Today I’m excited to launch my beginner-friendly Hermes course with 17 opinionated lessons to set up my favorite AI chief of staff in a single afternoon.

This course covers everything from installation to integrations (e.g., email, calendar, Google Workspace) to cron jobs (e.g., morning briefing, health check).

Watch my free 45-minute walkthrough on YouTube. If you want the written version with all 17 lessons and copy-paste skills, consider upgrading to paid at behindthecraft.com.

What the course covers:

• (00:00) Why Hermes is the best 24/7 AI chief of staff

• (01:16) Where and how to install Hermes safely

• (02:55) The best AI model to pick for Hermes

• (05:04) Connect to Telegram for mobile chats

• (11:08) How Hermes uses tools, memory, and skills

• (12:39) How to personalize Hermes by editing its user and soul files

• (15:49) Two best ways to troubleshoot Hermes

• (18:15) Set up Hermes to respond via voice

• (22:47) Connect Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, and Sheets step by step

• (38:25) Create routines like morning briefing, health check, and more

Why Hermes and what’s inside the course?

Hermes is, in my opinion, the best AI chief of staff available today. It’s reliable, free to use (you just need a $20 ChatGPT subscription), and very powerful.

That’s why I spent 20+ hours writing 17 opinionated lessons covering three tracks:

1. Quickstart: Get Hermes running in less than 30 minutes.

2. Integrations: Let Hermes work in your favorite apps (e.g., email, calendar, docs).

3. Cron jobs: Set up morning briefings, health checks, business reports, and more.

Upgrade to Get My Full Hermes Course

Here’s what each track covers.

Quickstart: Get Hermes running in less than 30 minutes

Learn how to install Hermes safely, connect it to your phone via Telegram, and personalize it to be yours by editing its user and soul files.

This track covers:

1. Where to install: Set up Hermes on your laptop, Mac Mini, or virtual server.

2. Install Hermes: Download the desktop app and pick your AI model.

3. Connect Telegram: Create your bot and chat with Hermes from your phone.

4. How Hermes works: A beginner-friendly guide to memory, tools, and more.

5. Personalize Hermes: Edit its user and soul files to make it genuinely useful.

6. Troubleshooting: My two favorite ways to fix Hermes if you get stuck.

Integrations: Connect the apps you already use

Integrations are what make Hermes more useful than a chatbot. Start with voice replies and Google Workspace, which I think are must-haves. Then consider linking Granola for meetings, GitHub for backups, YouTube for research, and more.

This track covers:

7. Voice replies: Talk to Hermes while on the go.

8. Google Workspace: Connect Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, and Drive.

9. WhatsApp: Use Hermes from WhatsApp with a second phone number.

10. Slack: Add Hermes to Slack for threaded discussions.

11. Granola: Let Hermes analyze your meeting notes.

12. GitHub: Back up Hermes and let it work with your repos.

13. YouTube: Let Hermes summarize videos and research for you.

Cron jobs: make Hermes proactive

Last but not least, cron jobs (or scheduled routines) let Hermes do work for you proactively. I cover how to set up my favorite cron jobs including:

14. Weekend planner: Find fun, time-sensitive family activities for the weekend.

15. Morning briefing: A daily check of your email, calendar, and more.

16. Business review: A weekly insights email with your financials and more.

17. Health check: A weekly review with your weight, workouts, and more.

My goal is to create the most practical AI membership online

With today’s update, paid subscribers can now access all of the following on the Behind the Craft membership portal:

1. 12+ skills and 20+ prompts handcrafted for personal, product, and creator work.

2. 17 lessons on setting up your AI chief of staff with Hermes.

3. Full Codex and Claude Code courses coming later this year.

We’ve also started hosting monthly expert-led live AI workshops in our AI Slack community, starting with my walkthrough of my Codex setup last Friday.

Again, I’ve made the full 45-minute walkthrough free on YouTube to make it easy for you to set up Hermes. If you’d like the written course, my AI skills, live workshops, and upcoming Codex and Claude Code courses, consider upgrading to paid.

Thanks!
Peter

These are more informal sessions that we’ll do once in awhile via the community. Below are the notes and takeaways from this session:

How to decide what to automate

Read more

Today, I want to share a new episode with Bin and Jake.

Bin and Jake built HyperFrames, a free open-source tool that turns HTML into product launch videos that used to cost thousands of dollars ot make. In this episode, they showed me how to one-shot a video from any website. Jake also revealed his full 5-step video workflow to make polished videos with Codex or Claude Code.

Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.

We talked about:

• (00:00) From HTML to professional launch videos with AI

• (02:16) Getting started: Install HyperFrames for free

• (03:50) /website-to-video: Turn any URL into a launch video

• (08:28) Jake’s 5-step playbook to generate better videos

• (10:03) Step 1: Gather assets and create a frame.md

• (11:46) Step 2: Create a storyboard.md with the scenes

• (12:45) Step 3: Pull animations from HyperFrames launches

• (15:43) Step 4: Generate and review static frames

• (17:20) Step 5: Build the video and polish in Studio

I’m proud to partner with Wispr Flow

When I’m building with Codex or Claude Code, I use Wispr Flow to dictate all my prompts instead of typing. It’s more accurate than other AI voice dictation tools and saves me hours every week. Try it out for free with my exclusive link below.

Try Wispr Flow for Free

Getting started with Hyperframes

1. Install HyperFrames for free to make videos from HTML. Hyperframes is a free and open source repository for making videos. To install it, just type “npx skills add heygen-com/hyperframes” in terminal or point Codex or Claude Code at the repo.

2. After HyperFrames is installed, try the website-to-video skill first. In Codex or Claude Code, prompt “Use /website-to-video to turn [paste URL] into a 30s promo video.” Paste a website you like, and HyperFrames will make the launch video in one shot by pulling the site’s screenshots, assets, copy, and brand look.

Jake’s 5-step playbook to generate better videos

While Hyperframes makes it easy to generate basic videos, it still takes a bit of work to generate professional animated videos like the above. Jake shared his 5-step playbook with me to do just that:

Here’s a detailed walkthrough of each step:

Read more

Today, I want to show you how to build an AI advisor that helps you think through important life and career decisions.

This is my favorite AI skill because it knows my goals, gives me useful feedback, and gets better the more I talk to it.

Watch my tutorial now to see how my /advisor skill works and how you can build your own in 13 minutes.

Timestamps:

• (00:00) Why I built a personal AI advisor

• (02:09) skill.md: How to define the advisor’s behavior

• (03:31) plan.md: The context file with goals, principles, energy, and life details

• (07:54) learnings.md: How the advisor remembers patterns over time

• (09:22) eval.md: What AI checks before giving me advice

• (10:15) Demo: Using Anthropic's Fable for deeper advice

• (11:31) How to build your own advisor skill now

I’m proud to partner with Wispr Flow

There are many AI voice dictation tools out there, but Wispr Flow has been the most accurate one I’ve used. My kids also love using it to dictate prompts to Codex and Claude Code so they can build games and apps. Try it out with my free link below.

Try Wispr Flow for Free

How my AI advisor helps me make decisions

I recently made a video sharing why I decided to leave my job to bet on myself.

What I didn’t share is that I talked to my AI advisor for over 3 months leading up to that decision. It gave me advice like:

“Your decision is psychological and about letting go of the person you spent a decade becoming.”

“Your kids are eight and four and will grow up fast. Your goal isn’t to maximize income, it’s to make enough so you can spend more time with them.”

My /advisor skill has been so useful because it has context about my goals, family, work, financials, and energy to help me think more clearly.

The whole setup is basically a folder with a few text files:

Let’s walk through each file and how you can build your own version.

1. Skill: How you want the AI to give you advice

Your skill.md should not contain a bunch of personal information about yourself.

Instead, it should tell AI what role to play, what context to read, how to advise you, and what to remember over time. Here’s the full skill.md for my AI advisor:

This file defines the advisor’s behavior. The next file gives it your personal context.

