Full Tutorial: Build an AI Life Co-Pilot with Claude Code in 25 Minutes | Alex Finn

What Claude life is is an entire

operating system basically for my life.

Every Thursday I wake up, I type in

/newsletter researcher. It goes, it

writes me a draft. I then go into the

draft, edit it, make it my own, and it

saves me couple hours a week. It's

basically you and Claude, right, that

built this startup.

Exactly. Me and Claude, my $200 a month

employee Claude Code. Whatever task you

do during the day, think how can I

implement AI into this task? I think one

of the most important skills you can

have in 2025

is

Okay, welcome everyone. My guest today

is Alex, a friend and fellow creator.

And Alex has this insane setup where he

uses clock code and cursor to do

research, get a life device, and

basically automate all his work in life.

So, I'm really excited to get him to

show us his entire system today and talk

about how you can set up something very

similar. So, welcome, Alex.

Good to be here, Peter. I've been uh

following your content for for a very

long time. So, I'm happy to be on the

show. So, let's just dive right into it,

right? Let's talk about Clockode. Like,

what what is it and what do you love so

much about it?

So, there are a million different AI

coding tools out there. They're kind of

like your mainline AI coding tools like

Cursor, like Claude Code, and they're

like more prototyping tools like VO,

Vzero, Bolt, Replet. Claude Code's my

favorite. Uh, it's been my favorite

since launch back I think like in

February it came out. It is the best.

It's the most comparable to Cursor. So,

it's a basically an entire uh AI tool

that builds you full scale complex code.

So, it can build you entire apps. Uh I

personally run it inside a development

environment so I can see the code run as

it's being built and all of that. Uh but

it is an AI agent. It's it's actually in

honesty just an AI agent period. But

it's one they market as a code builder.

So as we get later into this I'll show

you how I use it for things other than

coding. But it's basically an AI agent.

They market it as a code builder.

Yeah. Yeah. And and it's interesting to

see how clock and cursor are kind of on

this collision course cuz you've

literally like set up clock inside

cursor. So so maybe maybe you can show

us uh how to do that and also like why

you prefer it over like the command line

interface.

Yeah, for sure. Uh so let me share my

cursor. Uh here we go. So this is

cursor. It's just obviously a fork of VS

code. Uh, but the one added benefit is

this AI agent they put in here. But I

don't like this AI agent as much. Uh, I

don't think it's as intelligent as uh,

Claude Code, which what I did here is I

opened up my terminal control till day

if you're on Mac. Uh, and basically all

you need to do to install Claude Code is

you go on like uh,

enthropic.com/cloudcode

and you paste in the command that

installs Claude Code and boom, you have

Claude Code good to go. It's now in your

terminal. And so it's made to run in any

terminal. They didn't really intend you

to run it in cursor, but that's what I

do. Once you have it installed, I just

type in claude, hit enter, and it's uh

good to go here. Just hit proceed. And

basically, I now have an AI agent

running in my terminal inside cursor

that can write me code and do whatever I

tell it to do.

And I I think what really blew me away

with your claw code stuff is is your

claw live project, right? So, can you

open open it up?

Let's do it. So, I uh I put out a video

uh a few weeks now about how I use

Claude code to run my life. And I

basically been searching for a while.

Like I I knew Claude Code was

unbelievably powerful. I also knew that

there were things it could do outside of

coding that would be amazing, but I I

was kind of searching for those use

cases because it's at its heart, it's

just an AI agent, right? It's it's not

it it's it it's marketed as a coder,

but really all it does is just do

whatever you ask it to do. And so what I

came up with over these last couple

months, I call Claude life. And let me

pull that open.

And basically what Claude life is is an

entire

operating system basically for my life.

Mhm.

And I have an entire system in it. I

have a system of brain dumps which are

basically just notes I write and ideas I

put out. I have things for YouTube, for

my newsletter, uh for daily briefs, so

daily rundowns of my life. These are all

basically kind of automated processes

that claude code can go through with

just a slash command. And for those who

don't know at home, a slash command is a

command you a custom command you can

make by doing slash something.

And so I built a whole bunch of slash

commands that are totally custom that do

specific things.

Yeah.

I have one that tracks my mood. I have

one that tracks um a daily check-in.

Every night I do a daily check-in where

it asks what I did that day and tracks

what I did that day. I have like a

weekly rundown one and my favorite which

is the newsletter researcher.

Yeah.

