# 150 I Built A $100K Research Assistant With Claude Code (for FREE)

Show Notes

What if you could go from a blank folder to a fully functional competitive research tool complete with scoring rubrics, interactive dashboards, and repeatable skills—in under an hour? In this episode, marketing veteran Adam Sandler (yes, that's his real name) shares his screen and builds the entire workflow live using a real-world use case: finding distressed wedding venues in North Carolina for a friend's acquisition business. No coding. No technical background. Just Claude Code, plain English, and a process that any knowledge worker can replicate.

Check Adam's youtube channel:https://www.youtube.com/@ViableEdge

What is Build With AI?

Most AI podcasts talk about what's possible. Build With AI shows you how it's done, live. Each episode, host Corey Ganim brings on entrepreneurs and operators who share their screen and build real AI automations, workflows, and tool setups right in front of you. No boring slides. Nothing that hasn't been battle-tested. You'll watch actual implementations get built from scratch so you can follow along and do the same in your business. If you're a non-technical entrepreneur who wants to put AI to work without becoming a developer, hit play and build along with us.

Corey Ganim: All right, Adam Sandler, what are we building today?

Adam: How you doing, Corey? I thought it would be ⁓ helpful to show how to put together a process in Cloud Code, starting with some simple research and working all the way up to a tool. Because I think this is sort of one of the superpowers that Cloud Code unlocks for people who are not technical or don't have a technical background. think where we're going is the capability ⁓ for people who are historically in knowledge worker jobs like marketing, like myself, ⁓ we have the ability now to create tools, even if they're one off use tools to help us accelerate how we go to market, how we perform our work. ⁓ And I'd love to showcase how we can take an approach that focuses on competitive research, turn that into a tool that allows ongoing ⁓ repeated research so you don't have to do everything all over again. Effectively, building yourself a tool in real time as you operate it. That makes sense.

Corey Ganim: Awesome. Yeah. Well, this is going to be a good one. I'm excited for this. Anything having to do with Claude code is just massive leverage. Once you put in the groundwork to refine it and get it up and running. So we'll jump into your screen here in a couple of seconds, but before we do, why don't you just give us your elevator pitch? Like who is Adam Sandler? What's his background? Why should people listen to him and how to, how do people differentiate him from the other Adam Sandler?

Adam: Well, the differentiation differentiation piece is easy. I'm a lot less wealthy ⁓ So there's that yeah, but so, know, I ⁓ historically have a career in marketing I live in New York and ⁓ worked in a couple of large enterprise several large enterprise companies based in New York City ⁓ in various marketing roles, so American Express was one of the bigger names I've worked at and

Corey Ganim: We're getting there though, right?

Adam: I worked in the open business unit, which is focused on small business customers and worked on a content marketing initiative there called Open Forum. This was over a decade ago and it was when content marketing was still very nascent. So got my feet wet, ⁓ understanding ⁓ how to use ⁓ organic content as an acquisition mechanism. And... later in my career and most recently in that world, I was at Nestle Health Science, which was by way of acquisition of Nature's Bounty Vitamins, where ⁓ I led a digital marketing team and also ⁓ later in my tenure there helped to lead the Amazon business as well. So, you know, learned a lot about e-commerce and, you know, high volume selling. ⁓ you know, channel management, lot of very multifaceted ⁓ ways to market in that world. And Vitamins is a low margin, high volume business, which on Amazon, and I know you're well familiar, ⁓ can be very challenging. you know, was learned a lot, worked with a lot of really great people. And then since that time, over the last two years, I've been doing independent marketing consulting and started using AI just for like, how I operate quickly saw the benefits ⁓ of how it could help me deliver for my clients. fast forward to today, obviously you can't get through your day without encountering AI somewhere, right? Whether that's in your LinkedIn feed or within the apps you're using every day. ⁓ And so I think when we think about cloud code and sort of like how this technology and the platforms are evolving,

Corey Ganim: Right.

Adam: I think there's a real impetus and need for, you know, knowledge workers like myself. I don't want to characterize you, but perhaps folks like you and I to get comfortable and to really understand how to embrace this technology, right? And get past some of the, I think, technical hurdles, which, you know, on the surface appear impenetrable, but in reality ⁓ are really not.

Corey Ganim: You're right. Right. Yep. I agree completely. So what, ⁓ what I love about, know, these episodes and what we're going to learn today is you are going to share your screen. So if people are watching this or if they're listening on the podcast platform, be sure to switch over to YouTube and Adam's going to break this whole thing down step by step. We're going to jump into his screen, look at his Claude code set up and build some of these workflows from scratch. Adam, why don't you take it away?

Adam: Sure, absolutely. All right, cool. So ⁓ I am using Claude code in an IDE called VS code. VS code is a free product that you can download. And it's essentially an interface that coders use for doing engineering, right? But because of how Claude code has become a lot more popular among non-coders, This is an easy to use interface to get up and going, right? This is where a lot of people I think also get a little bit intimidated when you start hearing words like terminal and you see black screens like this with a lot of colors. But ⁓ as we get into this, you'll see how simple it can be, right? So ⁓ I'm using a ⁓ anthropic account. I pay for the max, the top max subscription, which is $200 a month. What I'm doing, you could probably do

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm.