2. Plan: Important context about your work and life

Paid subscribers can keep reading for the full /advisor setup, including my plan.md structure, learnings.md examples, eval.md checklist, and more.

Read more

Today, I want to share a new episode with Matt Van Horn.

Matt doesn’t have a CS degree, know how to code, or even read the plans that AI writes. Despite this, he’s built an incredible open source track record with projects like last30days (#1 trending on GitHub with 44K+ stars) and Printing Press (a tool that lets agents use any website or app). Matt has been a huge inspiration for my AI builder journey, and I think you’ll feel the same after watching our conversation.

Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.

Matt and I talked about:

• (00:00) "I don't read code and the plans are for AI"

• (01:19) Compound Engineering: Matt’s go-to agentic loop

• (07:07) How Matt builds without a CS degree or reading code

• (11:18) Printing Press: Turning any website into an agent CLI

• (15:38) How Printing Press finds hidden APIs and GitHub projects

• (22:44) Why CLI + skill beats MCP for agent workflows

• (32:49) How Matt contributes to Python, Go, and other top repos

• (44:28) Why Matt is still afraid to launch finished projects

I’m proud to partner with Riverside

I’ve used Riverside for years because it records each person locally in up to 4K, so my podcast audio and video stay clean even when a guest’s wifi gets shaky. Now it also helps me edit from the transcript, clean up audio, generate captioned clips, and publish everywhere from one place. Use code PeterYang at checkout for 1 month free.

Try Riverside for Free

Top 10 takeaways I learned from this episode

1. Use Printing Press to give your AI access to almost any website or app. Matt open sourced Printing Press to let anyone generate a CLI (command line interface) for any website or app. It works by researching docs, finding niche GitHub repos, and sniffing hidden API requests, so agents can use sites like Google Flights, Suno, OpenArt, and more.

2. If you’re non-technical, use Compound Engineering skills to build. Compound Engineering is a set of AI coding skills that lets anyone build with AI in a more structured way. Matt’s go-to skills include:

   1. /ce-plan to research the codebase, edge cases, and implementation path.

   2. /ce-work to execute the plan while following the project’s patterns.

   3. /ce-brainstorm to think through the feature and produce a requirements doc.

   4. /lfg to run the full loop from planning to implementation to PR.

To install it, point your favorite coding agent (e.g., Codex / Claude Code) at this link:

Read more

Last year, I made seven figures at my product job. Last week, I left that job to bet on myself.

This wasn’t an easy choice to make. After over a decade in product, walking away from a great job felt like giving up a core part of my identity.

What finally helped me decide were 5 principles I wrote down after a lot of reflection.

Watch my video now to hear how I made this decision and perhaps it can help you think through your next career move too.

Timestamps:

• (0:00) Why I quit my high-paying product job

• (0:23) Go where work feels like play

• (3:44) Give yourself permission to build

• (5:35) At some point, trading time for wealth just isn't worth it

• (8:33) Surround yourself with people who share your curiosity

• (10:11) The people you love won't be there forever

• (13:57) What I'm doing next (and a promise)

I’m proud to partner with Riverside

I’ve used Riverside for years to record my podcast thanks to its reliable, high-quality recording tools. But now I use it for much more than recording. Riverside has evolved into an end-to-end platform with AI editing, clip generation, streaming, and publishing tools. Try Riverside to go from concept to publish, all in one place.

Try Riverside for Free

1. Go where work feels like play

I became a PM over a decade ago because I wanted to ship great products. I loved the loop of understanding problems, identifying solutions, and executing to craft something great.

This loop is exactly what I got to do at Roblox. I have a lot of fond memories from shipping products like thumbnail personalization, configs & experiments, and AI analytics with my talented team of engineers, designers, and PMs. Most of all, I loved watching Roblox creators light up as we put these products in their hands.

But there’s another side of product management that I didn’t love, and it exists in some form at all the great companies that I’ve worked at. I call it product management theater, and it’s when the focus shifts to:

1. Polishing internal docs over the actual user-facing product.

2. Getting stakeholder alignment over doing what’s right for customers.

3. Climbing the career ladder over shipping products you’re proud of.

For example, early in my career, I spent 4 hours in a meeting with other PMs aligning on quarterly OKRs. That was one of the longest days in my PM career. Being stuck in that room is what pushed me to write my very first newsletter post. I desperately needed to ship something, even if it was just a blog post. That post became this newsletter, which now has almost 150K subscribers.

There’s a framework I come back to whenever I’m making a big career decision called the Zone of Genius. I use it to sort my work into 4 zones:

• Zone of genius is what you’re great at and love doing.

• Zone of curiosity is what you suck at but still love learning about.

• Zone of excellence is what you’re great at but hate doing.

• Zone of incompetence is what you suck at and have no desire to improve.

My zone of genius is building products with customers and sharing what I learn with you all. My zone of curiosity is getting better at building with AI agents. But all that PM theater I just described falls squarely into the other two zones.

I realized that I don’t want to spend my day in back-to-back meetings, no matter how much money or prestige comes with those jobs. I also realized that I was waking up at 6 AM every day to write this newsletter, even though I didn’t make any money from it for years.

Of course, I also loved crafting products and sharing memes with my team, and honestly I miss that already. But life is about trade-offs, and I wanted to spend more of my day in my zones of genius and curiosity.

So I encourage you to map out your own zones and be honest about what you actually enjoy, even if you’re not making money from it right now.

For me, I love building and get antsy if I can’t ship anything in a week, which brings me to the second principle.

2. Give yourself permission to build

The career ladder pushes everyone to be a leader, but I just want to be a builder.

The reality is that a lot of product leaders have calendars that look like this:

Because of this calendar, the only time that I really had to build was on nights and weekends.

Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy helping people grow and think I’m good at it. But I never want to give up the craft of making great products. I love being hands-on and obsessing over every little detail, from the copy to the UX to the marketing, because that’s what it takes to make a product great.

I also loved being able to check in code myself as a PM with AI’s help. Here’s the tongue-in-cheek GitHub profile that I used at work:

Yet, as you climb the ladder at most companies, you’re expected to step away from building and fill your time with product reviews, cross-functional alignment, managing up, and performance calibrations.

The good news is that this is finally changing. Companies are rewarding builders and ICs more than ever, and even managers are increasingly expected to do IC work too.

But becoming a good builder takes reps, and it’s just hard to put in those reps when you’re in back-to-back meetings all day.

So if you’re a builder at heart, embrace it. You don’t have to give up what you’re good at to be a “leader.”

It doesn’t matter if you’re an engineer, PM, marketer, or designer. Learn how to build.

3. At some point, trading time for wealth just isn’t worth it

Most people in tech are obsessed with total compensation and getting that next title.

If you’ve spent any time on Blind, you know what I’m talking about. Everyone is comparing how much they make, what their title is, and whether they work at OpenAI, Anthropic, or FAANG.

Look, I get it. Put in a few years at one of these companies and you can make generational wealth. But the people who hit all of these goals often have the least control over their time.

If you’re a VP, for example, chances are you’re in back-to-back meetings from morning to night. Kudos to anyone who can do that job well, but it’s just not the life I want. Instead, here’s what I figured out after the highest-earning year of my career:

Past a certain point, more money is not worth giving up agency over your time.

Real agency inside a company is rare. You might pour yourself into a promising product that gets canceled. You might have a great manager who gets re-orged out. So much of it is out of your hands.

And while I have a lot of respect for VC-backed founders, that life also sounds very stressful. You’ll have investors, a board, and payroll to satisfy every month whether you like it or not. With a VC-backed company, you have to go big or go home. You can’t just hit profitability and call it a day. Your investors will push you to 10x or 100x the business.

The path I want to try is being a bootstrapped founder of a small business. As long as I can pay the bills, I’m willing to trade off hundreds of thousands of dollars to be able to decide who I work with, what I work on, and how hard I work. It’s only been a week, but I love waking up to a calendar with no meetings before the afternoon and enough time to chase my curiosity and share what I learn with you all.