And what that is is I write a weekly

newsletter. Uh I have as you are you're

a newsletter writer as well. I have

40,000 subscribers on my Substack. Uh,

I've been writing this newsletter for

close to 40 years now and it is one of

the most rewarding content channels I

have, but it's also one of the most

exhausting, right? It takes up a lot of

time. Uh, as you I I write all my own

newsletters. I do all the research, all

that. And so, I wanted to find a way. A

lot of people when they get to high

levels of content, they they kind of

hire out the newsletter. They no longer

kind of write the newsletter. They

either hire out researchers or hire

people to write them. I don't have any

employees. I do everything myself. And

so I wanted to come up with like my own

AI employee that does that. And so I

built the uh newsletter researcher in my

life OS as well.

Yeah. So let let's kind of actually go

deep on that one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How did you go like step by step? Yeah.

I have in here I have a a I have a

folder in my life. So this is just a

folder on my computer,

right? This is a folder in my computer I

opened up inside of cursor. And inside

this folder, I created a bunch of

subfolders for notes I take for brain

dumps. Every day I go and I just brain

dump whatever's on my mind. Uh, and then

I have a newsletter folder. And in this

newsletter folder, I have a file, a

markdown file. Everything needs to be

markdown files called newsletter links.

And I put in a bunch of my important

links and competitors, including

yourself, that I think make fantastic

newsletters. These are these are

basically the only newsletters I read on

a regular basis. So I put them all in

here because I really like them and I'm

inspired by them.

And Claude Code has the ability has a

tool to do web searches and read the

internet and scrape websites. And so I

set up a slashnewsletter researcher

command which it's all done with a

prompt. You can put in a prompt, say,

hey, I want a newsletter researcher.

Build the slash command. Do this. Uh,

and I can give you the prompt so you can

put it. Uh, it's a pretty lengthy

prompt.

Um, but basically it says, "Hey, go into

my newsletter links.

Read all of the newsletters in there.

See what their latest newsletters are.

See what the topics they're talking

about are. See the languaging they're

using, what the news are, what anything

important going on in their newsletters.

then find what's trending, what's been

talked about multiple times, what might

fit in with my brand,

and then write me a newsletter draft in

my voice.

And so if I go here and I go

slashnewsletter researcher

and hit enter on that, the slash command

will actually spin up a sub agent.

The sub agent will now go and read

newsletter URLs from the newsletter

links.mmd which is this.

It's going to fetch and analyze the

posts from these newsletters. So it's

going to go on Justin Welsh's Dan Co

yours Sahil Blooms. It's going to

instantly kind of read all your past

newsletters.

It's going to identify trending topics

and patterns. So if all you guys are

talking about the same thing, it'll

identify that and it will then create a

newsletter draft and subject lines in my

voice, right? Because it's going to read

through my newsletter. So it'll read it

in my voice and then create a draft in

my voice uh and put a draft in here and

has a folder with the drafts in it for

every draft that's written. And so now I

send my newsletter out on Thursdays.

Every Thursday I wake up, I type in

slashnewsletter researcher. It goes, it

writes me a draft. I then go into the

draft, edit it, make it my own, and it

saves me couple hours a week.

So, where is the prompt? Uh, do you have

a file somewhere?

I do. Let me uh let me show you.

Yeah.

And so, I'll share this uh doc link. Let

me make this bigger. I'll send share

this with you so you can share it with

your audience. But each one of these, so

I have, I think, five different uh slash

commands I use for my life OS. Let's go

to the newsletter researcher just so you

can see how that works. Uh here's the

prompt.

Yeah,

create a newsletter research system that

analyzes competitor newsletters and

writes drafts. So it builds the slash

command, right? The slashnewsletter

research slash command, which is all

it's just a fi a markdown file in your

directory that is specifically for slash

commands. Mhm.

Uh, and then it builds the sub aents.

So, a content researcher sub agent that

researches you, literally you, your

newsletter, and then a newsletter writer

sub agent that then takes the research

from the content researcher sub agent

and writes the newsletter draft for me.

Mhm.

And it builds it all out. Pretty pretty

simple uh prompt.

And where do you put this prompt in uh

your file? like like is it part of the

slash command or what do you paste this

prompt into?

Yeah,

just give it to Claude.

Just give copy paste it go into claude

code. Right. So the setup is pretty

simple.

Yeah,

I'll show you.

So the setup for all this is simple.

Create a new folder on your computer. I

do it in my documents folder.

Inside that include whatever context you

want. So if you want to do what I did,

which is the newsletter researcher, make

a new folder in that directory for

newsletter.

