AI Agents Full Course 59 Minutes (for beginners)

26:27So this is just a little simple thing. You can pause the video and copy it.

26:35But I like to, I'm just going to remove that context file for now. That was just to illustrate that example of adding more. But we're just working with this one file for now. So I'm just going to open this up so I can edit it. And I will quite often add something on the bottom, like that little snippet. And this basically just says, actually, you know what? I might just add it at the top just so it's there, top of mind for my agent because I think this is really important. So you can see I've just added this in. It just says, read all files in context. Read memory.md. This is what you've learned over time.

27:13And then when I correct you or you learn something new, update the relevant section in memory.md. and it's just got a couple little things here. And it just says keep memory.md current when something changes, update it in place and replace outdated info. So we can do command S to save that. And then I'm gonna add another file here. We can actually just duplicate this. And this one, I'm going to call memory.md. And then we can open up this one. and I'm just going to remove all this context here except I'm just going to keep those sections.

27:55Remy Gaskell:So memory.md is basically, I mean it's just what it sounds like, right? It's basically like you want to, if the goal is to build AI employees that do things for us, they're going to need to remember our preferences. A good employee remembers preferences and learns over time and not that compounds. So memory.md is just a place that you can just make sure that over time, whatever you're using, coworker or whatever, it ends up getting compounded, getting smarter. So ultimately, you might be trying things like coworker and you're not getting good results. And a big part of that is you don't have clode.md and memory.md sort of exactly exactly and now the thing is some of these agent harnesses have started to add in this memory system that we're doing manually telling it to update some of them have got that built in automatically like open claw and I believe like Manus and some of the others have that built in automatically but it's still important to understand because it's just doing the same thing under the hood except they've just set this up for you so we've got this here now we've got our memory.md, our claw.md and then now if we go back into co-work if we do a new session in that same folder and we say my favorite color is lavender better remember for the sake of the demo I hope that it does what it's told It's going to remember it.

29:40You can see here. Perfect. It's gone good. I'll remember that. Let me save it to memory. And now you've got this big memory file that builds up over time. And whether, for example, this is your executive assistant. So it might be saving preferences like how to sign off emails or don't connect with clients on Slack. I always want to keep client comms on email. But if you're building out like a head of marketing, it might be preferences about how you like your ads structured in Facebook Manager. If you've got a folder where you're working on a website or an app, it might be things like don't use dark mode and then it will update so it'll never use dark mode again.

30:17And they just compound over time. So as you start to build up these rules, the amount of errors go down. And this just compounds and compounds over weeks and months.

30:27Remy Gaskell:Remy, have you seen some of these memory.md files get so big that at a certain point it's just ineffective? Great question. I personally haven't had that happen to me yet. I haven't hit that threshold. But a best practice for those claw.md files is to keep it around no more than 200 lines. And yeah, I could imagine if you started to build this up over years and years, you'd eventually hit a point where all the rules are stepping on each other's toes. And you could probably go through and do a bit of a manual clear. But I haven't hit that threshold yet. Cool. So people don't need to worry about cluttering their memory.md?

31:07I wouldn't worry too much. I mean, if it's saving the silliest little things, like the tiniest corrections, you can maybe update that clod.md to say only save substantial corrections, and then you can have a bit more control about what it's saving. So that's probably what I would do there. But once you've set this up, now when you say something like quit writing so formally, it's going to do the task then update its agents.md or in this case claw.md to keep tone casual never formal and then now in any new sessions it's going to keep that preference over time which is pretty cool so now we've got our executive assistant set up with memory and we've given him his role we now need to connect our tools because by default most of these agent harnesses they just have web search baked in but if you want to actually start linking it up to your tools like gmail calendar and everything else which is where the real productivity gains are made you need to do so via what's called mcp and i actually got greg i got this mcp explanation from when you had on um is it ross mike yeah yeah so this he did a great explanation and it just dropped into my head really nicely and it's basically that before mcps your agent or your llm in order to speak to tools it had to kind of learn their language because claude speaks english notion speaks spanish gmail french your browser speaks japanese and slack speaks chinese and it was capable of connecting to those tools but it like required these extensive custom developments that took a long time.

32:43But then Anthropic actually created MCP. Is that right? Yep, that's right.

