250 | The No-Code Way to Use Claude Code For Creating AI agents for Business with Tim Cakir

0:00Hello and welcome to another live episode of the Leveraging AI podcast, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and we have an incredible episode for you today. Now, everybody, literally everybody, is talking about building agents and how they're going to change the world and so on, but the reality is very few people actually build agents, and even fewer people build agents that actually do something meaningful in their businesses day in and day out. Our guest today, Tim Kekir, has built over 100 agents that work in his company regularly and do different functions in his business.

0:43And through this process, he became so familiar with what's good and not good that he even fired more than 50 of the agents that he initially created. So he's been evolving this for a while. Now, to make this episode even more interesting, we are going to talk not only about how to build the agents and show exactly how to do this, But we're also going to look at it with a very interesting platform, which is Cloud Code. Now, from an adoption perspective, everybody knows ChatChapiti. Some people know Gemini because they get it through their Google membership. But a lot less people are actually using Cloud, which I personally really, really like.

1:18And out of that small people that use Cloud, a much smaller percentage uses Cloud Code. And the vast majority of people who use Cloud Code are coders. But the reality is there are huge benefits that you can gain by using cloud code, not coding. And this is not exactly what we're going to look at today, is how to use cloud code, not coding, because I don't know how to code and I'm still gaining a lot of benefits from it. Now, the reason most people don't do it yet is because either they don't know that it exists or it has code in the name and people assume that's the only thing it is good for, which is not the case.

1:54And this is one of the reasons I'm really excited about this episode, because you're going to learn a new tool that most of you probably do not know. And you're going to learn how powerful it is and what can you do with it without writing code. Now, the other reason a lot of people are not using Cloud Code is because until not too long ago, you had to go through a weird install, which we're going to show you how to do in order to get it to actually up and running. But the reality is as of about a month ago, and Tim, correct me if I'm wrong afterwards, you can now run Cloud Code on the web, which means you don't have to install anything.

2:23There's still benefits of installing it. but you don't even have to do that anymore. So in today's episode, we're going to explain to you the benefits of running CloudCode and how to use it to create incredible agents that actually do functions in your business and provide value. Now, our amazing guest, Tim, brings a really huge variety of experiences that makes it highly relevant for our episode today. He held top leadership positions, including CEO and COO in many different companies, which means he understands how a business actually runs and what it takes to run an effective business. But he was also a professor in two separate universities, which means he's really good and passionate about teaching.

3:07And he is currently the chief AI officer and the founder of AI Operator, which is a company that helps businesses implement AI in an effective way. So this combination makes him literally the perfect person to teach us about cloud code and how to create agents not being a technical person. So you don't need any coding or technical skills to do this. And that makes me very, very excited. So, Tim, welcome to Leveraging AI.

3:35In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically. Whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward, or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career, this is the show for you. I'm your host Isar Maitis, a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast. You'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders, AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

4:16Well, thank you so much for the kind introduction. It's an absolute pleasure to be here, Isar. Thanks. You know, you and I spoke several different times. I'm a big fan of your YouTube channel. We're probably going to talk about that in the end where people can find you. But you're really a magician when it comes to doing these kind of things. But let's really start at the more higher level. What the hell is Cloud Code? And why do people need to care about it? Yeah, I think that there is one issue about Cloud Code is that they called it Cloud Code. Yeah. It's better than GPT. at least it has a name that means something yeah yeah it's just the code i mean clode is great but is they call it clode code and then everybody like i tell them i'm like oh have you tried clode code and they're like i don't code i'm like well you're missing out or maybe it's good for me because i use it and not others do but no i like to share i want everybody to use it i want everybody to get the productivity gains and the efficiency and the incredible i guess you call it magic i call it just obsession about uh obsession about ai and what it can do um and so clode code was basically a way to interact with the cloud models in the CLI, in the command line interface, which is the terminal in a computer.