Then create a markdown file with

newsletter links, paste all the links in

and then open up claude code and paste

in that prompt from that document which

basically says, hey, set up this slash

command and sub agent.

Okay,

paste it in, hit enter, and claude code

goes in and I think you can see it here.

Yeah, it builds its own directory for

commands and it builds its own directory

for sub aents and sets it up for itself.

Oh, that's okay. So, so it probably

saved the newsletter researcher prompt

in the commands, right? In in that file.

Well, it takes the prompt and sets up

the command. So, let's go into

newsletter. So, it's not directly saving

the prompt. It's just taking the prompt

and taking the instructions from the

prompt

and setting up its own instructions

inside the commands file.

Dude, can I see the news? Can I see one

of the sub agents? Like is is that like

another prompt like the newsletter

writer or you know?

So newsletter writer. You're Alex

Spinn's newsletter ghost writer

specializing in creating engaging

newsletters that blend AI insights,

creator growth strategies, and personal

stories.

And here's my voice. Here's how my and

so it read and listen I didn't write any

of this. This is all cloud code wrote

this entire file. This is completely

automatically made.

It what it did was it read my

newsletters, right? It went to

alexfin.ai

read my newsletters and then determined

my voice and then created all these

tasks and structures and everything by

itself based on the prompt I showed you.

Yeah, that's pretty wild, man. So

basically it took your master prompt to

make all these like command and sub

agent subfolders and for each one is

wrote its own prompt based on the links

that you give it, right? That's

basically what it did.

It basically prompted itself to build

its own structure of what it needs to

do.

Yeah, that that is wow, dude.

So uh but but um but of course you have

to audit read result, right? Like you

don't you don't just copy and paste

whatever it come up with to to your new

newsletter. Yeah,

AI is not at the place yet where you can

say write this and then you copy and

paste it and press send it. It's just

not there yet. It it still feels a

little too robotic. And you can prompt

it to a point where it feels more human,

but

I don't consciously feel good just

copying and pasting AI content and

hitting send. I want it to feel my

personal. I want it to feel my own. So,

this is just the draft, right? And I'm

going to show you what the draft looks

like, right? Gives you a few subject

line options, builds you a draft. I then

take the draft and I pretty much gut it,

but then use the template and the

structure to put in my own writing.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I do this whole

thing too uh except I use cloud projects

instead of cloud code. The problem with

project is like I have to manually paste

in all the content and the research I do

and I have to manually tell it like what

topics I'm interested in writing about.

Right. So it still works but it's like

way more manual than what you've set up

here.

Yeah. It's a lot more automatic. You can

set up a lot more custom processes like

cuz in clawed projects which I still use

projects for a lot of different things

but you can't like set up slash commands

or sub aents or things like that. And

it's also not managed through your

computer, right? Like this, these are

all local files. And so if I want to do

a brain dump, I literally just open up a

new file and start writing, right? And

so that's another advantage of this as

well.

And and how did you like dude, you have

a lot of stuff in here, man. Did you

just like uh build more and more sub

agents and slash commands over time or

how do you

Yeah, any anytime like I I think one of

the most important skills you can have

in 2025

is being able to automatically

during whatever task you do during the

day,

think how can I implement AI into this

task?

Right? the more you can have that kind

of reflex as you work, the better you'll

be and the more like tools and things

you'll come up with. And so, the reason

why you see so many commands and sub

agents here is as I'm working throughout

the day, no matter what it is, the task

I'm doing, right? I like I have my list

here in my notebook of all the tasks I

got to do today. As I go down the tasks,

I think, how can I set up a clawed sub

agent that makes this easier? How can I

set up a slash command that makes this

faster? How can I use GPT5,

you know, to bounce ideas for this task

to make it more efficient or whatever it

is? And that's why you see so many

commands and sub aents here is I'll be

doing something. I'll be like, man, what

are my goals this week? I'll be like,

why don't I just run this through

Claude? And I can automatically have it

prompt my goals for the week. And that's

why you see a sub agent for that here.

Okay. So, um Okay, so this is a wrap

this newsletter researcher. It looks

like it did write a It did write a

draft right?

Yeah. So, let's see. Let me say enter on

here.

It's still working.

So, 811. So, yep. Here, this is the

draft. So, let's see. Why data beats gut

every time. Last week, I was talking to

a creator with 50K followers who told me

something that stopped me cold. I've

been posting for two years and I still

have no idea what works. This hit

different because 18 months ago, that

was literally me. And it actually took

backstory about myself, the MongoDB

moment. So, I worked at MongoDB before I

quit to do content and AI full-time.