The funny thing is, growing up, I didn’t even know this was a real path. I chased prestigious schools and brand-name companies and thought there were only two options: climb the ladder in big tech, or raise money and build a unicorn.

But I think bootstrapping makes a lot of sense now for many people. It’s cheaper than ever to start a business, and a single person with AI tools and agents can get a lot done.

To wrap up this section, there’s this image from Wait But Why that brings into perspective just how little time we all have:

I’m in my early 40s so almost half of my time is already over. If you’re in my shoes, realize that:

The hedonistic treadmill of chasing money and prestige can become a trap. Time and agency are the most valuable assets we have.

4. Surround yourself with people who share your curiosity

One of the best ways to spend your time is with people who share your values and goals.

These days, I mostly make new friends through my kids’ playdates or online. X can be toxic if you’re just doom scrolling, but I’ve made some good friends there who gave me the courage to make this bet. I think everyone should have a few group chats with people who are on the same journey as them.

Two group chats that I rely on are:

1. A YouTube learning group started by my friend Steve Huynh, who spent 14 years as a principal engineer at Amazon before building his own business. I joke that Steve’s group is bad for the economy, because everyone in it eventually walks away from their high-paying tech job to build their own thing.

2. A PM creator group started by Ben Erez, with folks you might know like Lenny, Elena, and others. Everyone in it is a PM or product leader who’s also teaching, creating, and building.

My point is that it’s important to find people who share your values and goals. People who are honest, encouraging, and open, who won’t put up a front, and who’ll give you the courage to make decisions like this.

Courage is contagious. Hang out with people who’ve done some version of what you want to do and who are honest about the parts that are great and the parts that suck.

5. The people you love won’t be there forever

I think about my parents a lot these days. They sacrificed a lot to move to Canada and give me a good education. Now, they’re retired and honestly living the good life, going on cruises all the time.

The thing is, once you’re retired, nobody cares what your title was, how much money you made, or which company logos are on your LinkedIn.

And the reality is that at most companies I’ve worked at, there are only a handful of coworkers I still keep in touch with. Almost everyone else moves on the moment your employment ends.

So if work isn’t the relationship that lasts, then it has to be the people we too often put second: our family and close friends.

Being a PM and a creator at the same time made me feel productive, and the dual income was great, but I hadn’t had breakfast with my kids in months. I was just working all the time.

Over the past week, I’ve been walking my 8-year-old daughter to school. It’s twenty minutes each way, twenty minutes that I used to spend stuck in traffic or on Slack. Now I spend it with her, and she tells me about her friends, her dreams, and the things she’s worried about. This walk is now the highlight of my day.

Before I quit, I promised my wife I’d spend more time being present with my kids. Parenting is hard and I’m far from perfect. Sometimes I just want to shut myself in a room and play video games. But I now have a lot more time to try to keep that promise.

Nobody wants to put on their tombstone that they got divorced and neglected their family, but at least they made VP at Meta.

The people you love won’t be there forever, so spend more time with them while you can.

The 5 principles that helped me make my decision

Here are the five principles again that led to my decision to leave a high-paying job to bet on myself:

1. Go where work feels like play. Map out your zone of genius and be honest with yourself about what you actually enjoy doing.

2. Give yourself permission to build. If you're a builder at heart, embrace it, because you don't have to give up what you're good at to become a "leader."

3. At some point, trading time for wealth just isn’t worth it. Real wealth is having agency over who you work with, what you work on, and how hard you work.

4. Surround yourself with people who share your curiosity. Courage is contagious, so find people who are on a similar journey as you.

5. The people you love won’t be there forever. Make time for your family and close friends while you still can.

One more piece of practical advice if you’re feeling the same itch to bootstrap:

Don’t take a blind leap. It took me three years to get here, and I didn’t make the jump until I was making around the same from my business as my product salary. Start by tinkering and building things on the side while showing up fully at your day job. I took pride in my work at Roblox until my last day.

Here’s what I’m doing next

For now, my focus is on delivering the most practical AI tutorials and interviews available online. That means:

1. Making this channel and my newsletter the best place to learn AI online without the hype.

2. Building behindthecraft.com into a valuable membership where you can get my personal AI operating system, AI tools, and community access.

3. Building products with AI myself and sharing all the wins and the mistakes along the way.

One more thing — it’s so easy to pump out AI slop these days, but I think trust is the only currency that matters for creators and builders. I’ll use AI to save time, but I promise that everything I publish will be reviewed by my own eyes and AI slop free.

And if I ever get too cringe, you should hold me accountable.

Watch my video and I’m happy to answer any questions in the comments.

Today, I want to share a new episode with Kun Chen.

Kun is an ex-L8 principal engineer at Meta who now ships up to 40 PRs a day while rarely reviewing code. In our episode, he walked through the free tools he built to make that possible: Lavish for visual planning in HTML, Treehouse for parallel agents, and No Mistakes for catching AI’s errors before they make it to production.

Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.

Kun and I talked about:

• (00:00) Why he doesn't review code anymore

• (01:04) Agentic engineering: Plan, code, validate

• (06:22) Demo: Fixing an AI tutor screen with agents

• (08:40) Demo: Why HTML is better than markdown for planning

• (19:53) How to turn a rough idea into an AI-ready spec

• (23:21) How Kun runs 20-30 agents in parallel

• (32:04) No Mistakes: Kun's free AI code review tool

• (45:19) What Kun checks before merging AI-written code

• (50:18) How to get better at agentic engineering

I’m proud to partner with Linear

As teams ship faster with AI agents, the bottleneck shifts from building to deciding what to build.

Linear’s new Agent understands your full workspace context: roadmap, issues, customer requests, and code. Ask it to surface patterns across feedback, scope out a spec, or catch you up on team progress.

Try Linear for Free

Top 10 takeaways I learned from this episode

1. Code faster with a team of AI agents. Kun sees himself as the manager of an always-on engineering team. His job is to create plans, validate work, and improve the overall system. Specifically, he runs the same three phases each time:

   1. Plan: Building clear plans is now the most important phase.

   2. Implement: Coding is now handled almost entirely by agents.

   3. Validate: Agents check the work first and only escalate to Kun if needed.

Plan: Spend most of your time here

2. Plan quality determines how long agents run on their own. A one-line prompt might get the agent to work for a few minutes while a detailed plan can keep it working for hours. To delegate more work to agents, move up these three planning levels:

Read more

Today, I want to show you how to build Claude Skills that catch their own mistakes and get better the more you use them.

I’ve become completely AI-skill pilled. I love encoding my knowledge and taste into skills and then reusing them to save time every week.

Watch my video now to see me build a skill from scratch in 5 steps complete with an eval loop and memory.

Timestamps:

• (00:00) What an AI skill is and the 5 steps

• (01:56) Step 1: Give AI your personal context and examples

• (05:00) Step 2: Edit the description to trigger the skill reliably

• (05:59) Step 3: Build an eval loop to have AI fix its own mistakes

• (11:54) Step 4: Add memory so the skill improves itself over time

• (13:40) Step 5: Build a skill editor to improve all your skills

• (17:44) Where human taste still plays a role

I’m proud to partner with Linear

As teams ship faster with AI agents, the bottleneck shifts from building to deciding what to build.

Linear’s new Agent understands your full workspace context: roadmap, issues, customer requests, and code. Ask it to surface patterns across feedback, scope out a spec, or catch you up on team progress.

Try Linear for Free

A quick recap of AI skills

As I shared before, a skill is just a folder with instructions that AI can trigger for a given task. In this tutorial, I’m going to build an /edit-post skill that can edit any newsletter or long-form piece. Here’s what the skill folder will look like at the end:

edit-post/
├ skill.md
├ example-tutorial.md
├ example-personal.md
├ example-product.md
├ evals.md
├ memory.md

1. skill.md tells AI what the skill does and when to trigger it.