32:49Remy Gaskell:Yeah. Anthropic built MCP to basically sit as this translator in between your tools so that Claude can still just speak English and your tools can just speak their languages. And this MCP speaks every language and then just translates your calls from your agent to the tool and then from the tool back to your agent. So just set a really easy standardized way to connect tools up. And that's what we're going to be using to connect all of the tools to our executive assistant. So if we go back into co-work here, you can see that Claude make it really, really easy to connect up your tools. You can just go to connectors, browse connectors, and they've got like hundreds of all the biggest apps that you probably use.

33:32And you can just, you know, add them, sign in, pretty self-explanatory. But I believe Codex would be the exact same. You know, you can go skills or if we go settings, they probably have like a, and then like Manus is the same. For example, if you go into Manus, we can see, we can go and connect our tools. Very, very similar process. And then same with Perplexity Computer. You know, you've got your connectors and you can connect all your tools in here. It's just all using that model context protocol, MCP. So I've already, before the episode, gone and connected all of the tools that I use most, like Gmail, Google Calendar, Granola, Notion.

34:14They're all set up already as MCPs. And what I'm going to do now is I'm actually going to open up this executive assistant folder in Claude code to sort of demonstrate how these harnesses are all the same and they work off your local files. And the real future-proof AI stack is just having those markdown files on your computer. and the reason why I like to work in markdown files is because it's just the easiest sort of format for your LLM for your agent to actually digest and understand compared to if you were to give it your files as like a docs or a pdf file so I like to use Claude code within visual studio code so you can see here I'm just gonna it looks very similar to anti-gravity I'm just gonna open up our executive assistant folder here.

35:02And the way that I see the future of this all going, Greg, is I think that everyone's going to have their, what I call an AI OS, like an operating system. And this will just compound over time, like you saw with adding the rules and getting less errors, but with adding your tools and then skills, which we'll get into, which is basically just training AI on your processes. And I think that everyone's going to have like an AI operating system they work in. And everyone will just have personal agents and agents to manage each department of their company and people won't actually use these apps anymore.

35:33Like I've connected up Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, Granola for my meeting notes, Stripe for payments, Notion for project management and I don't even enter these tools anymore. I just sit in Claude Code as one central place and an example here is I sent myself before the episode, I sent myself an email from a fake prospect and I also entered in Granola a fake meeting with this prospect. So now I can say things like, summarize my inbox from today.

36:08Remy Gaskell:Someone might ask, well, how important is that really? Is that such a high value task? What are high value tasks that you're actually getting done here?

36:25Remy Gaskell:Or maybe you get a lot of emails. you know well if you know emails is a big thing if you do get a lot of emails but just having like all those tools connected in one place and not having to switch and copy paste context so you'll see an example here right so we've got summarized my inbox from today which is like one of the most basic agent tasks ever but we can see this is one i sent earlier we've got this one email here like our call today excited after your call wants next steps so i might just say here um okay great i I review my meeting notes with Maltoshi from today and then draft up the email, sending the proposal and creating the Stripe payment link and then go into Notion and set up the project.

37:09And where this starts to compound even more is when you start to build out skills for each of your processes. Because every time I do a process, even like this, manually prompting it, and I know I'm going to do it again at some point, I'll then just turn that into a skill. and then you eventually end up, if you automate three to five tiny manual processes each week with skills, you eventually end up automating your entire life with these agents.

37:35Remy Gaskell:Right, so it's not so much in summarize my emails where it's super, super valuable. It's like that's where the starting point is and then we want to manipulate it and use it and go deeper and stuff like that. that's when connecting these tools really, really are valuable. And you can see here, it's now connecting all my tools. So it's gone into Granola and found the full meeting of what we went through today. It's now going into Stripe to create the product link. And then it's going into Notion to set up the project. And then it should create the draft ready for us to go to send out. This is really like a new way of working.

38:19Remy Gaskell:Yeah, it is. It's so new. And even this task, it's really simple, right? Just sending an email based on a call with a proposal link and stuff. But even if you can just do something seven times faster without having to go into all these tools, copy the meeting notes into the page to give it context on your meeting, it really starts to compound. Then you start to fit a week in a day and then seven weeks in a week. And stack that up over a year and you're going to be miles ahead of everyone else. And when we get into skills, you're going to see how this continues to get even better. But you can see here, it's drafted the email.

38:59It's pulled in all these insights from our call in Granola, which is like where I do my meeting notes. And then it's created the Stripe payment link. Here, ready to go.

