all kinds of things. You can even ask that, by the way, to organize files on your computer. All of these IDEs, as long as they have access to your computer, you're good to go. So that's the installation part. Are we good to jump into the concept? Hold on. Before you go to that, let's talk about where users are actually gonna begin interfacing with Cloud Code. Yeah. So you can use this in any terminal. You could use warp like I showed you. I like to use it in cursor. You can use anti gravity.
There are so many IDEs that I haven't even mentioned. An IDE is just an editor. You can just open any terminal. And once you have this installed and you use the magic words Claude, you should see your little crab icon friend pop up, and you're good to go from there. Perfect. Easy enough. Cool. Now let's move into let's talk about a what I wanna automate first, and then we're gonna show what we actually or what Mark actually built after that. So let me I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen now. Alright. So looking at my screen, what I wanna automate is my short form content. So for some of those people or majority of you guys that don't know, I've been kind of going hard on short form content. This is a goal for 2026. I really wanna tap into this platform here, both on Instagram, YouTube shorts, and TikTok. Alright. So about a week ago, I had this video right here go absolutely bananas. It's got about almost, like, 825,000
views, bunch of engagement, and I've actually grown. Like, I had about, like, three or 400 followers before this. This singular video is, like, unlocking this whole new channel that I could tap into. And, this is a huge goal of mine going into 2026.
And then here's a YouTube short too. I posted this three days ago. And And this one, I'll just refresh, is absolutely running. So the goal for what I wanna build is I wanna build out a system that could help me automate this.
And so that way, don't need to be super hands on with it. Because right now, I have somebody that's actually writing scripts for me. I have to approve these scripts. I actually go and I analyze what videos did well so I could try to recreate that success of that video. So if I had a Claude code system that I could just, like, have on autopilot or I guess I'd you know, there'd be a little bit of human in the loop there that could just help systemize this process for me, that would be absolutely,
like, the most valuable thing ever. So Mark actually built that out. So let's go into a little bit more about that. And if you see on screen there, uh, before he unshared the screen, he had 89¢
from that video. So in exchange for 89¢ that he's paying me, I built the system for him and for you.
So let's get into it. Conceptually for the audience, so I don't lose you. Core concept is Brock, like you said, wants to go celebrity mode on short form. We wanted to focus primarily on Instagram. So the number one way we need to do that is scrape. Now if we just ask Claude
Code, go and scrape Instagram, that is a very mammoth task because there are many proxy layer security,
all of these things. And to actually do the scraping, we're gonna use a marketplace called Appify.
You can think of it as the app store where you can take tons of scrapers. There's ones literally designed for Instagram,
TikTok, what have you, and you can essentially lease them or rent them to execute your tasks for a small pay as you go fee. So we're gonna use that. Restore it in a database, and then we'll use that to help create
those ideas for Brock. So, we're gonna focus primarily on Instagram. And instead of paying $10 every single time like you're used to doing using platforms like Lovable and Bolt and what have you, we can just use something called SQLite.
And what SQLite is is literally a free database you can run locally on your computer. This frees you because every time I had to experiment before, I would have to shell out another $10 to Supabase. So this lets you build vibe quote for free. If you wanna go to the next level and then upgrade to Supabase, that's always something you can do after. So that's the database we'll be using, and in there, we'll be posting or hosting things like the creators, the posts, and the hooks that we scrape. Scrape. In terms of the workflow, if you remember before, my YouTube command center, I have one input, many outputs. In this case, Brock just wants to say the words make me viral as one command, and then after that, write a topic or a link where Claude can go and read about whatever the tool is and then generate 20 hooks,
then rank those hooks by a virality score. That virality score, I'll talk about right below, and then we'll pick a top three and then create captions for that. Brock can have one input, one idea, and then have multiple outputs. Great question. So go go back up a little bit. So on the topic side of things, context is really important here. Right? Because if I give, like, a little short paragraph of what I want the context to be about, it's probably not gonna be the best output. Right? It's not gonna generate the best hooks cause it's not gonna have context, or will it take that, then do some web searching, and then, like, find the right amount of context and then use that, or, like, am I wrong there? Could you break that down for me? No. No. For sure. So the first time you use this, everything we're using is a language model. Language models are not magic. They're not super intelligent.