5:27And that's very scary, right? And because there is no UI, there's no user interface, or the user interface is just text. It's a dark screen. It looks scary, right? It looks absolutely terrifying. I even sometimes open up and I'm like, oh, shit, am I working here again? Like, I just work 90 % of my time now in the terminal, you know? And it's like, it's so funny. We've done such UI designs and so on, right? And now we're going back to using a terminal. So Cloud Code is really an incredible, it's got a product to tap into large language models that are bi-anthropic. So Cloud Opus 4.5 being the latest one.

6:05And why is it so powerful? Because it runs on your terminal, it can create files, folders, it can run scripts, and it can really control everything on your computer, right? including browser to the applications to the settings of your computer itself. And because of that, it takes a level higher in control and efficiency and being able to achieve things than a chat GPT, right? A chat GPT is great. You have to connect things. You click on connectors, cloud itself. You click on connectors. But with cloud code, it's in your computer. It's literally everything that you have in your computer that you can run.

6:40And in a nutshell, it looks scary. It sounds scary because of the code, if you don't code. But what I've realized with CloudCode is that it's right now the most powerful product for building systems, business operational running systems. And I'm still mind blown. You know, when I speak about it, I'm like, what the F is it? You know, it's just it's still incredible what we're living. And it's just, you know, the beginning of December. And CloudCode is just mind blowing. Absolutely. Amazing. So let's really show people, first of all, how it looks like. And then we can start diving into examples of how you are using it to create these systems and processes.

7:21And again, people, yes, I agree with everything Tim said. Like, what is the terminal? How do we even get to it? And it's really simple. Both on Mac and in PC, there's a button that takes you there and you can have the terminal. And as Tim said, it looks like we're back in 1985. It's like a DOS prompt environment. But it works and it is extremely powerful. And for those of you who are like, oh my God, I don't want it to mess with my computer. You do as long as it's controlled. And one of the amazing things in cloud models in general and specifically cloud 4.5 is that it's code adherence, which is a professional term to saying it does what you fucking tell it to do versus kind of does what you want it to do.

8:06It is very good at that. So it's only going to do what you tell it to do, and it is not going to do anything you do not tell it to do. So the fear of like, oh, my God, this thing can take over my computer. In theory, if you tell it to you and you define exactly what you want, it will. But if you tell it to do one, two and three, create this file, copy the information from here, bring it there, activate this thing and send this message, then that's the only thing it is going to do. Yeah. And I think that it has really good security settings. you can set to the settings so that you can decide on what it can do without asking you each time and it's also incredible at really asking you when it's necessary and when it doesn't have enough information is like hey i'm about to do this but i'm not sure like you know what do you think about this plan and you're like oh okay i like the plan go execute the plan or let's change the plan right the planning mode of it is just it's just mind-blowing in general i find claude to be the most collaborative model out of all of them that really makes you feel that it's a consultant and not just an execution arm of your dreams and that makes Claude like an amazing partner for anything this as well yeah I think that in you know if we talk about models very quickly before I show things you know I use Claude's 4.5 opus the most at the moment but if I'm doing a business strategic task like planning you know Q1 2026 for my business I I will still switch to GPT 5.1 Pro, which it's only on the Pro people.

9:34So not the plus, the 20 bucks, but the 200 bucks. And people tell me, oh, I have the Pro. I'm like, no, no, no, you don't have the Pro. How much do you pay? 20, you don't have the Pro. So GPT 5.1 Pro is just incredibly amazing at business, at business logic, business strategy, and so on. But everything else now, I'm definitely a Claude 4.5 Opus fan. And it's, you know, if you pay for Claude Max 20x, which is$200 a month. You don't hit the limits. And I run that on my Cloud Code. So just FYI for everybody, be careful. I'm going to show you things now. If you run it on the API, the cost can go up very quickly.

10:10So you do want to be on a subscription package on a Cloud Max plan, a 10x or a 20x plan. Okay, so let's dive right in. Let's see how this thing looks like, how to set it up, and how to create magic with it. Awesome. Let me share my screen. Can we see my screen here? Yes. Awesome. So this is why I said it's scary, isn't it? It's just a black box, right? So let's take a step back. How do you get this thing? How do you open Terminal on your computer? So for people who don't know what it is and... Absolutely. So I run a version of the terminal called iTerm2. It's an application that you can download.