2. The example files include my best posts so the skill can learn my writing style.

3. evals.md will have pass/fail checks the skill uses to grade its own output.

4. memory.md will log lessons from past chats so the skill gets better over time.

Now let’s build these files in 5 steps.

1. Create the skill using your examples and personal context

My newsletter has three types of posts: tutorials like this one, personal essays on career and life, and deep dives on AI trends and concepts. I saved my best posts for each type in separate md (text) files below:

Then I gave Claude Code all three example files and this prompt:

The most important thing here is to give AI as much personal context and examples of good output as you can. You should also keep these context files separate from the main skill.md for two reasons:

1. It keeps the skill.md lean because AI can decide which example posts to load (e.g., tutorial vs. personal post) based on your draft.

2. It lets you share the skill more easily without revealing your personal posts or information.

2. Be explicit about when AI should trigger the skill

When you ask AI a question, it doesn’t load the whole skill by default. Instead, it only reads the name and description to decide whether to load the full skill:

So it’s very important to include explicit “Use when…” instructions so AI knows when to trigger the skill automatically. You can always trigger it by hand too (type /edit-post).

3. Test the skill manually, then build an evals.md loop

Once you have a skill drafted, test it manually a few times.

For example, I ran /edit-post on a real draft, then gave it feedback to improve. After a few manual iterations, tell AI:

An eval is just written instructions that asks the AI to check its own work. I prefer pass/fail over scoring evals (like 4/5) because AI can’t reliably tell a 3/5 from a 4/5. Here’s a snippet of the evals that it generated for me:

Before we run the evals, give AI one more prompt:

This sets up the evals loop where one agent edits the post, a second agent grades it, and because the grader has a clean context window, it isn’t biased by the first agent’s work. If anything fails, the two will keep working until everything passes:

When I ran the loop on a newsletter draft, it took five rounds between the two agents to pass all the evals. AI stripped every em dash and “X, not Y” phrase along the way.

I think setting up this evals loop makes a big difference in leveling up your skills. You can just kick it off, go get coffee, and come back to a cleaner draft. You should still review and edit the final output manually of course.

4. Give the skill a memory.md so it improves over time

Evals improve the skill’s output and memory improves the skill itself.

To set it up, ask AI:

A memory.md is just a text file with a reverse-chronological log of what the skill learned from your past chats. Here’s an example:

Setting this up is optional, but I’ve found it useful for feedback that doesn’t fit a clean pass/fail check, like “make the voice more authentic.” Make sure skill.md references both evals.md and memory.md.

5. Build a skill that builds skills

I’ve been skillmaxxing for days, and I do worry that relying on AI to write skills could lead to a mess of slop that drags down the model’s response quality.

That’s why I built /skill-editor and /no-ai-slop skills to make all my skills concise and strip AI slop like em dashes, “X, not Y” phrasing, and duplicate instructions. Here’s a snapshot of my /no-ai-slop skill:

When I ran these skills on the /edit-post skill we just built, it caught a few em dashes, removed some redundant formatting, and made the skill more concise.

Quick plug: I’ve made this full post free, but if you want to copy my /skill-editor and /no-ai-slop skills, along with a dozen other handcrafted skills, consider becoming a paid subscriber to unlock all my skills and prompts at behindthecraft.com.

Follow these 5 steps to build skills that improve themselves

Here’s how you put this guide into practice. First, reflect on your past week and brainstorm with AI workflows that you can streamline with skills. Then create each skill by following these 5 steps:

1. Give AI your personal context and best-in-class examples to draft the skill.

2. Trigger the skill reliably by including “use when XYZ” in the description.

3. Build an evals.md with pass/fail checks so AI can loop to improve its own output.

4. Add a memory.md with lessons from your chats so the skill improves over time.

5. Build (or copy) a /skill-editor skill to keep all your skills clean and concise.

Watch the video now and subscribe to my channel if you enjoyed this tutorial. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments!

Today, I want to share a new episode with Josh Pigford.

Josh sold his last startup for $4M and is now building 5 products solo with agents. He showed me his exact AI skills stack, including a 4-step /build skill, an /adversarial-code-review skill where he pits Opus against GPT, a /but-for-real skill that makes the AI catch its own mistakes, and a /learnings skill that improves AI’s output over time. Josh has been a solo builder for 25 years and it was fascinating to watch how he works.

Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.

Josh and I talked about:

• (00:00) Why launching fast beats months of planning

• (01:02) A tour of the 5 AI products Josh built solo

• (05:22) /build skill: Research, plan, track, implement

• (10:52) /adversarial-code-review skill: Getting GPT to review Opus' code

• (16:02) /learnings skill: Make AI update its own CLAUDE.md

• (16:47) /but-for-real skill: Make AI fix its own mistakes

• (19:11) Live demo: How to design non AI slop websites

• (28:55) Advice for builders without technical experience

If you enjoyed my chat with Josh, check out his new community for AI builders.

I’m proud to partner with Wispr Flow

There are many AI voice dictation tools out there but I’ve found Wispr Flow to be the most accurate at transcribing words. My kids love using it to dictate to Codex and Claude Code to build games and apps. Try it out with my free link below.

Try Wispr Flow for Free

Top 10 takeaways I learned from this episode

1. Keep shipping even though the fear of being embarrassed never goes away. After 25 years as a solo builder, Josh still thinks “It’s terrifying launching something. Every single time it’s just like, what if zero people care?” But he ships anyway: “The idea of spending months working on something before you put it out for other people to use, I think that’s a real bad idea.”

2. Use Josh’s /but-for-real skill to force AI to check for mistakes thoroughly before pushing a change. Josh finds that the skill surfaces at least 3-5 additional bugs that AI missed each time he runs it. The skill (see snippet above) is hilarious because it bullies the AI to work harder. You can find the full skill to copy at the end of this post and in my new skills library at behindthecraft.com.

Read more

Today, I want to show you how to build beautiful slide decks with Claude Code.

Instead of making PowerPoint and Google Slides manually, I built a /slides skill that turns a rough outline into a fully animated HTML deck in minutes.

Just install the skill and type “/slides (your rough outline)” to generate a beautiful slide deck. Watch my tutorial now for the complete walkthrough.

Timestamps:

• (0:00) Why building slides with AI is better than PowerPoint

• (1:30) My /slides skill: 12 formats and 3 templates

• (4:20) The 6 steps that make the skill actually work

• (5:16) Watch me generate a full deck in 3 minutes

• (8:13) What's actually inside my /slides skill file

• (11:57) The one lesson that matters when building with AI

I’m proud to partner with Oceans Talent

I hired Char through Oceans a few months back to help with podcast production. What I didn’t expect was how quickly he’d take it further. He’s now creating clips and picking up Claude Code and Codex on his own to deliver more every week.

Oceans Talent places operators, not assistants. Their talent is AI-fluent and delivers what a senior US hire would at 3-5x less cost. If you need help with marketing, ops, finance, or an EA, book a call at oceanstalent.com/peter.

Get Started for Free

Why you should build slides in HTML

Getting AI to generate slides in HTML has many advantages, including being able to:

1. Go from 0 to draft deck in minutes with a rough outline.

2. Create live, interactive charts with Chart.js.

3. Drop in images and have AI automatically resize them.

4. Add subtle motion to capture attention.

5. Run a visual QA loop where the AI polishes the slide for you.

6. Ship with zero dependencies since all slides render in a single HTML file.

12 beautiful slide formats and 3 templates

My /slides skill comes with 12 ready-to-go formats (cover, agenda, two-column, stat grid, feature bento, comparison, timeline, chart, and more) and three visual templates:

1. Default: Editorial and warm with a sharp red accent.

2. Dark: Bold and contemporary with a black background and yellow accents.

3. Light: Apple-style clean and minimal.

Here’s an example chart slide generated using the dark template:

How to start using the /slides skill now

You have two options:

1. Copy and start using the skill right away by visiting behindthecraft.com to unlock it and 10 other handcrafted skills.