They look for patterns. So if you say, go look at this Claude code or co work feature, and here's the link, and you say nothing else, and there's no preferences or examples of how Brock writes his scripts, it will go and look at the database where we've scraped other creators and be like, okay. I think I'll do a remix between the different creators and my knowledge about writing hooks as of, I don't know, 2024 or 2025. That will be your first output. Then as you iterate and say, no. No. That's not how I like to write hooks. Here's the example of this 800,000
view video.
Try to mimic that style more and tell CloudMD, which is like the command center brain, to update that in its memory. So that's how this incrementally gets better. Got it. Yeah. So it's just gonna literally just get smarter and smarter and smarter the more I use it hypothetically. Right? Yes. As long as you keep telling it, listen. Um, this time, this was your mistaken flaw. Let's commit to memory to avoid doing that moving forward. So you have to be proactive in making sure that it learns. 100%.
And when it comes to the virality score, we kinda just made this up, Brock and I, just to come up with something. There would be some criteria. So this virality score is based off of curiosity, emotion, brevity, relevance. Relevance being, like, how trendy is the topic, which on short form, even though not short form guy, seems to be really important. Right? Extremely. And then you have uniqueness and platform fit. These ratios could be off. So these weights could be updated. You just wanna be able to design the system. So if you need to update them, you can. And then this leads to the overall preview of the process, which is you scrape competitors, you get some inspiration, maybe you add your own examples as well. You have some razzle dazzle. You generate the content, and then the final piece of the life cycle, which we won't cover in this video, but we you could do later on is after you create the thing, tell it to go scrape your own Instagram to see how did it do so it can actually learn from what went well and what didn't go well. That's where you have that full feedback loop. Yeah. That analyzing part is the part I'm most excited about, honestly. Like, scraping the competitors is great, coming up with ideas, understanding my hook style, all that stuff. But, like, analyzing what works because, really, what I've noticed at least in short form content, you find the, like, the hooks in the, like, the format of what works and just double down, triple down on that as opposed to trying a whole bunch of different things, seeing what works. And once you find something, it's really important. That analyzing part of this is what I'm probably the most most stoked about. Yes, sir. Yeah. So in terms of the links, these are the links that Brock provided to me of different creators he wants to be inspired by on the short form side.
So these were we'll revisit these shortly. And in terms of the actual build, one thing I like to do, again,
because I am lazy, is you can use whatever research tool you want. In my case, I like to use Perplexity Labs. It's this icon right here. They have a pretty generous feature as well. And what it allows you to do is give it an idea. So for me, just use WhisperFlow. I just go off for, like, five minutes about what I'm trying to build, and then I throw that into something like Claude or ChatGPT
and tell it, can you make this into a more refined prompt for something like Perplexity Labs? And then we get something legendary like this where there's no way I would have actually written it myself where we won't read the whole thing, but it just says act as an expert senior product manager and slash prompt engineer. I need you to write a highly detailed mega prompt designed for the absolute latest, most capable version of Cloud Code available today. Why do I say this? I wanted to know about the latest advancements in Cloud Code so it can refine the prompt accordingly. So I don't have to worry about what changed in this version? How should I talk to it now? It does that dirty work for me. And I say, use your browsing capabilities to verify exactly what version is the state of the art. Then I tell it what the goal is. We wanna do a competitor scraper. We want internal analytics. We want a command center, uh, dashboard later on, not a priority. And then we go through the workflow. So once I do this, it comes back. We zoom back out here with a sample prompt, and I tell it, can you just make this into a markdown file? So I can just drag and drop it into a brand new virgin eyes Claude folder.
It's not even a Claude folder. It's a folder that you import and use Claude code to read what's in that folder. So you're just you're just adding that to, like, your folder on your desktop, essentially? It's as simple as that? Literally, just to show your audience, you'd go open folder.
