Claude Code For Non-Coders: Everything You Need

Key Takeaways

What if I told you that there is a tool that can read your files, organize your notes, and send emails, and everyone thinks it's for programmers? It's called Claude Code, and the name is confusing. It has nothing to do with code. When you hear code, you think "That's for developers. That's not me." Neither do I. I'm a physicist, and Claude Code is AI that runs on your computer. In comparison to ChatGPT, which lives in a browser tab, it's trapped inside of the box. It's passive. It can't do real stuff. But Claude Code lives on your computer, and you can think of it as a personal assistant that can do research for you, send emails, access to your calendar, and can actually do stuff. For example, I can open my Obsidian vault. I can just ask, "What are my tasks for today?" Here you go. That's the answer. Claude Code just gets this information from Obsidian and gives me the output. And that's just directly talking to my Kanban board. And by the end of the video, you'll open your terminal maybe for the first time. You're going to install Claude Code. We're going to show some cool use cases that you can create events, reminders for you on your computer. Then you're going to make it personal. We connect it to our memory and set up our Claude.md file to make it personal. And then you're going to do automation using Claude Code skills from zero. No coding required. Just prompting and using our natural language. I'm on Mac. I'll just went to my applications, and let me search for terminal. There you go. Let just open it. Okay. That's it. No magic. We are here in a terminal. We'll feel like hackers. And here we can start doing something. For example, we can like send some commands to our computer. We can ask, "What is the current working directory here?" Print working directory. And there you go. That's my current working directory. Also I can list my directories using LS command. And there you go. Here is all of the files in that folder. So, let's create a folder. We can have a command called MKDIR. And then we can call it like test folder. Test folder. Okay, we created the folder. Now we can navigate to it. Let's use command called CD, change directory, test folder. And now we are in that folder. And we can also list the files. There is nothing. And actually you can find it in finder. So, that's the folder we just created. So, that's actually real. And we can create another folder. For example, let's say that's another folder. And you see that just appeared here. And we can go there and move stuff. So, that's actually everything you need to know about the terminal. Like there is no magic. That's kind of to get you started. That's more than enough to actually run Claude Code. And feel like a programmer. Okay, so let's move on. Right now I just Googled how to set up Claude Code. And there you go. I just go to this link, and we'll go it together with you. I'm on Mac OS. Here is a command. I'll just run it. Great. Let's set this up. I already have it installed. So, for you it might be different. I think it's going to just tell me that we are good. So, let's wait for a couple minutes until it's going to finish. So, right now it's installing it. All right. That's it. Claude successfully installed. Let's run Claude to set this up. All right. Great. We are in. We are in. And now that's the most challenging part. Now the rest is very easy. We can start interacting with the system. For example, I can ask, "Okay, so what are the folders which I have in in in my folder?" Okay, Claude thinks. Right now it executes commands which we were executing before, but on its own. Right? It answers back to us, and it's correct. Right? Now, can we create a a couple of markdown files just for demonstration that we can create files? We can ask it to create a files on our computer, and let's see them appearing. It writes on file, this one, and asks for permission. Now, let's accept it. And there you go. Here we have two files on our computer as we requested. It's going to be asking a lot of permissions, and there is a way to avoid it. You can just run Claude with a flag called dangerous to skip permissions. So, only run this if you know what you're doing. And because I'm experienced, so it's not going to ask me for permission. And it just makes the demonstration much easier. Let's try something real. Let me open my calendar. Right? And let's say I have an event here. Client check-in. I can just say, "Can you list my events in my demo calendar, please?" So, what do I have for today? And you can see how Claude is actually thinking, right? How to go about this task. Okay. And it's going to use query the calendar app, and it's going to get information. And here you go. It has information about this event. That's just amazing, right? It can query information, but it can also create events. Okay, so let's create an event for today, for 6:00 p.m. Let's let's go to the gym. Okay, it's a new year, new life. Let's go to the gym. And then at 8:00 we're going to grab dinner. So, right now we're going to create two events, and hopefully they're going to appear here in our calendar. And this is just kind of scratching the surface on what you can do. Right? Okay, so I think it didn't get correctly. Okay, so can you reschedule events? I think they are now at 9:00 p.m. So, you need to do it properly. Okay, sometimes the system is not ideal, right? But you can actually tell how to go about this task next time and put it into a memory, and it's going to remember that. Right? And okay, it kind of sees that both events are at 9:00 p.m. And it's going to try to reschedule them. It tries really really hard, but it's failing. You know, those live demos, sometimes they're tough. Okay, so it deletes the events. And now I think it's going to try a different approach. That's really exciting to see how system is actually working. And there you go. Right now it's actually correct. And that's what