Practicing building in public and wanted to share what I've built with help from my other writing brainstorming thread from @Deacon Wardlow and @Siv Darmalingum @E G and @David Trammel Using some of their ideas I did research on the writers and topics they suggested using Notebook LM. I synthesized that research into digestible artifacts for claude to extract themes and guidelines for developing conference talks. I then described to Claude the workflow I wanted to build, can share that prompt if people are interested. And then I also used the workspace-builder as a model for the scaffolding for the conference-talk-engine and my own workspace as models for schema in the Claude and Context mds. The output of all of this was a spec document to build the workspace. I incorporated guidelines to use SOLID principles for coding to allow a built workspace to be extended and improved upon over time without having to rebuild the whole workspace, this is because I think it's better to build a prototype fast and then iterate rather than be 100% perfect. You want to spend time to make sure that the spec doesn't produce errors, but some things will only show up with actual use cases. I then researched existing skills relevant to my use case and came up with 2: conference-talk-builder and giving-presentations. I asked claude to evaluate my research and the existing skills to see what gaps could be improved in the existing skill. I then asked it to write the spec After first draft of the spec I ran a reader-test which is a custom skill derived from @Ari Evergreen 's 6 phase workflow. A rough breakdown would be: 1) research data inputs and relevant skills, compile any useful context relevant to your workflow; 2) analyze inputs with claude; 3) describe your ideal workflow and any models you want to emulate, make sure to mention you are building a spec first; 4) review plan for spec; 5) draft the spec using claude; 6) reader-test to qa the spec.

I've been in this community for about a month now and wanted to share where things stand with one of my builds. This isn't polished by any stretch. I do have a few other workflows like content-creator, document-creator, but I needed something to help me navigate my day-to-day as I begin a couple side quests outside my normal 9-5. The goal was simple: I didn't want another chat window I have to remember to open. I wanted something that knows my priorities, reads my calendar, checks my email, and texts me when I need a nudge. Not a chatbot, more like a Chief of Staff. And the goal is to operate within the bounds of the subscription with no extra costs, while also maximizing token efficiency. The other thing I didn't want to do is implement an orchestrating harness yet (OpenClaw, Hermes, etc). The challenge for myself was to keep this as simple as possible without inflating scope. Someone in this community said once: 'constraints are just as, if not more, important than your requirements. What do you NOT want your build to do?' I've definitely taken this to heart in my workflows. ## Planning I've made a few posts about this in comments, but I cannot stress the importance of planning before you build. My method was simple: - First I brain dumped context via voice dictation and transcribed this. Simple tools: VoiceMemos, copy, paste. - Next, I worked through the planning phase with the chat function of Claude in Opus 4.6. I wanted pushback, challenge, and for the model to force me to think deeper and keep me honest. This produced the product requirement document, or PRD. This was a multi-day process (a week?) in my free-time. - For the architecture build, I used Cowork. Handed it the PRD, answered a few basic questions, and then it went on it's way. Got it uploaded to a private git repo. - Currently, I'm working thru further debugging and walking thru the checklist within the PRD in a phased approach. As you'll see below, I have setup a remote screenshare so I can also let Cowork see what I'm doing. This was the most essential because we work TOGETHER to make things happen. it's like working side-by-side with my developer and engineer.

Has anyone here tried to make everything run locally similarly to how they do with Claude? While I enjoy Claude having a way to not be reliant on it (like with Ollama and Qwen/Gemma) might not be a bad idea. If you have done this what does your workflow look like? What was your process?