Okay. You'd create a new folder, and then when you open in cursor here,
you'll have absolutely nothing except the name of the folder. This will be empty. So for me, this is where I drag and dropped the exact file I just showed you here. This was the only file in my cursor, and nothing else existed. Everything else came about from using Cloud Code. Yeah. Easy enough. Yeah. So this is the foundation. Now I should have been a bit more intentional to go through the prompt and make sure that all the features that AI came up with are the ones that I care about, but I use this to do this quick and dirty. That's that. In terms of Appify, one of the scrapers will rent is called an Instagram post scraper. Uh, this one scrapes the actual posts, captions, etcetera, but it doesn't take the transcript
of the Instagram videos themselves. If you don't feel like going and shopping around to see which app in this Appify app store can do that, you can use their MCP server that can just go and navigate their database for you. So if you tell it, listen, I need to do x, y, and z for the cheapest cost, you will go look at all what are called actors in the App Store, pick the cheapest ones and the ones that are most highly rated and recommend those to you, and then you build your workflow after. Yeah. That makes it so easy. Gotta love the MCP. Yes, sir. And then in terms of using and installing the MCP, this is where nontechnical people might just tap out. They made it easy as well. So if you just go to mcp.appify.com,
exact URL, you'll see something like this. You can pick what matters to you. I would just click on things related to data storage.
I would just pick everything if you're just starting out. You don't know what you're doing. And then at the very bottom on integrations, all you have to do is pick on something like cursor or Cloud Code, and then it'll give you the one line command. And if you click on add API token, it'll put a placeholder. All you have to do is go and get your Apify API key from your account, which if you go to your account, is literally right here. You grab this. You paste that exactly in here, right there, instead of these little curly brackets.
You take this command.
You open a brand new terminal session with Cloud Code, and you paste it. So I will show you in one second after I block my API key what it looks like, and we'll go from there. Yeah. I got one thing to say on that because I've used Apify in the past for certain builds in n n n, for example, to try to create the same thing. And finding an actor that actually works sometimes was a pain because it worked in the past, and then something broke and it wasn't up to date. They weren't, like, servicing it, whatever. I don't even know. But I think the MCP thing makes it so much more simple, and I'm glad that you brought that up because then it'll just go ahead and find which one is working right now so you don't need to go and do that yourself. Or it it will actually just test them. So it'll run it. It'll be like, this one sucks. Let me go search for another one. This one sucks. I'll go search for another one. It will do the dirty work for you, which is why I like that. So this is what it looks like in Kershur. Obviously, I have blocked my API keys. I pasted that exact command I showed you before, so that Claude MCP add Apify.
I just had to add my API key right here, and then it went, executed that command, and then it comes back at the bottom saying successfully added. And all you have to do is restart a brand new session in Cloud Code, and it will take effect. And I'll show you how you can verify that you have that MCP server. When you have a brand new tab, you just have to write MCP
and then put MCP status. You'll see right here, we have this connected, so we know we are in Valhalla. We are good to go. We are in the promised land.
And beyond that, all you have to do is I just said, are you able to find this? So I told it, go and look for this Appify scraper. I just wanted to double check it's working. You can see right here, as soon as you see this little green icon and you see m c p underscore something, the m c p is working. So it found it, and it tells me about it. It tells me about the success rate, the total number of users, which is awesome because like Brock said, it's always aware of what is being used so it can rank the actors by usage and success rate. And it tells you what it does, the pricing, the input parameters of what it needs, what you can offer it. And then I said, can you can I scrape the transcript of videos? And it says, no. You can't, which is where I discovered that. So it can do metadata performance,
but it can't do that. So then it went and found three alternatives with their respective
success rates and their pricing, which is why this is so awesome. It's very hands off. You are the boss, and it tells you what is the best choice and why. Once you do that, I say, cool. Can we test it on this? We take, uh, Nektarav's
short form, and we ask it for, let's say, the first three videos. It doesn't work, and then it hangs. And then I basically try to understand why is it hanging until it finally comes back with the following. So this is the caption. This is everything about that video. So I'm like, cool. Now we're cooking with gas. We try a few more posts, and I I say, can you try three posts at once and see what happens? So the first one works perfectly. You can see right here, this is the source URL.
If I scroll to the very right
and I grab this, you can see let me see right here.
Zero to forty seconds, zero to eight seconds. Okay. Stop building your automations from scratch.