10:44You can run the normal terminal. The normal terminal doesn't have some of the little gadgets. I mean, you know, now you see these as cool gadgets because you can see, you know, the GPU and what it's doing. But on the normal terminal, you don't see much. So it's a little bit cooler than just the terminal itself. There's also another option that I was into for a bit called Ghosty, with double T, Ghosty, which was also a terminal tool, which is really good. But you just go on your Spotlight, in your Search Spotlight, if you're on a Mac or in a Windows to your search, and you go right Terminal. And if you want a little bit of better experience, I would suggest iTerm2.

11:16It's a great little app. Cool. Yeah, I will say one more thing, not to confuse people, but I would say it anyway. if you're using any of the vibe coding tools, whether it is Replit or Lovable or whatever, there's a terminal version in there that you can run as well. And it has slightly better user interface than this thing, but overall it does the same stuff. So if you're starting with nothing, then just running the terminal in the computer could be your easiest starting point. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the difference there is I think we spoke about this when we first met, but I was saying that, yes, in the Replit terminal, you can run cloud code.

11:59Yeah. I think you tried it since then, too. Six minutes after we closed the call, I already had it running. Yeah, it's one of the best hacks people don't realize is that you can open up Replit and not pay too much for Replit tokens and only set up your environment and then run the terminal, cloud code in the terminal inside Replit, and then you can see the preview, which is great. But there we're really talking about coding and building a product in that folder and you want to be in that repository. But here, what I really love is that I'm on my computer. So the first thing that I did when Cloud Code came, and I was like, oh, what's this crazy stuff, right?

12:33I was like, okay. And it was a couple of sleepless nights as usual when anything new comes, it's a sleepless nights. You know, I love it. And the first thing was like, oh, okay, it can do files, folders in my computer. And it was years that I've been wanting to tidy up, you know, my desktop documents and all that kind of stuff. And I just said, hey, can you give me a strategy? and I was like great can you implement that and it changed names of files and images and videos and put them in folders and it just kind of started cleaning out my computer I was like oh crap this is this is very good you know I've been wanting to do that for 10 years or so and I never did it you know I just piled shit on top of shit and then it was it was putting all the pdfs somewhere naming them reading them telling me what they are and really creating different folders for me I was like wow this is this is really like we're starting to see real agentic agentic support assistant, whatever you want to call it, on my computer.

13:22So here's the terminal, right? Iterm2 running my terminal inside my terminal. And it's a black box. It's a black screen. Let me see if I can make this a tiny bit bigger for people maybe. So it's just a black box. And then you have to install Cloud Code on your computer. That's very easy. You can actually go on Chrome or in a browser and write Cloud Code installation. it's a very small snippet of some words and some kind of code that you just input here and you let it run and it installs it it asks you to log in, right? So I'm not going to do that because I've already done that. It's very easy.

13:57It's just a five minute process. And then what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to tease you a little bit and then I'm going to show you what I've built and then we'll go into how to build what I've built and this type of thing, if that's okay with you, Isar. That's awesome. Sounds like a great plan. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to launch Claude by saying Claude. So I'm just going to say Claude and I'm going to enter. And as we can see right away, I get the question asked if I trust this folder, because Claude Cohen may read, write or execute files contained in this directory.

14:26This can pose security risks, so only use files, hooks and bash commands from trusted sources. Meaning prompt injection, as we know. If this was some files and folders that I didn't know, and then there was some kind of hacker trying to get my information, it could kind of do that. But it's my computer, I know it's clean. I've been working on my computer for really long. Even if I change computers, I cloud, so I know what's in my computer. So I'm going to accept yes, proceed. And then that's it. We get this little, I love it, this little thing. And here we go. This is closed. Cloud code is ready.