39:11Remy Gaskell:That's cool. and then now I can just go send this email and it will use my Gmail integration to go and send it. That's really cool. It is, hey. I think this is the new way of working and Cody Schneider who you had on the pod the other week, I saw a tweet from him and he said that in the future everyone's going to have like an AI operating system like this and you're going to have like the 100x employee because everyone will come into their role with a pre-existing AI operating system and then build out skills for all their manual processes, similar to how I was describing, and just keep building skills each week for anything manual that comes up until eventually their entire life and work life is automated.

39:54Great, as you can see here, it's now created the draft here in Gmail, ready for us to go. And if we're happy with it in the platform, I could also just ask Claude to send it there and then. But then what also gets really cool is I'm going to demonstrate now how I actually build out skills for these processes. So I know I've talked a lot about skills so far. I want to just give a little overview on what skills actually are. Yeah. So the easiest way to think about skills is SOPs for AI. So standing operated, oh my God, standard operating procedures for AI. So it means once you explain something once, you never have to explain it ever again.

40:36An example of this is without skills. If you are creating a proposal for a client and you're sitting in your Claude chat or whatever agent harness you're using and you ask it to create this proposal, you're probably going to go back and forth a bunch of times. Change the formatting here. Use this color blue for this part. Put the price at the bottom instead of at the top. And eventually, maybe after 15 minutes, half an hour, you landed a proposal that you're really happy with. And you send it. And then next week, you want another proposal written. but unless you're going and finding the same session and working in that same session it's going to have completely forgotten all of these preferences and even if you have that memory system set up these kind of things you don't really want clogging up your memory they're better off as skills which is basically it packages up that process into a.skill file and in that.skill file it's basically just a markdown file that explains the exact process that you went through.

41:36So you could create a proposal skill and then every time now you need a proposal written, it just takes that skill, knows exactly what to do and then you can have that proposal the same way every single time.

41:50Remy Gaskell:So is a skill like a memory file? What's the difference between essentially a memory.md and a skill? Is it just like a memory.md file for a particular job? to be done. That's pretty much like exactly it. And all of these agent harnesses pretty much now have skills as a feature. So you can see here, like if we go into Codex, for example, they've got skills here. Same with Claude as well. And when you're working with these agent harnesses that operate like mostly locally off your computer, you can see here, it actually operates out of this hidden file called a.claw folder, skills. And these are all of the skills that I've created.

42:39There's tons. And if we open one up, for example, like this one here, let's find a good one. For example, I've got this one here for writing viral hooks. And in this skill, we have a.skill file, which is basically like your memory.md, which explains the exact process for writing viral hooks. and then it's also got packaged in here some references like hook formulas okay so wait so how did you create that skill okay so there's two ways that i find useful to create skills is one you can have an idea of a skill you want to create off the bat so like viral hooks for example i had this course on viral hooks which i transcribed put it into claude and claude has this by default it has a skill creator skill added into it same with all of these major agent harnesses they'll have a skill creator skill so it's kind of like skill ception you use the skill creator skill and you say hey take this course on viral hooks and create a viral hook skill and it can create it like that that's one way uh and then it will package it up nicely with that skill.md

43:48Remy Gaskell:it'll do the whole thing for you wait second you ask you asked it to take the course yeah i uploaded the course like the full transcript literally and i said uh yeah based on this course on viral hooks build me a viral hook skill and then i use that for my content team so just like we're building the executive assistant folder i've got a folder called content team and i've got that that uses that skill for me and the second way to create skills is going through a process manually once with Claude. And then if you know you're going to have to do it again, like that proposal example, you can just say once you've done the task, hey, create a skill for what we just did.

44:31And it will package up that process you went through. And that's the second main way that you can create skills.

44:37Remy Gaskell:So in your viral hook example, if you go into that folder again, so you have a references folder. So that is probably, like was that, yeah, let's open it up. I'm just curious. See here, it's got a full thing. So was this from the course? Yeah, this was basically from a course I put into it. And did you ask it to create a reference folder? How should people think about... No, it just did it. So I think what would be great is if we could actually demonstrate building a skill live. Let's do it. And so, for example, this process here, I could create a skill called like a daily brief skill you know that goes through and summarizes like your calendar your inbox and your projects in Notion and plans out your day for you in the morning and then you can run that on a scheduled task because a lot of these agent harnesses now are starting to introduce scheduled tasks so you can just run it on 9am every morning use my daily brief skill to prepare me for my day but I think another cool one here just to show you an example of how minute, like how intricate I make these skills is let's just say for this fictional meeting I had with this person, I might say, can you draft up an email?