Instead, use this AI tool. So now I know, cool. That is a script, and our next job at some point will be how do we extract
what we think is the hook? Because short form is short. So how do you know which one is the hook if you don't see the first five seconds or the first line or the first two lines? So there's gonna be some judgment there, and there's some nuance, which is why this is not perfect. One thing I did notice is that the MCP had an aneurysm when I tried to make it do three at once. So it turns out, at least for this actor, it needs to do one at a time, not all at the same time. So once it did that, it was able to do one one one, and then we were good to go. And then you could see right here, this is the transcript that comes back from each and every video along with the original URL. So that's kinda like the end of the first session. And I basically say the following, because every session in Claude code is a brand new blank slate for the most part outside of whatever you have in this file called ClaudeMD. You can think of clotMD as your memory bank, the same way you'd have memory in chat.
One thing that we have to know is I don't wanna have to go through every single time with a blank screen and say, go and give me the transcript of this video for it to have to go in circles to realize, one, it doesn't have one actor to do that. Has to do two of them. And then two, that it has to do one at a time. So instead of me having to worry about that, I just say, take note on how you're able to scrape these transcripts and what actors you used and create a Claude MD file that would have a full understanding of how to execute this. So I don't have to repeat myself each and every time. So you didn't even usually, like, if you're interacting with, like, AI, ChaiChukwuTe whatever, you'd say that, like, oh, give me a prompt to use to then always know how to perform this task. But inside of Cloud Code, this is, like, what stands out to me, is it literally went and created that we could call that a skill. Right? Is that considered a skill in Cloud Code? I won't let you say skill because I'll miss they'll be misleading. So Okay. It's not a skill. It's just it's creating
this Knowledge base? Knowledge base. Let's call it knowledge base. Yes. Okay. Got it. Yeah. That's cool. I literally created that file instead of just giving, like, a prompt that you would usually get that you'd have to u like, save somewhere in your notes, use it when like, wouldn't you know, whenever you're using a custom GPT, for example. But Yeah. If you click on it, they make it like a hyperlink, especially in cursor. You could see, like, top priority is, like, the make me viral command. That's after we actually built it out. But if as you go through, it takes notes on the different data models you have,
the hook ranking algorithm we ended up making,
everything that it needs to use. So he has a section here on actors used. So now it knows this is the Apify actor name. This is the cost, and the second one we use to actually grab the transcript of the video is this one. So it keeps that running memory, which is why this is powerful. And, ideally, it's gonna be way quicker ever like, at least after that initial time because now it knows exactly what to do, so it doesn't need to go through this treadmill thought process of trying to figure it out. Yeah. So if you compare it to something like a ChatGPT,
every single time you fail a ChatGPT,
if you don't, uh, if you aren't proactive to go and document and avoid it happening, it will keep happening over and over again. But in Cloud Code, every time something doesn't go as planned, you could say, go and learn from this mistake as soon as you finally get to the point where it did the right thing. That's where you have that feedback loop. Now to make this a lot more tactical,
this session was about executing the plan. So for me, if you go to here, this is the plan. This is an adapted version of what I created in Provexity Labs. This is the original. And what I asked for in a separate chat was, can you make this thing instead of just a list of feature requests in a wish list? Can you make it into a plan and make it so that there are checkboxes
so you can keep track of what you're doing as you accomplish each task?
Now why did I do this? One, it's no secret that Claude has a context window as of this recording of 200,000 tokens. MCP servers actually take a lot of that. So it can take anywhere between two to 15%
of that session. So instead of me running into a max window every single time and worrying about that, if it keeps checking off when it's completed,
I can always go back and be like, listen. Go pick up where you left off on the plan. I So can see like, okay. Cool. I haven't started phase 2.3.
Let's keep going from there. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. So that's super helpful, which is why I ended up creating this plan.
And the plan, you'll see right here, as it completes things, it will tell you, this is completed. This is not completed. And it'll keep editing the source plan until we're good to go. And you could see here, it's using the MCP server to test out, again, uh, the different Apify posts
scraping. And then if we go to the very bottom here, it's using and creating what's called the SQLite database. So like I said before, if you click on database
and you click on short form, this is what it looks like behind the scenes. You don't need to use a super base. It creates all of your database
for free. You see all the columns here. And if this is too ugly for you, I had a separate chat where I said, can you make it so that we can have some form of UI to look at this? So this was the chat. I said, can you make it so we have UI?