Adam: for the $20 a month subscription. ⁓ So what I'm gonna do here is open a new directory. Actually, I'm already in a directory. So I'm going to open a new terminal up here. Terminal is sort of like your foundational interface for operating a computer, right? So.

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm.

Adam: All I'm going to do is ⁓ type, I'm using a command to allow me to skip permissions. I don't recommend it for newbies, but essentially what I'm doing is just typing Claude and launching Claude code inside the VS code application. So I hope that. Yeah.

Corey Ganim: It's funny that when I first, sorry to cut you off, but when I first launched, ⁓ or when I use Claude code for the first time. So I use cursor, which is obviously a competitive Vs code, but I could not figure out how to launch Claude code. Like I literally, so I had to ask Claude and it was like, you, all you do is just type the word Claude and press enter. And I was like, ⁓ okay. That's not that hard.

Adam: Yes. Yep, yep. And I think, you know, what you just mentioned of like how you figured it out, just ask, right? Just ask Claude how to do it. And that's how I learned a lot of stuff as well. No shame. ⁓ So ⁓ there are a couple of ways to open Claude within. ⁓ VS Code has ⁓ built in now. I think it's built in, but there's an extension that Anthropic released called Claude Code for VS Code.

Corey Ganim: Right, yeah.

Adam: which gives you a little bit of a nicer interface. So if I hit this orange button up here, after it's installed, you'll see this orange button. It'll just give me something that's a little bit easier on the eyes. Yeah. And I do work in this a lot. It does have a couple of limitations compared to the terminal version, which is on the left side. I don't want to get into the details on that now, ⁓ but ⁓ perhaps in a second session, if we want to go dive deep, we can do that.

Corey Ganim: ⁓ nice, yeah. Yeah.

Adam: I'm going to close the but like I said, you know, if you're just getting started, this is a really like easy way to onboard yourself to working with cloud code inside the code. I'm just going to close this one and focus in on the terminal. It's the same exact thing just looks a little bit differently. So I thought it would be really interesting to focus on a research based product project rather because it's a really great example of how we can build an iterative workflow and start with something very simple and get to something that is like a tool and a process that can be repeated. Right. And research is always a great example of this because there's so many different ways to conduct research. For now. ⁓ I thought maybe we can look at like competitive research in some manner. Are there any ⁓ like industries, verticals, companies that you have in mind that we could target for competitive research?

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm. I do. So I'll use a, actually a real life example. was doing a consulting session for a friend of mine last week who was in the wedding venue business. So something that they're doing is they're actually going and approaching other owners of wedding venues here in the state of North Carolina. And they're pitching them and basically saying, Hey, we will run your venue and just kick you back a rev share. So you don't have to do any work. You don't have to bring any leads. You don't have to market. We're literally just going to use your venue. Right. And so part of what I was showing him, and I was actually showing him this in Claude cowork, which is kind of like a step down from Claude code, but they do similar things. I was showing him how Claude cowork and therefore Claude code can go out and do some really detailed, deep research on wedding venue, basically wedding venues in the area. And it's, it's funny because he wanted, he wanted to find distressed wedding venues and his definition of distress. It's not. concrete, it's not like, ⁓ they have to meet these criteria. It's like, ⁓ know, distress might be, they might be in financial distress. Like they might be going through bankruptcy. They might have bad Google reviews, you know? So there was kind of like these three or four, ⁓ kind of loosely defined definitions of distress. And I was like, well, let's just throw these into cowork and see what it does. And sure enough, within five to seven minutes, it had, I think seven or eight.

Adam: Yeah.

Corey Ganim: venues within 30 miles of his venue that we actually dug through the results. And he was like, these are like good. Like these are one of them that own that like Claude went in and found that the owner, ⁓ just went to prison and now there's an, a foreclosure auction on this wedding venue. And my friend who I was showing this to is like, would have taken, like, I never would have found that it would have taken me hours to find that. So yeah. Yeah. So long-winded way of saying like, let's just use that as an example. Let's look for.

Adam: That sounds distressed.

Corey Ganim: We could repeat the same search, like wedding venues that appear to be in a state of distress in the state of North Carolina.

Adam: Yeah. Yeah, and you'll see me using my voice. I think, you know, it's pretty... Actually, I'm using Super Whisper. ⁓ Yeah, it's very similar. And only because, like, I guess I found it first. You know, I've been using it for over a year at this point. And it is, you know, it has not cost me any money. It's great. ⁓ And so, you know, I highly recommend Voice Dictation because...

Corey Ganim: Whisper Flow. Okay, interesting. Same thing, I'm sure. Mm-hmm.

Adam: you're removing a lot of cognitive load when you're not typing, when you're not having to stare at something. ⁓ So just a hot tip for those who are not on board yet. okay, ⁓ let's research distressed wedding venues in North Carolina and let's focus on pain points and reviews from customers. Okay, so I purposely left it a little bit general because I'm curious about like how it's going to scope out ⁓ the idea of distressed, right? As you were speaking, and I think you sort of like that was the point you were making is like, well, what does distressed mean? And one thing I was thinking of was like, well, how would you research that? Because like if there's financial distress, that might not be public information, right? So and so what Claude?

Corey Ganim: Right. Right. public. Yep.