14:58And I have closed on Opus 4.5 with a closed max plan. As I was mentioning, you don't want to be on the API. You're going to pay a shit ton of money if you do that. And then I'm on my user. I'm in my whole computer. I'm not even in a folder. But what you could also do, which I'll show later, you can run it in a specific folder, right? So I do run it in very specific folders. Like I have a sales folder, I have an onboarding folder, I have a customs folder, and I run it in different places. And what's great about this is that I can open up multiple tabs and I can run four or five clothes at the same time.

15:30And it's like, oh, so I had an assistant and now I have multiple assistants and each can run multiple agents and each can have different skills, clothes skills. It just gets a bit meta. It's like I run orchestrators that run other ones and they run each other. And it's just because like, what? And I was reading about hyper productivity and it's scary because it's quite exhaustive. It's like, oh, my God, like I have to I have to babysit all these agents. And so so I think it's tough. It's not easy to get to the usage that I am. But I'll show some simple tricks for everybody to to start getting there, because this is the world that we're really living in.

16:02But in 2026, I do believe that this is going to be one of the most powerful things is to build systems that can run without you. right and you wake up in the morning this is my dream i wake up in the morning which i'm kind of doing a little bit of that but i want to wake up at 9 a.m not you know i want to be on my desk at 9 a.m i've dropped my kids to school i'm at 9 a.m uh in my desk i open it and i have i've done all of this stuff bless you i have all of this stuff i've done all of this stuff these are things i was a bit unsure you know i want to ask you some questions great what is what did it do i did all the follow-ups it sent the proposals it's you know it's it's created some uh contracts for some clients and so on and then it has some clarification questions like hey i wasn't sure about this you know like can you check that email can you check that document and you check it and then you say okay you know glad you didn't send this because here's some feedback right and then you give that feedback but then that feedback the next day i don't want it to ask similar feedback because it knows it so i wanted to learn and i wanted to be iterative learning right so that it keeps it keeps learning every time i give it feedback so i kind of build something like that i'll show in a second as well but this is the world we're going to live in guys and you know it's just going to wake up, throw out your whole sleep and you went to school, dropped the kids and stuff, you came back, you've had multiple agents, you know, 50, 100 agents actually doing work for you, right?

17:15This is definitely happening. I can show you in a second. You know, it's just that I still dream of a little bit more proactivity from these agents, right? I still have to run them, I can schedule them, but the more proactivity is coming, I know that, because we saw that with ChatGPT Pulse, right? On the pro plan, we have something called ChatGPT Pulse, which every morning it gives me, like, some incredible things about me, about my search history, about my day, about my calendar, and it kind of is proactive, right? So I think we're going to get this proactive. Right now it's very reactive. So I have Cloud.

17:45So Cloud's ready. It's scary because you don't know what to do. It's asking, like it's waiting for me. It's like, okay, well, I'm waiting for you. What are we going to do, right? So let's say what we're going to do is we're going to go and we're going to launch. Let's launch a guide about Cloud Code. How about that, right? So I'm going to write a 10-page guides about Cloud Code. And I want to write this. So what I'm going to do is actually I would kind of go to the folder where I have content and guides, but I'm not going to do that. And what I'm going to do, hopefully this is going to work. I'm going to talk to it because I talk a lot to these things now and I don't type.

18:17So I'm just going to talk to it quickly. Go to my guides folder inside my content folder in AR operator and run my guide system and let's write a guide about cloud code. How cloud code with Opus 4.5 and the cloud max plan and how cloud code people think is for coding, but it's not. You can run business operations and you can do a lot of things and so on. Do a proper research and make sure to run all the agents and to run the actual guide system workflow. So you still kind of have to babysit a little bit and you have to tell it like, make sure to run my workflow, right? Make sure to find the agents.

18:59Because if not, it still wants to please you and it's going to go and do it on its own thing. But I already have a system for this. So what I'm going to do now, I'm doing Shift-Tab. As you can see, something is changing on the bottom left. And Accepted It's On so that it accepts, like you automatically accept some stuff. I'm going to take it to plan mode. Because I don't want it to go and actually start doing things. I want it to plan first. It gets very powerful when we put things in plan mode. So this is going to take quite a while. And again, to switch to plan mode, you just... used uh yeah so just use a keyboard shortcut there's no again like anything fancy to do that you just switch the mode that it's going to operate in yeah shift tab shift tab and then you get to plan mode you see it's green on the bottom left it has like this this kind of pause button is it a pause button so it's more like hey i'm not going to take actions you know i'm just going to plan you know i'm not going to go change anything and what we can see you know we can open up this whole thinking with control o which gets really big um you know and it looks scary right this This is where exactly it starts looking scary because like, oh, okay, what is this?