Upgrade to Get Instant Access

2. Keep reading to understand how I built the skill in 6 steps.

How I built the skill in 6 steps

Here's how the skill works under the hood in 6 steps:

1. Read skill.md and styles.md to understand the guidelines and slide formats.

2. Clarify the topic by asking the user questions about what the contents should be.

3. Research online to supplement what the user provided.

4. Generate the deck as a single HTML file.

5. Run a visual QA loop to take screenshots of each slide and fix layout issues.

6. Deliver the final deck that you can present in your browser.

To build this skill yourself, follow my tutorial and iterate with AI on the steps above.

With AI, you have to build the system first

If you remember just one thing from this tutorial, make it this:

With AI, build the system once instead of doing the work every time.

Creating my /slides skill took me longer than making a deck from scratch. But now that it’s up and running, I can use it to save time on every deck I make from here on out. The same idea applies to any workflow or routine you do more than once.

Watch my tutorial now and let me know if you have any questions in the comments or get a Behind the Craft membership to unlock the skill now.

Today, I want to share a new episode with Ryan Carson.

Ryan is a serial founder who’s building his latest startup solo with only AI agents. It was fascinating to watch him demo the exact skills and routines he uses to get OpenClaw, Codex, and Devin to manage his inbox and calendar, do sales outreach, and build features while he sleeps.

Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.

Ryan and I talked about:

• (00:00) Agents are just cron jobs and text markdown files

• (02:25) Demo: How Ryan set up OpenClaw to be his AI chief of staff

• (08:14) The setting most people get wrong in OpenClaw

• (13:46) How to onboard your agent like you would an employee

• (17:06) The cron job that books cold meetings while Ryan sleeps

• (24:36) Why Ryan prefers Devin over other AI coding tools

• (28:33) Demo: How Ryan ships 10 PRs a day solo

• (33:08) Google Ads agencies and a $6K/month designer

• (37:11) Why building the system is the real startup work

I’m proud to partner with Wispr Flow

There are many AI voice dictation tools out there but I’ve found Wispr Flow to be the most accurate at transcribing words accurately. My kids love using it to dictate to Codex and Claude Code to build games and apps. Try it out with my free link below.

Try Wispr Flow for Free

Top 10 takeaways I learned from this episode

Build your AI chief of staff with OpenClaw

1. Make OpenClaw your AI chief of staff with these 4 skills. Each skill is a markdown file that teaches OpenClaw how to do one job:

   1. executive-assistant: Checks email every 15 minutes, watches your calendar, and pings you on Slack when there’s an important email or calendar conflict.

   2. business-development: Searches for sales prospects nightly, adds them to a Google Sheet, and sends personalized email outreach as your agent.

   3. daily-task-manager: Keeps one canonical task list instead of guessing from chat history.

   4. daily-task-prep: Preps your task list before you wake up, pulling from calendar, unread emails, and outstanding outreach.

To copy these skills, first install OpenClaw (or Hermes). Then paste this link into Codex or Claude Code to duplicate Ryan’s full chief of staff system:

Read more

Here’s what you get when you sign up:

1. 10 hand-crafted AI skills that I rely on for personal (Personal Advisor, Health Coach, Weekend Planner), product (Strategy Writer, Spec Writer, Exec Reviewer), and creator work (Social Writer, Infographic Designer, No AI Slop).

2. 3-6 months free for Wispr Flow, Granola, Replit, Linear, and more ($270 value) for new paid users of each AI tool. Plus 20+ prompts that I use personally.

3. An invite to my member-only Slack community with 700+ builders.

Upgrade Now to Get Instant Access

• Already a paid subscriber? Sign in with your paid subscriber email.

• Not yet a subscriber? Upgrade now and you’ll get an invite link in your email.

Watch this 8 min video to see me give a tour of behindthecraft.com:

I plan to add full guides for OpenClaw, Hermes, Claude Code, and Codex — the 4 products that have changed how I work. Prices will go up once all of these guides are live, so subscribe to lock in the early bird price.

10 handcrafted AI skills that you can set up now

Most AI skill packs dump 100 skills on you and let you sort the slop yourself. The skills below are what I actually use every week and all 10 are available now in the Behind the Craft portal.

Personal

1. Personal Advisor: My favorite skill. Get honest advice grounded in your goals, energy, and life situation.

2. Health Coach: Get evidence-based tips on workouts, meals, and sleep, based on your health metrics and routines.

3. Weekend Planner: Find 10 time-sensitive things to do on an upcoming weekend personalized for your location, preferences, and constraints.

Product

4. Strategy Writer: Shape a crisp one-pager document with vision, principles, strategy, and milestones.

5. Spec Writer: Turn rough notes into a clear spec with my personal PRD template.

6. Exec Reviewer: Set up a profile for your CEO or leader and get their feedback before the real review.

Creator

7. Social Writer: Turn your draft into 3 LinkedIn/X posts based on my most viral hits.

8. Infographic Designer: Create a simple design system before generating beautiful, consistent infographics for your content.

9. No AI Slop: Removes 10+ types of AI slop from your writing.

I’ve also included Skill Editor, the skill I use to build and edit every other skill. More on that below.

Upgrade Now to Get All 10 Skills

How I created these AI skills

Skills are the best way to share your expertise with others, so I treat building one like creating a real product. Specifically, I go through 5 phases:

1. List the most repetitive, manual tasks. The ones I do by hand or that require a lot of copying and pasting into AI are the best candidates. For example, I often ask AI for business advice (Personal Advisor) or to remove AI slop (No AI Slop).

2. Separate the instructions from the personal context. I split each skill's instructions (skill.md) and my personal context (plan.md) into two files. The context file auto-updates from past chats so the skill improves over time.

3. Get the AI to ask questions to gather context. Many skills tell the AI to ask a few questions first. For example, the first time you run Weekend Planner it’ll ask you about your location, preferences, and constraints.

4. Spin up sub-agents to test the skill and run evals. A set of agents test the skill with common and adversarial queries, while another set grades each response pass/fail. The AI keeps iterating until everything passes.

5. Test and polish the skill by hand. I always test each skill and make manual edits to improve it. This is the difference between slop and a skill that’s worthwhile.

I’ve found that these steps lead to much better skills. You can use the Skill Editor skill in the portal to follow the same process to create your own.

What’s coming next

I’ve been creating content for 3 years, and it’s only because of my paid subscribers that I can keep doing this. Over the next few months, I plan to deliver to them:

1. Builder skills, starting with skills to create beautiful slides and landing pages.

2. My full personal OS for Hermes / OpenClaw and Codex / Claude Code.

Visit behindthecraft.com to unlock all my skills and prompts plus $270 in free AI tools now.

Upgrade Now to Get Instant Access

Today, I want to share a new episode with Alex Albert.

Alex is a research PM at Anthropic building the next Claude model. He gave me a rare inside look at how the research team operates — including how they turn user feedback into model training, how they decide which capabilities to prioritize, and how they improve Claude’s personality. If you’re wondering how frontier model development actually works, then this interview is a must-watch.

Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.

Alex and I talked about:

• (00:00) How Anthropic treats each new model as a product

• (04:58) Building adaptive thinking into Claude

• (07:07) Why Claude is starting to dream

• (11:15) "If it's not a one-way door, then it's essentially free"

• (15:40) How Alex uses Claude Cowork to pressure test his docs

• (17:05) Inside Anthropic's eval process for new models

• (21:02) How Anthropic trains Claude's character

• (32:39) The consciousness question Anthropic is quietly working on

I’m proud to partner with Oceans

I have to give a shout out to Char, my executive assistant from Oceans, for helping me run the podcast. Here’s how we work together:

1. I gave him my AI skills for drafting show notes and clips

2. He’s iterated on them across episodes to make them better

3. We both do a manual review at the end to apply human taste

Now we have a system that saves us hours every week. If you need help with marketing, operations, finance, or an executive assistant, I highly recommend giving Oceans a try. Book a call at oceanstalent.com/peter.