I hate looking at it here. So I talk to it like my friend, and you can talk to it as well. And you get something like this where you can click on it. And when I, uh, load it back up, you'll be able to see different tables like hooks and posts, etcetera. That's basically you'd be able to interact with it on a browser. Yeah. Much easier to look at than the IDE that we're looking at here. Yeah. It's basically like having a Google Sheet on steroids, and the most important thing, like I said, is it's free. So one thing I wanted to do now is put everything into practice, and I noticed that we encountered a bug. I thought that things were running super smooth. We have the MTP. It learned how to scrape, and I started storing things in our database
and started creating the viral hooks algorithm so I could create this post creator. And then I realized that there was one fundamental flaw, and I'm just gonna wait to just pull that up so your audience doesn't have to watch me scroll. Yeah. Sounds good. Okay. So here, at some point, I realized that it was making a fundamental mistake.
It was scraping everything, but it would put the caption
in the transcripts column. And you might say, why do I care? Well, you care because it was training on
these hooks that were actually
the caption. So it learned to say comment x, and I will send you y instead of the actual hook of the videos. And I got confused because I started getting tens of hooks that all started with comment y for x. And I'm like, this is not a hook. So then I went to look at the database, and I'm like, you literally put the captions in the transcript. You never actually captured and saved the transcript. So at this point, that's where I said, I just noticed that your hooks are the captions.
This is wrong.
So it went through. It deleted all the things, uh, that were incorrect,
and then it reloaded and went through and just kept only the posts, and then we start adding on the transcripts. So when we finally go the the next step, which is okay. Now that we have transcripts in there, we come up with the virality score. It goes through and it creates,
like, a ranking of all the posts in the database. So if we go to the database and you check the scores, you'll be able to see that they're actually implemented and calculated on the fly. So that
allows us to do the following. If I go into here so if we say,
make me viral, this new feature,
this is the command that in CloudMD, our memory bank or knowledge base as we now call it. I just said go and look at this feature and come up with material. You'll notice that despite that, we still have a couple of them that were biased from before. I think CloudMD did hadn't updated yet. It says comment co work to get free access, but we still did have some real hooks for the most part. So eighty twenty, 80% were actual hooks, but we still wanted this to be a 100%. So Here. Go up one more time. Yeah. I wanna point one of these out. Like, for example, number two, that hook, pretty solid. Claude just became your AI coworker that finishes tasks without you. Like, that's something that I would actually use in one of my short form videos. So that's I mean, goes to show that it's at least working. Yeah. And maybe you could use the comment, coworker, and they're happy. Like, this is solid for the caption as long as it knows what to do. But I just wanted to show this because it's important to know that especially if you go on x, especially the dark depths of x, people will say this thing will replace software engineers, like, remove everything from existence. It still makes mistakes. It should have been smart enough. If you can use an MCP server to see what actor we need, it should be able to look at and be like, oh, this is probably not a hook. But you have to be aware that, like, you can't just go off to the beach and come back and expect good results,
especially if you're not a non techie. So human in the loop watching this is essential. Yeah. That's like the keyword for this episode, I think, is human in the loop because otherwise, we could build out this system if we're not constantly iterating with it. It's probably not gonna be the best. So that's why this is a good starting point for us and for me to start using. I'm excited to see what this looks like a month after playing around with this, having to test out different videos that I post and giving my thoughts and, you know, kind of expertise on it. Yeah. And the thing is you can go much deeper than this. So right now, this is the scoring
algorithm where you could see right like we said before, curiosity,
emotion, etcetera. It's using its judgment. Like, Claude is going through and ranking everything that we have in our database with a score. Brock can look at this and be like, no. You are so wrong. That last video was a complete flop, or this video did incredibly well. So this will take tinkering.