Adam: is doing right now, it's searching the web, right? Just like a lot of these LLMs have the capability to conduct web research ⁓ behind the scenes, right? Outside of the view of the chat. That's what Cloud Code is doing right now. And we're getting a little bit of a visual of the different terms, right? So we're seeing there was one about scams, which caught my eye earlier. ⁓ But

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm. Right. Bride strand. It's one of the keywords that it uses suddenly brides stranded. So it's like, how funny is that? So it's basically looking for like social media posts or like reviews or basically anywhere online where somebody has complained that, XYZ wedding venue, like stranded me on my wedding day. Like we were screwed, which I think is like really interesting. I wouldn't have thought to do that.

Adam: that are. And one other thing to be aware of, and I don't think this is happening right at the moment, but ⁓ Cloud Code can launch autonomous sub agents, meaning it can actually launch its own chat sessions that it will operate outside of your view to conduct this research in parallel, right? So you can have three sub agents all doing work at the same time. and then they will come back and report the results to the primary agent, which is our session here. Right. So just a good thing to understand. And maybe we'll look at some of that later. So here we go. So we have ⁓ an outcome here. There's a lot, actually, some links. ⁓ Obviously, we don't want to read the entire report. But what I'd love to do is get to a point where we have a ⁓ commonality, some common data point. to work with across these different ⁓ venues. So we've done the research. We have some Intel. And one of the magical things that Cloud Code can do, and I think Co-Work now as well, is it can create a file and store it on your local machine. So we can now capture these insights, whereas maybe if you're just using ChatGBT, you might have to copy and paste it into something else. ⁓ And I think it sounds small. But this, think, is one of the core benefits of using Cloud Code. The ability to read, write, edit, and delete files on your machine means that you effectively can manage the information and the context that Cloud Code is using and has access to at any given moment and can update that context. And now we're sort of bumping up against the idea of persistent memory. Right. So I just want to draw the line from like that seeming that seemingly simple capability to the actual utility and impact. ⁓ So it's hard to sort of like just eyeball to see if like there are ⁓ pain points that we could parse into data, but I'm going to ask Cloud Code to do it anyway. I would love to create a CSV that can give us visibility into the discrete pain points. for this selection of competitors as we look to get a understanding of the landscape for our business of finding distressed wedding venues.

Corey Ganim: Well, so do you see the table above? actually kind of already did that where...

Adam: It did it. Yeah, it it sort of gave like a roll up if you will, right? Like here are the common things. I would like to get more granular, you know what I mean? Yeah, because that's what's going to open up the path for us to operationalize that data, right? Like there's not, there's maybe some good intelligence here, but it doesn't look like we can like really use it just yet, right? And that's kind of like what I want to get to.

Corey Ganim: Uh-huh. ⁓ so you're saying we want it specific to each venue. this. Got it. I see.

Adam: And so as Cloud Code is thinking, the panel here on the left, it's empty because this is just another view into the folder that the project is on on my computer. Right? So if I right click here and click reveal and finder, it's going to pull up that exact folder research. Right? So it's just another quick tip to like,

Corey Ganim: I see. Yep.

Adam: identify files on your machine, you could right click, reveal in Finder. ⁓ But also just to illustrate that this box here is just the same thing, different view. And it's very helpful because you'll end up managing a lot of files. And here it is, right? We have our CSV with a ton of these different. ⁓ and then it structured some schema based on the findings, right? Not a ton of data, 31 records, great for a demo just like this. But if you are working with large sets of data, you can similarly use this kind of approach, right? ⁓ Great, so we sort of like, have a schema now, right? We've done research, we have a schema. What can we do with this? Let's now, ⁓ our business of identifying these distressed ⁓ venues, guess, you know, we want to at some point like transact something, right? Or contact a customer or a potential prospect or client, right? Help me understand a little bit like what the business wants to do. Cause I want to like try and shape it around the goal.

Corey Ganim: Yeah. So, so his, the, the goal of my friend who does this was twofold. It was one, if they are in enough distress and they're willing just to sell their venue outright, then they, my friend wants to buy it and then operate it. Right. And then on the other hand, if they don't necessarily want to sell, but they're so, you know, grinded down from years or months or, or however long of operating these venues that are clearly not performing well. And if they're not performing well, they're probably not making any money. So his pitch then is again, we'll come in and operate it and we'll spruce it up. We'll even invest in the property to get it up to 2026 standards and we'll bring in the leads and we'll operate it. And then we'll give you a rep share essentially.

Adam: Okay, that's super helpful. A lot of detail as well. ⁓ I'm gonna do my best to sort of regurgitate some of that in a pithy way. ⁓ Using this data, we would love to identify targets for our business to explore for potential acquisition and targets for our business to explore for potential management partnerships or cooperative arrangements where...

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm.

Adam: we can have some level of control and management of the venue. So again, I'm leaving it a little bit open-ended. And one thing I'd love to showcase here is plan mode. And I'm going to flip it on. So if I hit Shift Tab here, I'm activating plan mode. And this is one of my favorite features of Cloud Code. I believe it's in cowork as well, but I don't know if you can manually activate it in cowork. ⁓

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm.

Adam: What plan mode does, it turns Cloud Code's capability to edit files off and tells Cloud that you want to have basically a conversation to plan out this next task. And the idea is that Cloud Code is going to then sort of guide you through a series of different questions to clarify the ask. And then it's going to write a plan to do this, right? And so this is probably a little bit of a simple example.