Get Started for Free

Top 10 takeaways I learned from this episode

I’ve organized these takeaways into 3 sections:

1. How Anthropic is building the next Claude

2. How to get your AI product ready for the next model

3. How Anthropic research PMs work

How Anthropic is building the next Claude

1. Anthropic decides what each model should be good at before training. Alex’s team picks the big capability bets upfront before pre-training (e.g., coding, knowledge work). These bets come from talking to enterprise customers and from Anthropic employees hitting roadblocks in their own work.

2. Think about the model and the harness together. The model and the harness are coupled. Each surface wraps the model in a different prompt and tool setup, so the same model can give different responses depending on where it runs. As a research PM, Alex has to think through how the model will perform across Claude, Cowork, Claude Code, and more.

3. Anthropic has full-time researchers thinking about Claude’s consciousness. Anthropic has people whose whole job is to think about what it means for Claude to be a conscious actor. There’s no official position on whether it is or isn’t, but the question is taken seriously as agents take on more autonomous work.

How to get your AI product ready for the next model

4. Test on the latest model and build minimal scaffolding. The two most common mistakes that Alex sees teams make when building AI products:

Read more

Tell me if you’ve seen this before:

Today is a hard day. We’ve made the difficult decision to reduce our workforce by 1,000+ employees. Our business has never been stronger, but AI has changed how we work, and we’re restructuring to win in the agentic era...

Whenever I read one of these, I mentally translate it to what’s actually happening:

Today is a hard day. We screwed up and overhired during the zero-interest era. Now, we need to cut costs. AI agents are easy to blame, so…

According to levels.fyi, over 80,000 tech employees have been laid off in Q1, the highest level since the 2022-23 recession. Here’s a rant about why layoffs continue to happen and what you can do to take back control.

1. The “AI made us do it” copy-paste memo is an excuse

Every layoff memo looks the same these days:

1. “The way we work has changed...Today’s actions are not a cost-cutting exercise; they are about defining how a growth company operates in the agentic AI era.”

2. “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen...We need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership.”

3. “AI tools have changed what it means to build and run a company. A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better.”

The pattern is always the same: "Today is a hard day → but the business is strong → AI changes everything." It's almost as if the CEOs writing them have a group chat where they share the same script. I think they should just admit that…

2. The real reason is overhiring and empire building

Here’s how headcount grew in the ZIRP era at companies that did Q1 layoffs:

1. Meta: 45,000 in 2019 → 86,000 in 2022

2. Amazon: 341,000 in 2016 → 1.6M in 2021

3. Salesforce: 49,000 in 2020 → 80,000 in 2023

4. Block: 3,800 in 2019 → over 12,000 at peak

Let’s be real — the leaders who grew headcount this quickly messed up. Jack Dorsey, to his credit, basically admitted this the day after cutting 40% of Block’s staff:

There are two main drivers of organizational bloat:

1. Companies prioritized growth at all costs. Money was free and companies chased users and ARR instead of retention and profitability.

2. Empire building was the norm. Leaders were rewarded for growing their scope and headcount instead of keeping their team lean.

Growing headcount this fast is a one-way door change because…

3. The alignment tax is real

If you've ever worked inside big tech, you’ve probably experienced something like this:

You have a product idea that should ship in a week. You just have to draft a memo or deck to get approval from stakeholders and your management chain. By the time you finish the process, months have passed and the market has moved on.

I've worked at great companies with slogans like "it's still day one" and "move fast and break things." But no matter how catchy the slogan is, I now believe that:

As a result…

4. There are basically two types of companies now

If you're a tech employee and worried about keeping your job, start by asking yourself:

Type 1 companies grow headcount as a last resort, even though business is doing well

For example, Anthropic is hiring a lot of people, but only because revenue grew 80x in Q1 2026. When I asked Boris (creator of Claude Code) how his team thinks about hiring, he said he only wants to hire if they've genuinely hit a ceiling on what work AI can take on.

Another example is Linear. Karri (CEO) set a rule to at most double the team every year, even though they've been profitable since 2021:

Type 2 companies are growing headcount despite a stagnating business

You can tell if you’re working in one of these companies if the hallway conversations include a mix of:

• “I need more headcount to do X.”

• “I need to be a manager to grow my career.”

• “Why are we still hiring?”

Unfortunately, I think many tech employees are at type 2 companies where the traditional career ladder is breaking at the seams. From my friend Elena:

Elena’s point is that climbing to VP isn’t the flex it used to be. Smart operators are choosing to go back to IC work instead.

The next generation of great companies have learned from the mistakes of the previous generation. They’re rewarding builders over managers because they know that one person with AI leverage can avoid the alignment tax and do an entire department’s work.

5. How you can take back control as an employee

As an employee, I think the bottom line is:

Take whatever you’re most reliable at and figure out how to do it faster with Claude Code, Codex, or another AI tool that fits your workflow. The goal is to free up your time to do work that’s higher-leverage and harder to commoditize.

I hate seeing employees be at the whim of their employer, so here's what I recommend:

1. Read the signals. If business growth is stagnant and leadership is suddenly obsessed with "flatter orgs," "AI-native teams," or "restructuring for the agentic era," you already know what's coming.

Read more

Today, I want to share a new episode with Moritz Kremb.

Moritz is an AI creator who built a personal OS in Claude Code to manage his emails, create content, and even buy groceries. In this episode, he walks through everything you need to set up your own: folder structure, tools, memory loops, skills, and routines. We also talked about the pros and cons of OpenClaw vs. Claude Code.

Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.

Moritz and I talked about:

• (00:00) The honest tradeoffs: OpenClaw vs. Claude Code

• (09:03) The reliability problem that made Moritz switch

• (15:40) The folder structure that runs Moritz's entire OS

• (20:03) The memory loop that makes Claude Code remember everything

• (23:47) CLI vs. MCP vs. API: which to pick and why it matters

• (26:02) Skills walkthrough: automated grocery runs and video uploads

• (29:03) Local vs. remote routines (and when to use each)

• (31:51) The full content pipeline from idea to posted video

• (41:43) Tips to start building your first personal OS

I’m proud to partner with Linear

As teams ship faster with AI agents, the bottleneck shifts from building to deciding what to build.

Linear’s new Agent understands your full workspace context: roadmap, issues, customer requests, and code. Ask it to surface patterns across feedback, scope out a spec, or catch you up on team progress.

Try Linear for Free

Top 10 takeaways I learned from this episode

1. Build your Claude Code personal OS in 4 layers. Moritz runs his email, content pipeline, and grocery shopping through his Claude Code OS. It has 4 layers:

   1. Folder (with memory): A set of files Claude Code reads at the start of every session so it knows who you are, what tools it has, and what it remembers from past chats.

   2. Tools: The APIs, MCPs, and CLIs that let Claude complete tasks like send emails, post to social, search Google Drive, and more.

   3. Skills: Detailed instructions for tasks that Moritz does over and over like “upload my video files” or “refill my grocery cart.”

   4. Routines: Scheduled jobs that run proactively.

Let's walk through how to set up each layer below:

2. Set up your folder structure first. Get this right before setting up tools or skills so that your OS stays organized. Critical files include:

Read more

Today, I want to talk about the race to build a personal AI agent.

Everyone wants an AI chief of staff that can triage emails, book meetings, edit documents, and take care of work that we don’t want to do.