20:01Actually, it's not that scary because this is just like, oh, it's finding folder, right? It's going to my documents and my documents has found my ARPreder folder, my company name folder. And then there it found the content folder and it opened that up and then it's looking at certain things, right? And so on, right? And as you can see, I just asked something, but it wrote its own prompt, find the ARPreder project on the system, look for a folder or a project called ARPreder or similar. Within it, find the content folder and a guide subfolder, look for any guide system and so on right so it kind of gave itself some tasks and it's like okay this is what i'm going to do and then it keeps thinking i'm going to close this because it can look a bit scary and let's go to the normal look right so that's like the detailed look of seeing what's inside this 360 lines this 376 like what is it doing inside these you just go control oh it gets even more scary than what it is so you close it you're like oh my god let me not see that but it's good i do recommend you know when you get comfortable i do recommend to read these things and you know if you want to understand what the model is doing behind the scenes and by the way it's the same thing in like all the regular tools like if you're in chachapiti or claude or gemini it says it says thinking i'm like okay what are you thinking about if you click on the thinking blinking thing it's going to show you exactly what it's doing and then the the benefit of that is you understand how the model works and how it thinks and that usually makes you a better prompter because you know the steps that it's going to do and you can guide it just like tim did now like oh go look for this folder go look for these agents why is he doing that because he looked previously and said, okay, it's kind of like struggling with that.

21:27If I tell it what to do, it will know what to do. So looking at this actually gives you a better understanding of how the models work, and then you can be a better prompter because you can know how to guide it. Yeah, absolutely. And it's not just about being a better prompter. It's about this thing that we see in the news, isn't it? It's like saying that humanity is getting dumber, right? They're getting dumber, and kids are getting dumber because they let Chachibiti do all the work, and they just get the output, and then they go with it. But the second you open the reasoning, the thinking, right the thinking i always say because it's the reasoning and you open that up and you start reading it and in every model that you're using if you can read that you get smarter yeah you get absolutely smarter i see things that these things are thinking or like reasoning i'm like whoa i didn't think about that or let me let me bring more information let me bring more context right it becomes really an a partner you know yeah and not just like god did this work for me and then yeah it's okay let me go no it's like well we work through things together and i'm learning and the next time I know how it's going to kind of think and how it's going to reason and I start understanding different models it's yeah it's very geeky but yeah I am obsessed about all this stuff so as you can see on the bottom what happened this is quite a new UI user interface kind of feature is you know it did one two three four things like project type audience use cases pricing for these like tabs and then I can submit and it's great it's asking me clarification questions now right So, okay, do I want a standalone deliverable, like top-level folder, like AI safety starter pack, which I've already built that before.

22:54So it's like, do you want a complete package for distribution or do you want to research the guide pipeline? Do you want just a quick guide about cloud code or do you want something for distribution? I potentially want a standalone deliverable. So I'm going to click that. So I entered that. So basically tick that. So you can also tick things if you want to see them. You can do a space bar, which I've already done. So no. But here, who is the primary target audience for this Cloud Code guide, right? Business operators, I think. Entrepreneurs, founders. Yeah, I think I would go. I'm going to go for entrepreneurs and founders, right?

23:24Because those are the people that I kind of talk to. So I'm going to go, yeah, entrepreneurs, founders. What specific business operations or use cases should be emphasized beyond coding, right? Here, I would potentially spend a bit more time, right, and tell it to the things. But I'm just going to do something quickly. I'm just going to tell it so that it kind of finds my systems. make sure to go read my systems i have a this guide system which is about content creation i have a sales system which is about you know running a crm and so on and how to sell in my company i have a onboarding system after i close the deal how do i onboard a client and then i have a training system how do i train people and create the training program the custom training program for our 12-week AI First Mindset training program.