I wanted. And now we can capture this interaction. So, can you document in your memory how to go about creating of the events using proper time? It looks for this file called called Claude.md, and that's the memory of the system. Of this Claude Code. And it's going to right now introduce a change such that next time we're going to run it, it's going to remember how to create those calendar events. Right? We still need to teach the system to behave how how we want. And that's the beauty of it, because it's going to be compound over on and over time. Also it can search uh for you, do a deep researches. Let's do something simple and quick. I want to know what's the weather tomorrow in Waterloo. Can you give me a report and write it to a file for tomorrow? It's in Canada. Great. And by the way, the app which I'm using is WhisperFlow. It's really amazing. So, you can see that I just speak, and the text is appearing. It makes so much easier to interact with those tools. Yeah, it feels like a game, you know. It now does a web search forecast for Canada on January 9th. And it did it one search in 17 seconds. And let's see if it can save the report in our computer. And that's the report. There you go. Amazing. Oh. Yeah, and here is the weather and extended outlook. Great. Great. I love that. Now, you can It's it's a general-purpose engine. It can do literally anything. It can analyze your files on our computers. One example is, "So, can you list all of my PDFs in my downloads folder which I modified in the last 7 days?" Now, it's going to go through that process and search for PDFs in my downloads folder, so I don't have to. It just uh saves so much time. And for example, can you open my thesis last version? It can also like open files for you. So, here is the report. Okay. And here is my PhD thesis which I submitted today. That's very cool. Exciting times. Right? It opened it automatically by using this command. This will just like give you some ideas on how can you interact with the system for non-coding use cases. And this is just like scratching the surface of what you can do. So, the goal here is to get into the habit and just try to explore it yourself and build this intuition where it can be helpful and where it's going to fail. And over time you're going to be learning more and more. Okay, so here you can be convinced that Claude Code is powerful, but here is a problem. Every time you start a new session, it's going to forget about who you are. Right? What are your tasks? What are your clients? What are your preferences? This is where Obsidian comes in. And Obsidian is just app on your computer where you can interact with your notes. You can just have different projects and so on. It's like, you know, it's like a Notion. So, you can view your notes in a graph. You can display a dashboards. Here they call bases. For example, you can have your your agenda view. You can have your calendar. Here is the Kanban board which you can move around. That becomes very very powerful where you can build this operating system for yourself where Claude going to be a personal assistant for you. And that's the role of Obsidian to store the context about ourselves. And for Claude, the goal is to use this context and do useful stuff. And here is the Claude.md, that's the most important file for your Claude because that's a memory. It's a file which loaded when you start the Claude. So, let me open this this folder and and just show it to you that that it actually going to remember what's going on here. So, that's our Claude.md and we are in this folder Claude code Obsidian starter. Let's run Claude with skipped permissions. And if that's true, then we can ask a question. For example, what is this vault about? Let's say Let's add something. My name is Artem, right? You are my personal assistant. Okay. And let's restart Claude such that it's going to use this new updated file. Good. And I can ask what's my name? And hopefully it's going to answer Artem. Your name is Artem, right? And that's a confirmation that Claude understands this information which we loaded into it. Now, and this is becomes very very powerful. We can set up our Obsidian and it's going to know about our clients, projects, tasks, daily notes, everything, right? And you can display them in this nice table view, right? You can filter by active projects. And now you can see it's very very powerful like where you can build this dashboard for your life. Let's say like what are my active projects, right? Let's see how it's going to handle that. It's supposed to give me like these three projects. It searches for my files and let's see how it does it. Now, here we have all of our projects. And they're all in context, right? Here all of them, right? That's exactly the same one which we have in our Obsidian, all of the six projects. Right? And here we can store information, store our context about this project, and we can directly use it in Claude to make it more personal. That's just mind-blowing possibilities right here. So, you don't have to like re-explain the context each time. Like you go to ChatGPT and it doesn't know who you are, right? And this system just solves this problem, right? Let's actually maybe do some tasks. So, we have this Kanban board. Let's say Okay, where is this Kanban board? Kanban, right? So, what are my tasks which are in progress? And let's say I want to add a new task. So, I want to add a new new a tasks in progress right now. I'm working on a video about how to use Claude code for non-coding cases as a personal assistant. And let's add it to my tasks. Good. Okay, and it has like all of my tasks, right? And like exactly the same the same output, right? And I can just like manage my tasks. And here it just created a file record Claude code personal assistant video, and that's what I'm doing right now. That's extremely powerful. Can you put it into my calendar at let's say 3:00 p.m. to record this video? Can you schedule