I've spent the last few months testing OpenClaw, Hermes, Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini as personal agents. In this post, I'll share:

1. 10 capabilities a great personal agent needs

2. An honest take on where each product stands today

3. The personal agent stack that I use right now

10 capabilities that a personal agent needs

I think a great personal agent needs to be able to:

1. Manage email, calendar, docs, sheets, and slides

2. Integrate with any API, MCP, or CLI

3. Run recurring and triggered tasks

4. Remember things about you

5. Work across web and mobile with no friction

6. Switch between text and voice replies

7. Have a personality that’s fun to talk to

8. Use your computer and browser

9. Stay reliable

10. Keep your data safe

The reality is that no product checks all 10 boxes today. Here’s how each stacks up:

OpenClaw: The most flexible personal agent, but reliability is a real problem

As the original personal agent, OpenClaw still gets a lot right:

1. Lives inside your messaging apps. Talking to my OpenClaw in Telegram just feels more personal than talking to another agent in a separate app or terminal.

2. Easily switches between text and voice. I primarily talk to my OpenClaw using voice replies, which is convenient and fast.

3. Incredibly flexible. You can customize OpenClaw’s memory, capabilities, and integrations more deeply than any other option in this post.

But OpenClaw’s critical flaw is reliability. I estimate that 10% of my time with OpenClaw is spent fixing it instead of using it. Examples:

1. It forgot it had access to edit Google Docs.

2. It randomly started using a robot voice instead of the one I like.

3. It breaks half the time after every update.

Having to use Claude Code or Codex to fix my OpenClaw doesn’t feel great.

My verdict: OpenClaw is still the most powerful and flexible personal agent. But the maintenance tax is real and reliability is a major concern.

Hermes: I was skeptical at first, but it breaks less often than OpenClaw

I’ll be honest, I avoided Hermes for a long time. Too many people were shilling it on X, and the luxury handbag name felt off. What changed my mind was watching AI builders I trust quietly migrate over from OpenClaw.

I’ve been testing Hermes for the past week. Early impressions:

1. It’s more reliable than OpenClaw. Hermes works more consistently. It even fixed some of the cron jobs that OpenClaw on GPT 5.5 broke:

   

2. It communicates more what it’s doing. It tells me in Telegram when it completes a cron job and how long a task is taking.

3. It tends to work more independently. When it spots a repetitive workflow, it turns it into a reusable skill automatically. This can be a pro or a con depending on how much control you want to give up.

OpenClaw still feels more “alive” thanks to its transparent heartbeat and memory system, but I’d take reliability over those features any day.

My verdict: If OpenClaw’s maintenance tax is wearing you down, give Hermes a try. A week in, it’s been more reliable for me.

Claude Code: The best personality, but availability and rate limits are a concern

Over the past few months, Anthropic has shipped many features to replicate OpenClaw’s functionality, including routines, remote control, and chat channels. As a personal agent, Claude Code has real strengths:

1. Best model personality. Opus feels the most like talking to a trusted friend who will support and challenge you.

2. Strong agentic capabilities. Opus is also, along with GPT 5.5, the best model at just figuring things out, no matter how wild the request.

3. Claude Code is a rabbit hole. Using Claude Code feels like playing a video game where you’re always discovering new shortcuts. It’s a rabbit hole in the best way.

But Claude Code also has major reliability issues:

1. 98% uptime isn’t great. It feels like Claude is randomly unavailable every other week. Key features like routines also break silently without sending any alerts.

2. Mobile integration is manual. You have to type /remote-control to continue your chats on mobile, and it sometimes disconnects after a while.

3. Rate limits are stricter. You can’t get as much usage out of the equivalent Claude plans as you can from Codex (the next option).

My verdict: Claude has a great personality and strong agentic capabilities. But Anthropic needs to prioritize fixing reliability and scaling compute.

Codex: An incredible desktop app and generous limits, but no mobile yet

As a long-time Claude subscriber, I’m genuinely impressed by how much progress the Codex team has made. They’ve shipped:

1. A beautiful desktop app. The app is simple and intuitive to use. You can hook it up to other popular apps with a few simple clicks instead of having to remember slash commands:

   

2. GPT 5.5 with generous rate limits. GPT 5.5 is a great model and you can also get more usage out of the Codex plan than the equivalent Claude plan.

3. Best-in-class browser and computer use. GPT’s strengths here help your personal agent complete workflows in products that don’t have great API support.

Codex has one big gap: you can’t talk to it on mobile yet. 80% of my conversations with my personal agents happen on mobile, so this is a deal breaker.

My verdict: Codex has won me over for coding. It has the potential to be a great personal agent once the mobile app ships (probably very soon).

Gemini: This is Google’s race to lose

Gemini is best positioned to be the go-to personal agent for the masses, but it just doesn’t have all the capabilities yet. What Gemini does well:

1. Native Workspace access. The Gemini app reads emails, schedules meetings, and creates docs by default. But it can’t edit docs yet (more on this below).

2. Best live voice and video conversations. Gemini Live lets you talk back and forth and even supports camera and screen sharing.

But the Gemini app still can’t edit Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides. All of these products are owned by Google, so it’s not great that Gemini is the only AI app that doesn’t support this. Codex and Claude Code do it natively with a few simple connections.

Overall, Google seems to be adding chat windows to all of its individual products instead of making the Gemini app the most capable personal agent.

My verdict: Google has all the data and products to win this race. But basic capabilities are still missing, and time is running out.

My personal agent stack right now

As of this writing, I use:

1. Hermes for everyday tasks. Emails, calendar, Google Doc edits, and honestly, therapy through voice replies. I switched over to Hermes because it’s more reliable than OpenClaw.

2. Codex and Claude Code for building things. When I’m coding, writing, or producing real work, I live in these apps. If I had to pick one, it’d be Codex due to the more generous rate limits (but you know how these things change fast).

The important thing is to not get stuck like me, migrating from one personal agent to another instead of doing real work. Pick one or two agents that work for you based on the pros and cons above and just commit.

One thing I can promise you:

Once you have an agent that’s available 24/7 and can actually get work done for you, you’ll never go back to a regular AI chat interface again.

Today, I want to share a new episode with Ravi Mehta.

Ravi is a top AI instructor and former CPO of Tinder. In our episode, he did a live demo of using his 3-layer context engineering system (functional, visual, data) to build a beautiful music app instead of the usual AI slop. You’ll never prompt AI the same way again after learning about Ravi’s approach.

Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.

Ravi and I talked about:

• (00:00) Why most AI prototypes feel like slop

• (01:08) Context engineering, explained from first principles

• (05:12) Layer 1 demo: Functional context

• (09:38) Layer 2 demo: Visual context

• (13:31) Layer 3 demo: Data context

• (15:47) Building a custom MCP server in Claude Code

• (19:54) The full stack prompt: all 3 layers in one shot

• (24:21) Why separating the data layer is the real unlock

• (28:59) Should PMs prototype or just ship to production?

• (33:51) Where PRDs still fit in AI native product development

I’m proud to partner with Wispr Flow

Wispr Flow has quietly become one of the AI tools that I use the most. It lets you dictate into any app on your computer or phone and turns your voice into clean, formatted text automatically.

I save at least 3 hours a week from using it to draft newsletter posts, write specs, and reply on Slack. It’s just so much faster to dictate to AI than to type, and you’ll never go back once you try it. Use code PETERWISPRFLOW to get 6 months free.

Try Wispr Flow for Free

Top 10 takeaways I learned from this episode

1. Apply three layers of context to create polished AI prototypes. Ravi built the same music app in 3 ways to highlight what each context layer adds:

   • Functional context. First, he wrote a spec listing the feature requirements (hero, albums, etc) and got a generic app with placeholders.

   • Visual context. Next, he added a wireframe from Figma to the prompt. This led to better UX and layout but the product was still missing real data.

   • Data context. Finally, he asked AI to generate a JSON with genre, artist, and album names and used a custom MCP server to pull in album cover art from Deezer. This time, AI generated a complete music discovery app.

The best thing about this system is that you can swap the data layer (JSON) at any time to have your app highlight completely different content (e.g., from rock to hip hop albums) without touching the other two layers.

