Get good in the terminal before you build an AI agent A newer member asked me today whether they should build an agent. They had just started using Claude Code a couple of days ago. My answer, in order: 1. Get really good inside the terminal first. That's where AI is most powerful. Give it access to your tools there. 2. Then n8n, which is what we use for automation. 3. Then an agent. A Hermes agent is very useful, but only once you know how to give it skills, tools and scheduled tasks effectively. They do different jobs, which is the part people mix up. An agent is always on. It runs in the background on a computer, you can text it when you need something, and it runs scheduled jobs. What agents aren't great at is trigger-based work. Email comes in, do this, respond, send a reply. Anything like that, we use n8n. The nice part now is that Claude Code is very good at building inside n8n. Give it the n8n skills plus a connector that lets it talk to n8n, and it can build workflows and debug them. You don't even need to log in to n8n. You describe the automation flow you need and it does it. Which one did you set up first?

Here's the exact setup.... Apify has a Google Maps scraper with 500k active users. It's managed, maintained by someone else, works out of the box. You don't need servers or proxies to run it. Price is $1.50 per 1,000 scraped places - not free, but way cheaper than most scraper subscriptions. Now here's where it gets fun. Apify has an MCP server. Which means Claude Code can call it directly. Setup takes literally 2 minutes: 1. Go to Apify 2. Top right corner, hit the API dropdown 3. Click the MCP configurator 4. It generates an MCP server URL with your scraper preloaded 5. Add and configure the MCP server in Claude Code, then verify it's connected. Done. Now Claude knows exactly which scraper to use and can call it on demand. So instead of logging into Apify, setting up a campaign, waiting, exporting - you just tell Claude: 'Scrape me 300 med spas in Miami with low ratings.' And it goes. This is the middle-tier solution I recommend for most people. You're not writing code. You're not managing servers. You're just giving Claude a job and letting it run. Couple of things worth knowing: - You'll get phone numbers and websites 'if available' which usually means not always - Emails you do get will mostly be role-based (contact@, hello@) not owner emails - But for volume prospecting? Totally works. If you don't want to mess around with enriching emails and cleaning lists, etc. Consulti has a full Local Leads database with owner emails and has API access and an MCP. You can check that out here. Use my code 30JAY on Apify to get 30% off. I think that only works on new accounts. Jay.

Something I'm building right now, literally in my other screen while I write this. I took over running my own ads. Not replacing my ads team, just doing it myself now, with Claude Code sitting next to me as the operator. Set up a Meta Ads developer account and a Google Ads developer account, takes maybe an hour. From there it launches dynamic creatives, builds audiences, and actually knows the right way to structure a remarketing campaign. The skills look unassuming. Simple little text files. But the amount of work that went into them, mapping out the ad APIs, documenting best practices for every remarketing type, is not small. Biggest shift though: I'm moving away from trusting pixel and cookie tracking. Cookies just aren't reliable anymore. Now when someone opts into any form on my site, that person gets pushed straight into a remarketing audience as an offline conversion instead. No more guessing based on a browser cookie that might not even fire. Going to film this whole buildout as it comes together. The way I run ads is changing completely, and it's the most excited I've been about a system in a while. What complete shift have you had using AI recently? Would love some ideas of what to hit next.

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Hey family, I have been working like crazy to build new workflows powered by Claude Code. They are here. Each skill with a dedicated page explaining what it does and how to install it. Enjoy my friends. leadgenjay.com/skills