it? Now we can combine those concepts. We can not only create files, but we can also interact with external systems such as calendar, do reminders, right? Okay, and let's wait for it to appear. And there you are. Now we can combine those concepts. We can actually take actions. It's very powerful. We can also do some work here. For example, if you're managing clients, you can also ask about who are my clients who require follow-up. Right? You can ask about what are you working next on this week? Who are your clients? You can like send emails. There you go. And that's the client who needs the follow-up. Okay, now if you want to Obsidian vault to use it with your Claude code, here I have a PDF guide. So, you can just follow that and you'll be in a very good shape. Go through it and it has all of the description. It has like templates for projects, tasks, and so on. And it has installation installation instructions, so you can just follow along. Once Claude have your context, we can execute workflows and those are called skills which enable you to to automate like repeatable actions which you might be doing. Now, and what is a skill? Skill is just a markdown file on your computer which stored in this folder, skills, and as example, that's the name of the skill, daily brief. And it has a description. And here is example in our Obsidian, we have skills, task notes skill. And it has a markdown file here which tells how to use and interact with our task notes plugin. That's for Kanban board interaction. It has description when we create, update, or delete tasks, we should be using this file. Claude's going to read it and load it into this memory. And then it has a instructions for Claude how to interact with our tasks base. And that's it. And you can have a different skills for different setups. You can have a client skill which can be used to manage your clients' relationships, right? You can just ask about who needs a follow-up. And then Claude's going to know to use this skill and it's going to route this like workflow to follow-ups and then send email, right? Or or like if you want to add a new client, you can just ask Claude, okay, I want to add a client and then Claude's going to read this file and it's going to understand how to go about your request. And here is a system that what I do is typically workflows. Where skill you can have a like different ways to do it. One way is have a targeted tool. That's a tool like Excalidraw that enables me to draw those beautiful diagrams here in Obsidian. And when I ask Claude to create a diagram, it's going to use this Excalidraw skill and it's going to draw the diagram, right? And there is another pattern to use skills using skills as a router. For example, you take an area of your life. It could be like clients or it could be reviews, right? Like daily reviews, weekly reviews, monthly reviews. And we can use a skill as a router, right? And here is example of daily review router. Here is a skill called review. And the way it's done is that when user says morning routine or weekly review, it's going to pick up the skill and it's going to route to our morning routine, right? And then we're going to go together Claude through it. Let me just show you how it exactly working. Okay, let's just clear the chat and start from scratch. So, hey Claude, I want to start my morning routine. It uses a skill called review, right? And it reads this workflow file and goes together with me when I start my morning, right? It uh reviews my active tasks. It checks my goals, my projects, my active clients. So, you can be very creative here and design it the way you want. That's just an example weekly. Like that's an example of morning review. Check if there is previous day note, right? Check the projects, check the tasks. Ask me how I feel, my mood, my energy, how I slept. And then and then we create a note in our Obsidian. It asks my least active projects, my tasks, my deadlines upcoming next week. It asks me how I feel, right? That's great. I can just pick answers like, okay, great energy. I feel rested. The focus is content work. Let me just submit. Yeah, let's just wrap it up and then I would say just write an write daily note. Okay, it it just does it. We are finished. And I believe here in our daily notes, that's our new note which we just created. Energy, sleep, everything is good. And today focus is a video recording. There is tasks from yesterday. That's very powerful. You just need to be very creative. How can you apply this to your specific use case? Yeah, and I wanted you to show you if you'll be doing this every day. That's my actual Obsidian vault. I've been doing that for the last 2 years. Just doing my notes. And it's been very much compounding and you can build this interactive graph with all your context with active projects and make actual use of your notes. Not just storing them here, but actually make them work for you. And that's the most valuable information. That's your personal context. Yes, I I've made this free starter kit. Feel free to grab it. Follow along. Yeah, and if you want a full system build, join us on January 22nd where we're going to start from complete scratch. Yeah, and feel free to join our Discord server. Here we have discussions how to use those novel tools which are just emerging for as a personal assistant to help us to do better in life, you know, deliver more value to our clients, to do better at work, to have better relationships. Yeah, now what I want you to do is just go and open your terminal on your computer, right? Download Cloud Code and just start interacting with the system just to see what's possible, right? So, one way is just I'm telling you what you can do that might be exciting, but the best feeling is when you actually try it yourself and understand what's possible, what are the limitations, and just start exploring, and that's just the best way to learn. I hope you had a great time, and I'll see you in the next one.