46:04I want to refer Maltoshi to my good friend Sebastian who has an AI automation agency and can help them out better with their needs.

46:17and then we can just go

46:22Sebastian's email is and we can just say that, right? And then now it's going to be able to take the notes from Granola, all the context and then draft an email connecting these to a prospect with a friend. And I have different referral things set up like that with people in marketing agencies and that's just like a little manual process there, tiny. It maybe takes 15 minutes out of my day. But then I can just go, I want you to use your skill creator skill and create a Sebastian refer skill so that whenever I ask you to refer someone to Sebastian, you know exactly what to do and you know his email address.

47:10and then that'll build out that tiny skill for us tiny process but it means like i know in the future i'm gonna have to refer someone to seb again and even if this skill now saves me 15 minutes another five or six times they start to compound when you create skills for every single little process in your business yeah i guess it's like we should just be asking ourselves like

47:33Remy Gaskell:in our day-to-day life? What are all the jobs to be done? What are all skills that we need? What are the repetitive processes or SOPs as you talked about? And then just setting up as many as possible to make our lives easier. Exactly. And just to give you a little demo here. So I alluded to that folder structure at the start of the video. And this is it here. So I've got workspaces, AI with Remy. and for example, I can open up my content team. And within this folder, this is just like a more elaborate version of our executive assistant but we've got our Claude.md in here which explains you are like the main orchestrator, you have the subagents.

48:22It's just a more elaborate version of that Claude.md but I've got a skill within this for like a meta ads analysis. So that was a process, for example, if you're a marketing agency owner, this is probably like the kind of stuff that you can get inspiration from. Like ads analyzing, you know, taking competitors' ads libraries, breaking down all the creatives and their landing pages. So I built out this ads analyst skill where I literally just do ads analyst and then I paste in like the ads library URL like that. And I'll click run. and I did an example yesterday with the UDI, which is a super large e-com brand and it ran through and basically scraped all of, it took screenshots of all the landing pages.

49:06It went and scraped all of the ads that are running, all like 220. It then did a full deep dive here on all the ads, visual analysis, copy analysis, why did this work, what could be improved. It basically did a breakdown of all the landing pages with screenshots. and it did a master report here about everything that's going on so just did a full breakdown and that was like a manual process that i would have gone through when i used to run like my marketing agency and that probably would have taken me like three or four hours and then i went through to build out this skill i went through the process once with claude like i started a fresh session and i was like all right go to this ads library url scrape this do this do this do this for like two hours and then after I'd done the entire process I just said use your skill create a skill to make a skill for ads analyzing and package up the entire process we just went through as a skill and then now whenever I want to do that process again I can just invoke the skill and it knows what to do which is pretty cool crazy crazy absolutely crazy so So now the refer Sebastian skill is live.

50:18And now whenever I want to refer someone to Sebastian again, I can just say, yeah, refer to Sebastian and it will just start to use that skill. That's example, the tiniest process, but you build like those up for all these little tasks you do day to day. And then it just compounds and compounds and compounds. And I can already think of an idea here where you can chain skills together. So you could example have like a meeting prep skill that prepares you for a meeting by researching the guest and compiling some talking points. You might have like a podcast research skill, for example, Greg, for a guest that's coming on.

50:58And you might also create a morning brief skill. and in the morning brief skill you can say if there's any meetings coming up or podcasts in my day use the podcast research skill to research the the guest and you can like chain them together and build like some really really cool workflows yeah and you can have it so it sends you an email right yeah exactly and then now these harnesses are starting to get more and more autonomous like they're starting to add like you know in the car they're starting to add like cruise control and stuff like now within most of these harnesses you can schedule tasks um like in co-work or code code now and you can like for example this one here you can go new task and I could say like uh run my morning briefing skill and then set that to go every every morning at 9am and then now it's like an automated workflow that like you've just got running every morning

51:59Remy Gaskell:now which is pretty cool yeah i'm i'm doing this right now like for example i'm buying a new car right now and it's like a particularly unique like color that i want and feature set and there's just none none really available so you know every three hours i i'm scraping all the different car marketplaces and then I'm getting a notification that when something comes up and it's crazy. I'm one of those people that if I didn't have this I would be spending an hour of my day just checking religiously every single CarMax and Cars.com and Autotrader and all these websites and refreshing like an insane person.