Corey Ganim: Right.

Adam: However, I'm sorry Cory were you speaking? Okay ⁓ So this is probably a little bit of a simple example, ⁓ but

Corey Ganim: No, you're good.

Adam: PlanMode is such a powerful tool because it'll help you identify opportunities or gaps or things that you may not have thought of. ⁓ And there have been so many instances where PlanMode has opened the door to different paths or different ways of doing things. It's a learning tool. And again, so you hit Shift Tab, and you can see on the bottom of my screen, the mode is indicated here under the chat box. So PlanMode is on.

Corey Ganim: Right. Mm-hmm.

Adam: And I'm going to hit enter. And plan mode, you don't have to have a robust hypothesis or idea or anything. You don't even have to be using it in the context of producing a thing. You could use it in the context of like, hey, help me plan my weekend. Yeah. And it really sort of got me onto the...

Corey Ganim: Right. It can be super basic.

Adam: I've become a big fan of guided experiences because of plan mode. So when I develop my own workflows, I try to enable a guided experience. ⁓

Corey Ganim: And I think, and not to get off on a tangent, I'll just brush over it briefly, but obviously you and I know how powerful skills are. And I think plan mode within Claude code is incredibly useful for kind of brain dumping the way that you currently do a task or execute a process and then letting it put together a plan for creating that skill. Right. So that, think plan mode and Claude code, in my opinion, is the most effective way to really put together solid skills in the shortest amount of time possible.

Adam: Absolutely. Absolutely. ⁓ And we'll definitely get into skills. So the first question it's asking is the format. Do I want a CSV, a Python analysis script, or both? And I'm just going to go with both here, because why not, right? ⁓ The next question, control level. For management partnerships, what level of control are we targeting? Full operational takeover, majority management control, advisory consulting, or flexible? Hands on the venue.

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm. So it's my understanding that they are ideally they want full operational control. It's like, hey, we take over everything. You sit back and collect a check. Obviously we're going to take the majority of the profit, but it's going to be hands off for you.

Adam: Mm-hmm. Yep. And you did mention that when you were describing it. ⁓ And then that was left out of my vague ask, right? So.

Corey Ganim: Well, but it's that goes to show that that's how good Claude code is, is it's like, well, Hey, this is probably a key detail that we should fill in. What's the context there. And that's another beautiful thing about plan mode is it will ask you the questions required to fill in that context to actually give you a good output. Whereas Chad GBT is just going to go and answer, right. Or even regular Claude is just going to go and answer unless you specify, Hey, interview me to get the context needed.

Adam: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, regular Claude is now using the question thing. I don't know if you've caught that. I think it's brand new. Meaning like when you sometimes just regular desktop Claude will like flash you questions to click on versus answering just like plan, mode, and co-work or in the UI extension we looked at. one other thing just to sort of call out here is that like if you're not sure or you're not happy with these options, you can

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm. It's smart.

Adam: you know, add your own option, or you could even chat about this, right? So you can dig deeper to understand like, whoops, I just went a little too far here. ⁓ God, I'm sorry. Let's try that one more time.

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm. No worries. But yeah, again, that's another good thing about plan mode is like I've, I've done that many times where I'll like fat finger a button and be like, ⁓ I didn't mean to type that. And then we go redo the interview and it's, know, take, take but a couple of seconds.

Adam: Yeah, there is a way to go back. just fat fingered it and stopped the whole question. Okay, so the thing that I wanted to mention though was the chat about this, right? So you can chat more about to get an understanding like, okay, why these options?

Corey Ganim: Yeah

Adam: A lot of times you'll see Cloud Code will make a recommendation in those options. It'll say, like, recommended this one. ⁓ So chat mode is great for understanding, like, well, why did you recommend that one? ⁓ And digging a little bit deeper into the process. And I'm using that more and more lately. OK, so for one reason or another, it just skipped the questions. That was my fault.

Corey Ganim: Right. The plan, yeah.

Adam: ⁓ But let's not waste time. Let's just continue moving forward. So once plan mode finishes and gets that information from you, it's going to present back to you that plan, right? So here's Claude's plan, distressed North Carolina wedding venue target analysis. We've got pain points. the deliverable will be another CSV file. And here's an overview of the schema situation. And it's created a rubric for scoring, right? So this is sort of like what is responding to the nature of our ask.

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm.

Adam: which was like, how do we decide what to do with which, right? ⁓ And so there's a scoring system that it's implementing here that will be visible in that CSV file, right? And here's the more information about the venues and looks like some details about those specifics. So normally I would like spend some time to read through this carefully. And I recommend everyone does when you're using plan mode, because you will find things that you might not align with, right? And you might find things that you want to change. And there are simple things

Corey Ganim: Right. Right.

Adam: things too, like if you're ⁓ working with a project that you want to manage version control, it's good to say like, and do this on a new branch, for example, right? So ⁓ after plan mode has presented the plan, I'm presented with more options. Yes, clear context and bypass permissions. So this just means that it's going to start a fresh session with this plan. That's what clear context means.

Corey Ganim: Right.