24:10Review all of that. And then as a bonus, because I'm on a very important call right now, also, can you highlight the system building system? No, thanks. All right. So I kind of said that because I wanted to go and check these things, right? So for those of you who are not watching the screen and just listening, the way this looks like, again, think about the poorest user interface you can imagine. So DOS level. So there's just this level. there's different rows and you can pick from them by scrolling to them with a keyboard and selecting them or you can go to the bottom one which is just like a open line and type whatever you want to type what tim is doing is what i'm doing as well we're voice typing everything just because it's a lot faster it requires a decent level of talking skills but not much because these tools are pretty good at understanding what you want even if you didn't structure it as well as Tim, you get much better at this.

25:05The fact that Tim has a YouTube channel and I have a podcast makes it a lot easier to say what we want in the first time around in an organized way, but you will figure it out as well. And it's just significantly faster than typing. And to be fair, I find that I express myself a lot more with more details and color when I speak versus when I type. And so that's another benefit because then the AI gets more context. But now that you've done this, let's see what the system does. yeah i just want to add something to that is because i'm still kind of practicing the speaking to the machines instead of typing to the machines because guys like every you know guys and girls and everybody you know like get ready because we are going to speak to the machines more by voice you know the new open ai product hardware is going to come is definitely not going to have a screen right that we understood that so so it's not going to have a keyboard we're going to speak to these things and you're going to have a robot in your house you're going to speak to it like these things are going to happen.

25:57So I think it's a great time now to practice speaking to these people. So I'm still not very good at explaining what I want and sometimes I go, but it's okay because it understands and somehow it cleans it up, you know, and I think by practicing I'm getting better at it. Yeah. So I'm going to accept what I just said there. I'm going to go, okay, yeah, this is the good stuff. And then it said, pricing, should the guide focus specifically on CloudMax? No, all right. All tiers comparison, right? So we went all tiers comparison. I'm going to submit all this information. So I've submitted all this information.

26:27It asks, you know, what was the four clarification questions? We answered them. And now four or five, right? And it's now going to do the work, right? And you'll see the minutes it's spending and the tokens that it's spending, but I'm not paying per token. I have a subscription plan. And, you know, if you're listening and not watching, it kind of gives you its plan. So it's exploring the AeroPayter systems because I told it, go look at my systems, you know, about the guy, the sales, the onboarding, the training, my system building system, which is the brand new one I just done last weekend and I'm still working on it.

26:57And it was like, I was building so many systems, I decided to build a system that builds systems. Like I was like, you know what? It's kind of like the Claude scale that builds Claude scales, right? It's the same concept. Exactly. I took that approach. I was like, you know what? Why am I keep designing, you know, these systems? I should have a system that asks me questions and goes and designs a system from the first four or five systems I've already done, right? And I just finished that and, you know, I'm still working on it but I finished kind of the first draft and I'm like, oh, this is getting meta.

27:23Yeah, this is getting cool. I even tagged, I think, Antropic on one of my LinkedIn posts. They didn't come, but I was like, guys, you've got to see this. I'm taking it a bit next level now. So what it does, it gives you the tasks, and it has four tasks here. It's going to explore, then it's going to design the guide structure, then it's going to write final plan for a code code guide, and then it's going to execute the guide workflow with all agents, right? So even before going to my guide creation system, is going to do these three tasks, which is the explore, the design, and the write the final plan for the Cloud Code Guide, which is great because this is not AI slop.

27:58This is exactly what I do. These are my systems and this is my context. And so the guide is going to be about exactly what I do. And people are like, oh yeah, but you've got AI to do your guide. I'm like, yeah, well, AI looks at my context, asks me questions, and it's going to ask me more questions. And I build these systems for the last, I don't know, couple months or whatever, right? It's definitely very, very custom content to the context of Tim, the AI operator, and my systems. Let me pause you and ask you a question. You're sending it to all these resources, like your systems and your agents.