Before you go off and learn the next shiny AI tool, learn your own computer.

I’ve been using the terminal a ton since upgrading my daily computer, and I’ve been using Claude to build little pieces of software to help out with mundane things I’ve got to do every week.

LLMs are making people lazy. I’m not exempt, and I want to encourage both myself and you to learn just a bit more about how the software we’re using actually works.

Here’s my full take in video form:

In the video I poke around the command line with some basic operations

If you've never touched it, the terminal is just what we had before the graphical stuff you're used to. Finder, folders, double-clicking, all of that sits on top of this.

It's basic stuff. But once it clicks, you actually save some time and feel like a hacker at the same time.

And once you're comfortable there, you can build small programs that do little pieces of work for you.

Here's the part I really want you to get. You can absolutely set up an automation inside Claude Code or Cowork, put it on a schedule, and let the AI run your task every week.

That’s an option, it’s just not the best one a lot of the time.

Every single time the AI runs, you're burning tokens. Claude is notorious for cost and for people running out of tokens.

So instead, I used Claude Code to help me build an actual program once: a little QuickBooks integration that takes my weekly coffee orders, cleans the data, and uploads them as invoices.

Now I just type coffee import, hit enter a few times, and eight invoices land in QuickBooks.

I'm not gonna lie, this was a lot of iteration.

The program itself was the easy bit. The hard part was the QuickBooks integration: the authentication, the reference data, getting it all to sync up.

I had Claude walk me through all those pieces before it worked.

And "error proof" only goes so far. Feed it bad data and you'll get bad invoices. It's only as smart as what you give it.

But this is the way I think AI actually helps small businesses. Not by running the AI on a loop forever — by using it to build the little tools once, then getting out of the way. Learn the computer first. The rest gets a lot easier.

Hope that's helpful. If you've got a repetitive thing in your business that a small program could kill, reply and tell me — happy to go deeper on how I built this one.