Adam: ⁓ So, you know, we have a full context window of tokens to work with and bypass permissions. It's not going to ask me to move forward with like discrete steps or edits. ⁓ So I hit number one and it's going to go and now activate on this plan and create that CSV and analysis. ⁓ And then after this is where like I want to, you know, nobody wants to go into a CSV.

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm.

Adam: Right? ⁓ And that is, think, where we started thinking about operationalizing this information in a way that is engaging, ⁓ easy to digest, and repeatable. And thinking about how this would manifest as a tool.

Corey Ganim: And so Adam, I got a question. So just to play devil's advocate, cause I already know there's going to be people who say like, well, why do need to do this in Claude code? Like, why can't you just do this in regular Claude or like chat GPT? I mean, is there a difference? And if so, what, like, what is the advantage of doing it in Claude code?

Adam: Yeah, yeah, I think it's a really great question. think, you know, we talked about the ability to capture and store these files, right? So, I mean, in all fairness, it's been a minute since I've like really dug deep in chat GBT. the last, as far as I know, chat GBT is not ⁓ able to manipulate files on your hard drive. ⁓

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm.

Adam: in a folder on your machine, right? So the examples we're looking at here, we're creating new files, right? But Cloud Code could go back and look at specific data points in here. We can ask it to retrieve certain things or change or edit certain things, right? So like it's a dynamic living and breathing project in that regard with files that are instantly on your computer.

Corey Ganim: Right.

Adam: Right. So I think that's one major difference. And again, like the LLMs are sort of like pushing in this direction or the typical platforms are pushing in this direction a little bit, especially Claude with cowork. Right. There's like rumors flying around there that cowork is just going to be the main chat. Yeah. Which kind of makes sense. ⁓ and so, ⁓ with Claude code, you know, where we're also working within a discrete project folder, right.

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm. That is just gonna be Claude, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Adam: The session that I'm working within can only see what I give it access to, which is this folder, right? It doesn't have memory of anything else that I've done. It doesn't know ⁓ anything else about me. ⁓ This is a completely empty project directory. So this specific session of quad code doesn't even have the skills that I typically would pull into a project, ⁓ right? So. All of that is malleable and customizable. I can completely customize how I want this project to behave. And I think that's also unique to a platform like this, like Cloud Code. We have the capability to plug in a lot of different tools. I'm sure you've heard of MCP, right? ⁓ Which are essentially integrations with outside platforms, easy, ⁓ low impact ways to transfer data back and forth, right? So I have a project where I have an MCP tool that pulls in website performance data from Google Analytics, creates a report, and then can take a number of actions based on the substance of that report. So there's a lot of things like that you can put together yourself ⁓ through those different things like MCPs and plugins and skills and things like that. So there's a lot, but I would say those are the things that come to mind in response to your question. Cool. All right. So what do we have? We have a new CSV, but we don't really want to work in a CSV. ⁓ So it's rolled this up as we were speaking. ⁓ We got a different score for each of these different ⁓ venues. these, do these residents, have you seen these names before?

Corey Ganim: Yeah. So it's so champagne manner is the one that we identified from our cowork session last week where that the owner, think just got a red like is in prison now and it's going to foreclosure sale. Right. So that was one that I even asked them, I was like, had you ever heard of this venue? Like, would you have found this in your regular research? And he said, no. And the reason for that is because it's not like it's on the website that like, Hey, we are in foreclosure. What Claude most likely did is it went out there and found like a social media post or an actually, I think it was a news article about the owner going to prison. And then it put two and two together. Like, Oh, this guy owns this venue. He's now in prison. The venue is probably a good target for acquisition. And then it digs a little deeper and it's like, Oh, what do you know? It's actually going into foreclosure. And it makes sense that it ranks that particular property with an acquisition score of 4.2 out of five. Right. And a partnership score of only 1.2, because like, you're not really going to partner with a venue that like, that doesn't have an owner and isn't going into foreclosure. It makes way more sense just to go and buy that thing. Um, so yeah, so all of the, mean, this is, this is like, I'm going to, I'm texting him right after this. I'm like, we've got a episode coming out for you. It's all about you next week. And, uh, I think I'll love it. So yeah, this is spot on.

Adam: Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's think through like what would be a natural next step from this, right? Like we have our research, we have our intelligence. And, you know, one of the things that I'm thinking of is, you know, we can create a visual ⁓ dossier or asset similar to like what might be an artifact in Cloud desktop to better consume and understand the outcome here.

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm.

Adam: ⁓ And that's something I do all the time. ⁓ One of my favorite skills is the playground skill. I don't know if you've heard that one. It's actually officially released by Anthropic and it's available through their plugins. And I have it installed ⁓ globally so I can invoke it without installing it in a specific project.

Corey Ganim: I'm not familiar, no.

Adam: ⁓ But for anyone who's interested, and maybe we can follow up on this because I don't know if I have the exact link, but if you type slash plugins, you can manage your different skills that are officially released by Claude, by Antropiq, right? ⁓ And you can add new marketplaces.

Corey Ganim: ⁓ interesting.

Adam: Right, so there's an official Claude plugins marketplace that you can grab the link. You can add it to the marketplace ⁓ list here and then you'll have a number of different skills and plugins that you can add to your projects through this way versus like dropping a skills folder in or something like that.

Corey Ganim: Right.

