365 Of Using Claude Code: What I Wish I Knew on Day One

A year ago, I opened CloudCode for the first time. And I had no idea what I was doing as someone who's not a developer. Today, it edits my podcast, it cuts my YouTube videos, makes my thumbnails, drafts my emails, builds pages, and runs a small team of agents. And I've used it every single day for the last year. So, here are eight things that a year of using CloudCode taught me.

Lesson one is CloudCode isn't really about code, it's about delegation. I feel like the name itself puts a lot of people off, and it immediately makes them think that this is something that is reserved for people who know how to code. But actually, you don't need to know how to write code. The only thing you need to do is be able to explain what you want Cloud to do in plain English. And you probably have that skill if you have ever managed people.

Never correct the same thing twice. For the first few months of using Cloud, I was repeating myself constantly. Saying things like don't use m dashes, only use my last take in the video. But then, I learned that CloudCode can actually keep a memory. And so now, every time that I corrected that correction becomes a permanent rule.

Some of the rules I implemented are that when I'm filming and I restart a line, always use my final take. Because I usually restart because I was not happy with the earlier one. Second one, no m dashes ever in anything. And also, I never want to use Google Drive in order to share things with my audience because it's not very secure. Lesson three I learned is that one assistant that does everything does nothing particularly well.

You need to give them jobs. For example, I have a team of agents that each have their own folder, its own instructions, and its own memory. For example, Alina is my chief of staff, and she handles my inbox, my diary, meeting prep, research, and sponsor emails. Iris is my social media editor and he edits both podcasts, makes the shorts, and manages my content calendar. And there's a list of who owns what.

So, when something needs both, like putting B-roll footage from a podcast guest, Alina writes the email and Iris uses the files. The reason that this works much better is because Iris' memory is full of editing rules, like what caption style I use, what is my style for thumbnails, how I like shorts cut, and those agents are on GitHub. So, when I switch laptops, my team comes with me. Lesson four is get one right before you make five. The mistake I initially kept making was I'd get excited about a new feature in Claude and I would say, "Oh, make me five videos or 10 shorts.

" And they would all come back and be crappy. And then I had five sets of fixes to give on five things, all with pretty similar problems. So, now I do it differently. Now, I ask for one video, I watch it, I give really specific feedback that's timestamped, and then Claude fixes it, I review it, and then I ask it to create the next nine videos. And those come out much better because it's built on everything that I said about the first one.

Lesson five is give yourself a proper place to leave feedback. Because for ages, my feedback looked like this. I would watch a video, I would pause it, and I would type, "At 2:03, the bit that says X, cut that here." And it was really slow, half of the time Claude would not understand what I was talking about, and it was a lot of back and forth. So, Claude [snorts] built me a feedback window, which is a simple page where the video plays at low quality so that it loads instantly.

There are speed buttons, so I can watch it at 1.2x speed or 2x. And whenever I see something that I don't like, I click and type a note, and it's saved with the exact timestamp. So, for example, at 2:05 cut this pose or use the other take or these words are repeated. And that means that Claude is able to read every note, and it knows exactly which moment I mean and fixes all of them.

There is one video where I left 28 notes, and it worked through each one. And you can do the same thing where you could create a thumbnail review system and actually draw on the thumbnail and say, "Hey, this arrow should be placed above me or whatever." Lesson six is you need to set up a GitHub account. And I do know that GitHub sounds like the most developer thing in the whole world, but think of GitHub as a Google Drive but for your code. And when you're using GitHub, everything is backed up.

So, if I open a new laptop, I can have my whole team of Alina and Iris and other agents with all of the rules, memories, and all of the info that I already put in. Lesson seven is start with what annoys you. I get a lot of questions from people who are asking, "What should I automate first?" And my answer is "What are some of the things that you're doing constantly that actually there is no need for you to be doing them?" Every big thing that I do with Claude now started with something really tiny.

Sho- For example, shorts that Claude now edits for me started with, "Hey, find the best five moments in this podcast episode." Lesson number eight is that the bottleneck becomes you. Because when Claude can edit a video in an hour, The slow part is actually me giving feedback on the whole video or deciding what kind of guests I want to book or which ideas are actually worth making. So now I spend more time deciding, delegating, and doing feedback. I hope this was useful.

My name is Nikki. This is Women Lead AI and I'll see you in the next one.