52:51Remy Gaskell:So yeah, the schedule. Great example there. But you know, this is a skill that would be relevant for my executive assistant. Same with that car one. That could be a good executive assistant skill. But then I've got those more elaborate skills built out for like, you know, my content team that adds library scraping one. And then I've got like, you know, a research, weekly research skill for my newsletter team. And that runs on a schedule every Thursday morning to go and scrape like I built the skill out so it goes and scrapes Twitter and Reddit to find what's new in AI but yeah skills are so so powerful combine them with like your MCP so it can use your tools and then you can start to just train up your agent on all the processes in your business and I did a build out on OpenClaw for a agent to manage meta ads and it went pretty viral and the way I built this was with all these key concepts.

53:49So OpenClaw functions the exact same way. So I hope it hasn't timed out, but I've remote accessed into my OpenClaw dashboard here and you can see it's just operating off an agents.md file in the back end. But instead of the.clawed folder, it's in the.openclaw folder. And then it's got a couple of these other ones here. It's got a memory.md. It's got some of these other ones that it's added on, like a soul which tells its personality and an identity which tells it who it is but it's that same concept of markdown context files connecting your tools and then creating skills so that meta ads manager one that went pretty vile I just planned it out with Claude I was like I want to have this open call manage my meta ads help me write the agents.md file to tell it you are my MetaAds media buyer, you do these processes.

54:39And then I created skills. So I created a ad creative skill. So it knew to go look in the Dropbox folder and create creatives. I created a copywriting skill. So it knew how to write good copy for the business. And I just built out, there's probably maybe 15 different skills. And then I would combine scheduled tasks, which is cron jobs, with skills and the context files and then just give it all the tools it needed and just following the same process as we just went through to build the executive assistant, I had an OpenClaw MetaAds media bio, which was sick.

55:19Remy Gaskell:I love it. And for the beginner, do you recommend people use OpenClaw or should they be using Cowork or Manus and some of the ones you showed? so great question uh i would say that open claw is probably like one of the hardest to learn and set up of these harnesses i would say co-work is probably the easiest i think perplexity computer you did a video on it um it's pretty simple too same with math easy um but i would definitely learn um and get comfortable using like claw code or um one of these other ones before i started to play around with OpenClaw. And I would also have all the processes built out in Clawed code first.

56:01So for example, that executive assistant over the next two weeks, I might build out a bunch of skills like the Sebastian refer skill, like a daily brief, meeting prep, et cetera, et cetera. And then once I'm happy with how it's all functioning in Clawed code, then I could look to migrate that into OpenClaw where it has that more autonomous nature to it. So that's kind of how I think about using OpenClaw and those other harnesses yeah cool all right anything else you wanted to cover I mean like really there's no right or wrong way to run these like that was the executive assistant I've got one built out for all the other departments in my business and then other businesses I work on I have the same and you can just kind of build out that structure with what works for you you've got like one other thing to mention is global versus project level which I'll just go over super quick.

56:54So like those skills, for example, you can add them at a global level, which means they apply to every single project you work in, whether it's the executive assistant, your head of marketing, and some skills you want globally because you might use them in every chat. Like a truncate skill that I created, which just makes whenever I want to make something shorter, it makes it shorter without compressing the sentences but just removing sentences that don't need to be there. And that's something I want in every session. So I've got that in global, but you can have project level skills like that Sebastian refer skill.

57:33I would not want that with my marketing, head of marketing, because it's just like clogs up the context and you don't need it there. So I would have that as a project level, for example. And you can have global skills versus project skills, global Claude.md versus project Claude.md. And same with MCPs, You have global MCPs and project MCPs. That's probably the other concept to go over. But look, other than that, that's pretty much the entire agent's crash course. So it's just that loop running in the back end to complete your task and connecting in your tools, your context, and the LLM all in one place.

58:11And I would just say to work out what roles you want to start to build out an agent for, go into Claw or your favorite chat model and get it to help you build out those context files through an interview style process. Just say, ask me questions to build this out. I'll connect all the tools that you need and then start building out the skills through daily use. And then pretty soon you're going to have pretty powerful AI agents built for every single aspect and department of your business.

58:39Remy Gaskell:Remy, thank you so much. I'll include links in the show notes, in the description, where you can go follow him, get to know him a little bit better. and I appreciate you coming on and dropping some sauce. Thank you, man. Thank you so much for having me on, Greg. It's been a blast.