Adam: So I already have the Playground skill installed through that method. So I can invoke it for things like this. ⁓ And just to give a quick understanding, Playground is a skill that is designed to allow you to interact with the model in different ways. ⁓ And I don't want to waste too much time getting into the weeds on that. I'll just show it in action. Let's use the playground skill to create a visual dossier of each one of these ⁓ acquisition or partnership targets ⁓ where we can get in a snapshot an understanding of the recommendation, the score, the time sensitivity with the right context for us to have a business oriented session on strategizing our approach for this.

Corey Ganim: Okay. So I see what you're doing here because you're, you're saying, what we're, what we're looking at above is like, okay, well, this is a little chart that basically shows of these five properties. This is the acquisition score. This is the partnership score. This is like a quick reason why Claude gave it that score. And it's like, that's great, but that doesn't really help us dive deep into like, what really makes this particular property a great acquisition target versus this one that might just be a really good partnership target. And like you were saying earlier, We have a CSV that has all that data. That was the deliverable of Claude's work, but it's like, we don't really want to dig through a CSV. Like it's hard to look at. It's hard to kind of make sense of it. So what you're saying is now with the playground skill, you're telling Claude code. It's like, Hey, basically take that CSV file that has all of our output and turn it into something that we can actually look at. That's actually visually appealing where I can kind of from a quick glance, understand Claude's reasoning behind. each of the properties and really from there be able to decide next steps. Right.

Adam: Exactly. That's exactly right. Like we're sort of asking Cloud Code to be our analyst and do the reporting and give us the qualitative ⁓ perspective. And this is a roll up. This is a summary. So if we click here.

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm.

Adam: Like, you know what, to be quite honest, I was expecting to see a lot more. Okay, there is a lot, okay. So, you know, it's just summarizing what is in that CSV to your point, right? Like, no, but I don't wanna read it. You don't wanna read it. And the utility of still having that CSV though, is that like we've established structure, right? Like we have structured data. And when we get into repetition, that's where doing that upfront,

Corey Ganim: Right.

Adam: like, or having that awareness upfront to start with structured data is going to help. Because if I just asked for research and it like, you know, dumped it into the chat and I copied and pasted it into another prompt, you know, you're, you're, there's no structure there, right? You're not, you're not building process or iterating, right? We're iterating here. And that's kind of like the, the through line that I try to keep ⁓ through these processes.

Corey Ganim: Right. Right. Mm-hmm.

Adam: So Playground is going to create an HTML file. ⁓ Usually it launches it automatically in the browser as well. It launched it off screen. Let me pull it onto the right side.

Corey Ganim: And it tells us it's saying I'm building a professional ⁓ briefing dashboard, essentially. Wow.

Adam: And that's exactly what it just did. Right. So let me, let me see if I can zoom in a little bit on it. Right. So here's a overview, right? Five venues, two acquisition, two partnership, one to monitor, two at high urgency, one medium, one to low urgency, right? We can even, you can even built in like ways to sort and filter. Yeah, that's awesome. Right. And then if I click here, I don't know if you caught that before, if I click here. Exactly.

Corey Ganim: This is crazy. Filters. ⁓ my God, this is like insane. I'm actually shocked by this.

Adam: Right? Exactly. ⁓ And so now, know, this is Playground. ⁓ Big, sorry, develops this into a self-contained HTML file. Like all of. Yeah, all of this is just one file. So like if you wanted to just send this file to your buddy, you know, you don't have to worry about like, where are my assets? Where's my data? Right? That wraps it all up into that one file.

Corey Ganim: Right. Saved locally on your computer, right? Right.

Adam: What Playground is really intended to do is allow you to interact with your model in different ways. for example, if I said, make a Playground for me to tweak the UI, it'll actually create a tool for me to visualize the UI and slide things around to change heights and things like that. It's amazing.

Corey Ganim: That's sweet. I'm literally pulling up cursor on another screen right now to install Playground as a plugin.

Adam: ⁓ And then Playground, what happens is it gives you a prompt to copy and paste back into Claude code with all of the minutiae and details of things that you changed, right? Like change the font 24x or something to that effect, right? So again, I'm just trying to like, I'm stretching Playground into use cases that I don't think it's typically designed for, but something I've gotten a lot of mileage out of.

Corey Ganim: right. I mean, this, really hope for the folks listening on podcasts that they switch over to YouTube because this is a really, I mean, we didn't even tell it to build a dashboard. just said like, Hey, give us something that we can visualize. And it went in and built like a fully functional dashboard with filters, with tags, visual, like ring style diagrams of like, of the scoring. I mean, yeah, it's tagged as like operational failure operating under duress.

Adam: No.

Corey Ganim: And then I like how it has a next steps recommendation for each one too.

Adam: Yeah, that was part of the ask, right? Because the ask included like, OK, like help me plan my ⁓ working session to strategize this, right? And then it even included a way to copy that to the clipboard. ⁓ Yeah, pretty awesome. So again, that's the playground skill, official anthropic release, way under the radar. So what do we do from here, right? Well, ⁓ what if we wanted to branch out into other states?

Corey Ganim: Right. Wow. Mm-hmm. We could.