And if you had a vibe coded a front end, every single time you would change the way you the the process flows and the automation flows, you'd have to go and rework the UI to match it. So that's where, like, the UI and everything that we focused on for the year, which is, oh, cool. I just built a clone of x. It's not about the clone. It's about, like, what is beneath it? What is the system underneath it? So when Brock spends a couple weeks until it's actually really good, then he could ask, cool. Can we just spin up a UI? And maybe we'll use Gemini as the LM to go do the analysis or Anthropic or whatever to execute everything that we've been doing in the terminal. So in a way, you you leave the final part for last where if you have a UI, if you have a product of your own, it's now fully polished. That's actually, like, a super good point because I was gonna say looking at this viral scorecard thing here, I was like, man, this just seems like a lot of numbers. I'd love it love it if it were in a dashboard. I was literally gonna mention that, but that's such a good point because if I don't have this thing dialed in, so to say, like, right now, it's just gonna be a pain in the ass having to go back and forth and try to vibe code. My audience knows how to vibe code and how it could be such a pain so many so much of the time. So, yeah, that's interesting. I'm excited to see what it looks like when it's in almost like its own little mini, like, internal software that I could use instead of having to use something that might be a little bit more intimidating like Cursor or something like that. Exactly. So and then the whole point is that it gives you all of these as outputs. So it tells you now the top three hooks. So it tells you why it's a hook, why it's a good hook rather.
So this one, Claude, code just gave non coders. Lily picked the same one, by the way, that you said is a good one, which is interesting that it agrees, and it comes with the rest of them. Still has this weird comment thing you'd have to remove from it. And then it comes up with the captions,
and what's funny is
it wrote the captions
as as these. This changes everything. It doesn't have the comment. Even though that's the hook. Right? That's, uh, wait. Would that be the hook? Or, like, the script, I mean? I think it could be a caption, but it's interesting that it didn't put the comment x or y even though we it's very prevalent in the small data that we have. So there's a lot of nuance here. This is super This would be really sorry to cut you off, but this would be super easy for me to give Claude code one
prompt and say, hey. Listen. For every or for every description
or yeah. I guess it'd be considered a description, I wanna chew I wanna use a keyword where it says common x, I'll send you y, and then it'll fix that. Now every single time I use it, it'll, like, understand that. Right? Yeah. And even better, since we have the Appify MCP already used, you could say, can you go on my Instagram, look at the top five performing ones, go grab my style of captions, and go grab my style of hooks on the ones that performed well?
And in the database,
I wanna change the score now. I wanna add a Brock, uh, weighting where
if it's a hook by me that did well, I want you to weight it higher than the other creators because the other creators aren't me. So this is where the nuance comes in. Instead of you obsessing on updating a front end and some button not working and you spend an hour fixing the button even though the process needs to change, you focus on the stuff that actually moves the needle. Yeah. This is this is great, dude. This is honestly better than I thought it was gonna be if I'm being completely honest with you. Like, I'm stoked to play around with this. Good. Good. Just everyone in the audience, this is a process. And the thing is, if you use something like an antigravity or a cursor, this is my special weapon is obviously, you're dealing with Claude here. But let's say you need virgin eyes on your your code or anything that you're generating, you can always bring in cursor for free for, like, a pretty generous free tier as long as you don't use max mode. And you can be like, cool. What does codex or GPT 5.2
think about
my system to generate hooks? So you can bring in different advisers,
if you will, to take over the same code base, whether you're vibe coding something or just producing something at scale. So you're saying as these models get better, you could then use that as almost like the orchestrator to understand how could I optimize this kind of is what you're saying? Let let's see if actually ended up building this UI. And for whatever reason, Claude code wasn't cutting it. It just wasn't getting you. Maybe you bring in a virgin eyes expert in the form of Gemini three Pro, and you say, hey. Look. Both of these share the same code base. So this code base, anything that's in cursor can see this. So Claude can see this, and anything in cursor can see this. So with that, you can go, like, in ask mode and be like, listen. Can you take a look and give me advice
on how I could structure this better? Or even more hacky, you could say, go and search the web for best practices for prompting Claude code. Can you help me draft a prompt that would fix this problem that's happening in my code base? And then it could go search the code base and then go and search the best way to prompt it, and then you can copy paste the prompt from here to here. So there's so many ways you could use this dynamic duo. Yeah. I love it. That's super
like, I didn't know you could do that, so that's that's a good tip. There you go. But, yeah, with that, like, obviously, we can go so much deeper, make this infinitely better. But it's the idea of just, you attach a couple tools, you throw some API keys, you give it some prompt, and then you start the progress. Like, to build upon that, not that we're gonna do this in this video, but a use case I would see for this is I have been using, uh, or I've been creating thumbnails for my short form videos on Instagram just because it looks better on my profile, whatever. So, literally, I could do what you did for YouTube where you have this using Nano Banana via the API from Gemini,
and it goes and actually creates these thumbnails for you using an image generation tool. And that might be the next thing that I personally go in and actually try to build out because that'd be super helpful. And you built something that's a bit more intricate than, like, short form video. I feel like the system you built with YouTube is, like, five step a couple steps ahead of this, and it's just crazy to see, like, what we could do with Claude Code. So this video is giving me promo mark, so I'm gonna need to hop off. Like,
dive in.