Here’s a detailed prompt that Ravi shared with me to generate all 3 layers in one-shot for any app or idea that you have (just replace the music app details with yours):

Read more

OpenAI vs. Anthropic gets all the attention these days, but Google Labs is quietly shipping some of the most interesting AI products right now.

Pomelli for marketing, Stitch for design, Flow for videos, and more — these tools are better than most people realize.

Watch the tutorial now to see me review all five tools live and share where each product excels and where they fall short.

Timestamps:

• (0:00) Why Google’s most underrated AI products are in Labs

• (0:39) Pomelli: Generate marketing assets from any URL

• (4:37) Stitch: Create web and mobile designs from scratch

• (7:27) Genie: Walk through AI-generated 3D worlds

• (9:11) Flow: The best tool for making AI videos and images

• (11:49) NotebookLM: Turn any source into video, slides, and infographics

• (14:27) 3 takeaways on Google’s AI strategy

I’m proud to partner with Granola

The world’s best product teams including Ramp, Linear, Replit, and more all use Granola to take notes and focus more in meetings. I’ve tried many meeting notes apps myself but keep coming back to Granola. It’s just that good.

Try Granola for Free

A review of 5 Google Labs tools and their pros/cons

1. Pomelli: Generate marketing assets from a link

Pomelli generates beautiful marketing assets and your brand DNA (colors, fonts, images, logo), all from a link to your website.

For example, I gave Pomelli a link to my favorite local Asian bakery, Simply Cake. It pulled the brand’s logo, fonts, colors, and images in under 20 seconds:

Once Pomelli has your brand’s DNA, it’ll generate 3 marketing campaigns for you to review. Here’s a Mother’s Day campaign it made for Simply Cake:

Pomelli’s Photoshoot feature is also worth trying. Upload a basic photo of an egg tart and it creates marketing-ready assets with Nano Banana:

Next, I tried Pomelli on my newsletter to see how it handles a content business. Unfortunately, it didn’t work as well. Content brands like mine don't have great product photography to extract from, so Pomelli has less to work with:

My verdict: Pomelli is incredible if you run a physical or e-commerce store with a strong visual library. My one gripe is that you can’t edit the text and images manually — you have to re-prompt the AI every time.

2. Stitch: Create beautiful product designs

Stitch is Google's answer to Claude Design. I gave it a simple prompt to "design a mobile fitness app." Stitch first generated a design system, then produced the screens:

One great thing about Stitch is that it’ll use Nano Banana to fill in images, which makes the screens look more realistic. There’s also a fun feature that shows a predictive heat map of where users might click.

But Stitch has one flaw compared to Claude Design — it didn’t ask me a single clarifying question before making the app. Compare that to how Claude Design handles the same prompt:

Read more

Today, I want to share a new episode with Tibo Louis-Lucas.

Tibo is a solo founder making $1M+ a month (!) after bootstrapping 5 AI products. I got him to walk through his exact playbook for validating ideas fast, acquiring users, and pricing AI products. If you want to bootstrap an AI business from scratch, this interview is a must watch.

Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.

Tibo and I talked about:

• (00:00) The right mindset for solo AI founders

• (04:48) Tibo's 5-rule playbook to reach $1M/month

• (09:55) The product pivot that unlocked $600K/month

• (13:08) Why you should charge money right away

• (20:50) The acquisition channel everyone says is dead (it's not)

• (26:58) Running 5 businesses without a real team

• (36:34) How to price your AI product

• (37:20) What's a good churn rate for AI products?

• (40:16) 9 products failed. The 10th hit $600K/month

I’m proud to partner with Oceans

I recently hired an executive assistant from Oceans to help with podcast post-production and it’s been one of the best decisions I’ve made. My assistant is proactive, picks up new tools fast, and is already using AI to speed up his workflows.

Oceans matches you with top-tier talent for marketing, operations, finance, and executive support, all fully vetted and ready to go. Book a call now via the link below.

Get Started for Free

Top 10 takeaways I learned from this episode

1. Tibo’s 5 rules behind his $1M/month AI portfolio. After launching 5 successful AI products (and many failed ones), Here’s Tibo’s rules to build an AI product that customers want:

   • Charge money from day one. Collect money early so you know if people actually want what you're building.

   • Follow user behavior, not your plan. When people twist your product into something unexpected, build for that instead.

   • Price for quality customers. Charging $50-100/month keeps away high-churn users who cancel fast and flood customer support.

   • Build free tools that rank on Google. Target each tool to a specific search query (e.g., “audio to video”) to win SEO traffic.

   • Launch fast and kill what doesn't work. Accept that most ideas will fail, so move quickly and double down on what sticks.

Let's dive into these rules with real examples 👇

Read more

Today, I want to share a new episode with Ryan Wiggins.

Ryan is the VP of Product at Mercury, my favorite fintech product. We covered three things that are on every AI builder’s mind — how to make your product agent-ready, how to build a Claude Code second brain, and what Mercury’s data reveals about OpenAI and Anthropic’s race for the enterprise.

Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.

Ryan and I talked about:

• (00:00) Why APIs and MCPs are the primary interface

• (04:40) How to get your product agent ready

• (07:51) Will MCPs cannibalize your app DAU?

• (10:36) How to decide between MCPs and CLIs

• (13:10) Inside Ryan's Claude Code second brain

• (18:40) Getting AI to coach you after every meeting

• (20:46) Mercury data: Are startups switching to Anthropic?

• (23:05) The product development process will never be the same

P.S. Mercury is offering Behind the Craft readers 1 year of free personal banking. Just click the link to get the discount.

I’m proud to partner with Wispr Flow

For many PMs and tech professionals, communication is the job. Slack replies, stakeholder updates, PRDs, emails — most of us are bottlenecked by typing speed.

Wispr Flow is the tool I use to close that gap. You speak naturally into any app and it outputs clean, ready-to-send text. It genuinely saves me 3 hours per week and works across Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android. Use code PETERWISPRFLOW for 6 months free.

Try Wispr Flow for Free

Top 10 takeaways I learned from this episode

How Ryan built his Claude Code second brain

1. Ryan built a Claude Code “second brain” trained on 5 years of work history that helped him 2x his productivity as a product leader. He did this in 5 phases:

   1. Create a profile. Have Claude interview you and write a me.md file capturing your role, goals, working style, and growth edges. This is the foundation.

   2. Build the knowledge base. Save your most important docs — specs, retros, performance reviews — in a local folder. Then ask Claude Code to install QMD (Shopify CEO’s vector search tool) so it can reference these docs.

   3. Distill the data. Ask Claude to create summary files using me.md and the knowledge base. For example:

      1. strategic-context.md — what my company/team is trying to do and why

      2. personal-growth.md — patterns in my feedback, coaching themes

   4. Wire up auto-context injection. Create a Claude Code hook that pulls relevant context from the files above into every prompt.

   5. Create the learning loop. Build a /learn skill that updates Claude.md after each session, plus cron jobs for morning briefs and monthly retros.

Ryan uses this to drive team priorities, make decisions, and self-reflect. It’s the most sophisticated personal OS I’ve seen, so I asked Ryan for a full 4,000+ word prompt that you can paste into Claude to set this up for yourself in 5 steps:

I want you to help me build a "Second Brain" — a persistent knowledge system that runs in parallel to my work using Claude Code. We'll do this in 5 phases. Walk me through each one interactively. Don't skip ahead — confirm each phase is working before moving on.

## Phase 1: Interview Me & Create my Profile

Interview me to create a file at ~/Documents/second-brain/me.md that captures:
- Who I am (role, company, responsibilities)
- What I'm optimizing for (goals, priorities, what success looks like)
- My working style (tools I use daily, how I communicate, what frustrates me)
- My growth edges (feedback I've gotten, patterns I want to break)
- What I care about outside work (interests, values — helps with recommendations)

Ask me 5-7 questions conversationally. Don't make me fill out a template. Write the file when you have enough.

## Phase 2: Build the Knowledge Base

Read more