Adam: What if like, okay, we've conquered North Carolina, what about South Carolina? Right? ⁓ And this is, I think, where we start thinking about skills, right? Because now we're thinking about repeating this entire process, you know? ⁓ And so I would, from, and to be clear, like, you know, we are, like, for the sake of the video, think, like, we're going, we're going fast, right? Like, I would put more thought and care into the individual steps. ⁓

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm.

Adam: But generally, this is the approach, I think. So let me think about this for a second. So we want to be able to repeat this process for other states. ⁓ So is there anything, before we do that, is there anything else on the dashboard? Where did I lose it? Is there anything else that we would? Yeah, yeah. I think I might have closed it. My right click is not working, because I want to open that in the Finder.

Corey Ganim: Right. I still see VS code right now.

Adam: That's strange. Anyway, ⁓ one thing that I felt like was missing was links, links to maybe their reviews, their homepage. ⁓ So I want to add that in. So please update the ⁓ HTML, the dossier HTML with ⁓ per venue links to their homepage.

Corey Ganim: Right. Yep.

Adam: include their contact information and if they have a Google review Google business page with reviews include that link also. because that'll be easy for us to then not have to do those extra steps when the time is right. And then when we want to create a repeatable process, we have those details included as well. ⁓ So yeah, it's a very interesting ⁓ focus, right? The wedding venues, like a lot of the purview that I have typically are companies that are very digitally native and doing a lot of like digital marketing through emails or landing pages and funnels and things like that. like the, I appreciate like this ⁓ unique vertical. because I think it's challenging to sort of pivot in that regard. ⁓ Because where I envisioned this going was like, now we could repeat a landing page for these different competitors, ⁓ But ⁓ this is a little bit different, and I really enjoy this. ⁓ It's very unique to what I'm usually doing.

Corey Ganim: Yeah. And I figured too, I was like, well, this is one we were just working on this week in cowork. Let's see if Claude code can go even a little deeper. And you know what, my next step here would, would probably be even saying to Claude code. It's like, Hey, that, that workload that we just implemented to find these venues in North Carolina, let's turn this into a skill so that we can replicate it at the city level or the town level. And then of course, at the state level as well. And a lot of times it's like, great.

Adam: Thank

Corey Ganim: It just does it and then you run it once, see how it goes. And then if there's tweaks to be made, you just tell it to update the scale accordingly.

Adam: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And ⁓ I do that all the time, like refine and update skills. some frequently will go in there manually. Because if you open a skill, and I guess we can look at this once we make the skill. If you open it, it's a markdown file, which is ⁓ essentially text. And it's written like a prompt. So you have the capability to be surgical if and where you want to. ⁓ And it's also very

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm.

Adam: I would say productive and helpful to just sort of like get that familiarity of how a skill is built, right? Just sort of like over time, you know, as you read them, you get that intrinsic understanding of how a skill works and it's gonna make you so much better at designing your own skills over time. So what's happening now, it's using Claude in Chrome.

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

Adam: ⁓ So it could, I think it's controlling a browser in a different, I have a different desktop instance somewhere. And I think it's controlling a browser there. ⁓ But one of the great capabilities they added recently to Claude code, and I think it's in all the Claude projects now or products, is the ability for it to take control of your browser. ⁓ So ⁓ I've gotten so much mileage out of that. And sometimes it'll just do it on its own, I think like it is now. ⁓ While it goes and collects that information, let's think about the next prompt. And I think after this is when I would be inclined to turn it into a skill, right? So we did basic research at first. We created structured data from that research. We...

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm.

Adam: ⁓ evolve that into a analysis with a scoring rubric and then we created a visual presentation ⁓ to enable us to like actually use it, right? And that was a lot of steps and we can basically repeat that in one command through the magic of a skill. skill, there are skill creator skills. ⁓

Corey Ganim: Yep.

Adam: Anthropic has an official skill creator skill, which I think can be accessed the same way through slash plugin It's thinking now so it's it's Effectively queued up but you can the same way that we looked at how to get the playground skill I believe you skill creator skill that way as well

Corey Ganim: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's just what slash command slash plugin.

Adam: Yeah, but you might need to grab that URL for the anthropic marketplace. I don't know if that's built in or not, to be honest. ⁓ And there's a lot of like, you know, community and user made skills and marketplaces out there as well. ⁓ I encourage scrutiny because like, you know, there's some, I've heard some horror stories of security issues. not experienced that myself. Just know where your things are coming from, I guess. Like if you're in someone's skill.

Corey Ganim: Right. Right. Yes.

Adam: Make sure you trust the source.

Corey Ganim: Yeah, don't just go and download random skills off the internet, especially if they're not, if they're not from an approved source, like you said. So that's, that's good advice for anyone.

Adam: And then as far as skill creation goes, lot of people, including myself, have created their own skill creator skills that are a little bit more advanced than the one Anthropic provides. ⁓ And I wouldn't say it's a necessity, but if you feel like you're not getting what you need out of the official skill creator, just go create your own.

Corey Ganim: Mhm.

Adam: is that you could be prescriptive about the kinds of skills that you want. You could even create a skill that specializes in specific types of skills. ⁓ And I don't want to overcomplicate things. The point of what I'm saying is it's totally white space. And there's very little risk to experimenting. ⁓ And so it's worth your while, because you're going to learn something one way or another.

Corey Ganim: Yes. Right. A hundred percent. Is it stuck on this one, the one property here that it's researching on the browser?