Yeah. On that thumbnail thing, just like to inspire people. So the way I I created it is I have Nano Banana create
the concept,
and then it drafts it out as a doodle. And then it takes that doodle, and it takes that, pumps it to Nano Banana again to create version one of the thumbnail.
And then it loads that into Gemini to get its opinion on the image as a YouTube expert.
And then after it roasts it, it injects its feedback back to the nano banana to to fix it. So I have this feedback loop where before I take a look at it, it's already preroasted itself, which is why, again, this is such a high leverage skill. If you're non techie,
this is the time. This is the perfect time to jump in and just get your feet wet. Yeah. That's
and that's I love to hear that. One one other thing I wanna mention before we end this episode because we obviously showed kind of what we built here or what Mark built here. Go back to that Excali draw board you showed because, correct me if I'm wrong, you built this with Claude code, didn't you? You didn't even build this out yourself. No. I have a system that I built in Claude code that helps me make explanatory
diagrams, especially for my YouTube,
where it's doodle. So it makes things a lot more consumable. So I will walk through. Like, I literally just talked to him. Like, listen. I'm about to hop on Brock's podcast on his channel. His focus is not as developer y. I wanna break this down. So help me make three to five images where you think this concept would, like, be done justice, and then it takes care it from there. Dude, I love that. Yeah. That's just hilarious. I love that you did that. Alright. So this episode has been amazing. I'm excited to go ahead and try this stuff now and actually begin using this system, build other things on top of it. But, Mark, if we could give the viewer of this, a complete nontechnical person, one actionable item to do right now, like, instead of just watching this video, taking notes, and doing nothing with it, what could they do right this second to actually take that first step, begin begin learning this, and hopefully building the skill that could change their life over the coming years? Yeah. So I'll I'll give the advice with a grain of salt because I know people will look at this. And even if we prove that it's effective, they still won't download the terminal. So if that is the friction point, you literally have something that's dropped from the heavens in the form of co work, which is not perfect. It's still an imperfect product, but it will give you this little taste of what it could look like to run agentic workflows. You won't get the breadth. You won't get the depth, but it will get you more comfortable,
and hopefully, it will give you FOMO that if you had, instead of a basic engine, you had the full firepower of a v nine, v eight engine that you could run that much farther. So instead of having to go from zero to deep end, you can go from zero to shallow,
get your feet wet, get used to it, and then when you're ready, make a couple commands and then start your Cloud Code journey. And keep in mind, this is a tool that dropped literally yesterday. So this is your sign from the heavens, like you said, to go and try this and test this out. There's no excuses now. Yeah. Um, Mark, this has been awesome, man. I appreciate it. Thanks for building this for me. Thanks for explaining it. Where could my audience find you? For sure. So
mark underscore cashif on YouTube, if you are someone that is interested on the deep end of things, you don't wanna be just non tech, you wanna go really hard, You could look check out my early AI adopters community. That's where I go hard all the time and I build all kinds of things. And outside of that, uh, hopefully, more on Brock's channel.
Yeah. I wanna give kudos to Mark's community too because I've been in there for, I don't know, probably over six months now. Honestly, if I wanna learn something that's a bit more technical, that is my favorite place to go. It kinda cuts through the noise of everything else. Don't have to go on YouTube or x and, like, get my anxiety up and my FOMO up. Instead, I'll just go straight to Mark's community. But it's a great place. So, yeah, Mark, thanks for coming on, man. Sure we'll have Have you on
a good one. See you, guys.