Adam: It might be. Yeah, it might be. ⁓ Let me give it like, yeah, 9,000 tokens. It's not moving. Let's, I'll stop it right there.

Corey Ganim: And what I want to do too, is I want to have you back for a follow-up where we can go deeper into skills because I mean, again, I think we're in agreement that skills is going to be one of the most critical. Well, skills to learn. And then over the next, you know, few years is how to build skills, what type of skills to build, ⁓ how to construct them the right way, how to iterate on them. So, I mean, as far as for today, I think this was a great example, as far as like an intro to what cloud code can do. And I mean,

Adam: Yeah.

Corey Ganim: People listening can use their imagination as far as where they want to take it from here. Like we said, you could turn this, this, ⁓ research process into a skill so that it's automated and it happens the same way every time you could then take it a step further and say, okay, well, next we want to find contact information for these venues, for example. And then it can go out and do that. And then you can turn that process into a skill, the process of actually finding the contact information. You can really take it all the way down the chain. I mean, you could have it. You know, you could have a skill where, all right, every time you find a new venue, you put together a three page PDF proposal, ⁓ that we can then use in our presentation to the venue. Like there's a million directions you can go with it.

Adam: Yeah, you could even set up like a cron job, right? Like have ⁓ a time based or time triggered workflow that executes like once a week and, you know, says like, hey, find me all the new distressed venues in, you know, the Southwest or something like that, right? ⁓ So yes, and you could chain them together. There's a ton of opportunities. know, I know we're like, ⁓ we're using a lot of time here. So I just asked it to add whatever it found to the existing ⁓ HTML file.

Corey Ganim: Yep.

Adam: And while it does that, ⁓ okay, just pulled it up again. Sorry. Do you still see me?

Corey Ganim: Yeah, I see it. I see the dashboard here.

Adam: Hey, cool. ⁓ So it should have added contact information where it was able to find it, but we kind of cut it short. But here it is, right? So we've got the address, we've got the phone number, we've got an email address. We cut it short. Otherwise, we might have gotten some other stuff that we asked for. ⁓ And then from here, let's move on to the skill. So I'm going to give you, it's like mind-bogglingly simple. Create a skill that can perform the research, the analysis, and create the dashboard visual just like this that we can run for any state or city. And I'm going to put this in plan mode. Which I highly recommend you you do when you are creating skills because of the same reasons that we mentioned earlier where you know, there might be details that you not you haven't thought of or You know there there could be blockers that would prevent this from just moving forward You might not get the outcome you want if you don't use plan mode. You might get confused. ⁓ AI still hallucinates, still gets things wrong, ⁓ still gets confused. I always like to tell people like, use your instincts, Follow your instincts. If you feel like if it smells fishy or something doesn't look right, don't just, you know, question. All the time I am correcting and finding things and, you know, instincts are critical here.

Corey Ganim: Right. Yes, right. Don't just assume it's right, right?

Adam: critical.

Corey Ganim: Right. And let's see if we can speed run this skill creation just because we've got a hard stop here in a couple of minutes. And if not, like I said, I want to have you back in the future for, ⁓ for a skill specific episode.

Adam: Yeah, yeah, I wish I could like turn a crank and make it go faster. ⁓ If it's if I could always like record a follow up video and send it to you if you wanted. ⁓ Once it's finished, if you're if you have to cut it. ⁓

Corey Ganim: I know. Yeah, I'd say let's go ahead and cut it here just because we've got another recording here in a couple of minutes, but this has been fantastic as far as an introductory lesson for, ⁓ for folks getting into cloud code, kind of how it's set up, how to, ⁓ really just how to get your feet wet, right? There's a million different use cases out there.

Adam: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Like I said, it's very simple. I do think it's going to be ubiquitous. ⁓ One thing we should just throw in there about skills is that skills is an open protocol. Google's products are using skills. think ChatUBT products are using skills as well. So those are transferable to other platforms. ⁓ And so I think that's just sort of like a signal.

Corey Ganim: Right. Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

Adam: to what you said, like they're not going away and it's gonna, I think, be more prevalent as time goes on.

Corey Ganim: Right. And I think, I think what people should take away, if they only take away a couple of things, it's one, just download an IDE, whether it's VS code or whether it's cursor and just get into cloud code and just start messing around with it. And then two, just create a sample skill. Take anything you do on a daily basis. Doesn't matter how big, how small and turn it into a skill and then just iterate on it over time. So that's, that's my feedback.

Adam: Mm-hmm. Yep. Absolutely. ⁓ Yeah, it's cool, man. This was great.

Corey Ganim: Yeah, well, Adam, it's been great having you. So where can people find out more about you and follow you?

Adam: So Adam Sandler was taken. So ⁓ you can find me at viableedge.com is my website. ⁓ And I have a lot of marketing related content in regards to AI and agentic marketing workflows. ⁓ You can find me on YouTube at Viable Edge. ⁓ I'm also active on X at The Viable Edge. And ⁓ LinkedIn, did manage to get Adam Sandler. Yes, so you can find me at Adam Sandler on LinkedIn.

Corey Ganim: Nice. Beautiful. Adam, thank you so much for your time and for those in the audience. We'll be back next week as always.

Adam: All right, Corey, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.