Okay?

And it included one of my stories in

there. And it talked about how it led to

me getting a following and building

Creator Buddy. And here's what's wild.

95% of creators I talk to are still

flying blind. The AI integration gap

that's costing you growth. And it

includes all this in here. And it

basically what it did is it probably saw

you were talking about the creator

economy. It probably showed Danco was

talking about coming back from

challenges and things like that and

awakening moment and it kind of included

all that in the newsletter draft.

Yeah, that that's great stuff, man.

Okay, so let's wrap up this call live

thing by uh looking at your slash

commands and just do like a quick highle

walkthrough of what each one does.

Absolutely. So let me see. I'll make

this even bigger for you here. Okay.

Yeah.

So, I've done a lot of things uh with

Claude uh sub agents and slashcomands, a

lot of different things in here. So, I

have a brain dump analysis. And so, what

I do every day is I have brain dumps in

this folder and I'll put in different

brain dumps for my days in here and I'll

open up a markdown folder and just

whatever's on my mind that day. Whatever

kind of thoughts, opinions I have. Like

today I'll be I'll probably have a brain

dump and I'll be like I did a YouTube

interview with Peter. YouTube interviews

are really cool. I can get a lot of

information out of it. Maybe I should do

more YouTube interviews on my channel.

You know, I'll just brain dump things

like that.

Okay.

And then I run the brain dump analysis.

And let me make this a little bit

smaller here. And basically what it does

is it goes through it scans my brain

dumps, my recent brain dumps I think

from the last week and it looks for

insights and patterns, recurring themes,

evolution of ideas over time, key

questions and break breakthroughs,

hidden connections between thoughts.

Yeah.

And the goal of this is to find new

pillars for my content. You know, I'm a

believer in, you know, really good

content and content creators have five

to 10 pillars and they just drive those

pillars over and over and over and over

and over again, right? Like one of my

pillars is anyone can build apps with AI

and start a business that gives them

financial freedom.

Yeah.

And I just include that pillar in my

content over and over and over and over

and over and over again. And so what

this slash command does is help me find

new pillars. It reads all my brain dumps

and goes, you know, your thought you had

here, you should make more content out

of it.

Got it. So, so it it actually looks at

your brain dumps for the past like 30

days or not just past day, right? Like

it tries to find patterns over time.

Is that what?

Yes. Analyzes all brain dumps from the

last 30 days. Okay. And tries to find

patterns.

Okay. That's awesome. Yeah. All right.

Let's quickly go over some of the other

ones. So, I have a daily brief and this

basically prompts me for prompts me with

questions like how many followers do you

now have? How many subscribers on

YouTube do you have? What's your MR?

What's your ARR? How are you feeling?

You know, what was a big challenge you

had? And ask me those questions. I

answer them and then it builds me a

dashboard. Uh, which let's see here.

Where's my daily my daily brief?

Yeah.

It basically goes in uh actually no,

it's not daily brief. It's uh is it

under metrics? Uh let's see.

There's a weekly dashboard. Is that

weekly dashboard? Yep.

Yeah. Yeah.

And it gives me my And it looks bad

here, but if I actually open this up in

Obsidian, it's well structured.

Um let me see if I can actually show you

an example in Obsidian. Yeah. Boom. Here

we go. Let me share my screen. I'll

actually show you. So, it builds a

dashboard for me that looks like this.

So massive week

tracks my creator buddy arr how many

paying subscribers I have my followers

uh and I can see like how close I am to

my goals for my trends over weeks uh

insights around my life. So what's

working for me, what isn't, action items

I should do the next week to keep

improving. It basically asks me four or

five questions and builds me this entire

dashboard of how close I'm getting to my

goals. I just do this every day.

That's great.

Yeah. It's like a motivational coach and

like an analyst at the same time.

Exactly. And like this is none of this

has to do with code, right? This is all

just Claude doing tasks for me. And not

many people realize Claude code actually

does way more than just coding.

Yeah. I mean that that that's what I

want to dive into. Yeah. So, uh is there

like one more you want to show or

Yeah, let's do that. Let me go back up

here. What's a good one here? Um oh, uh

let's see. Daily D daily brief. So I do

this every morning

and what daily brief does is it actually

searches the web for the latest news in

anything I'm interested in. So AI, tech,

entrepreneurship, creativity. I go in

instead of me opening up uh you know a

CNN.com or Wall Street Journal,

whatever, this actually will go search

the web because again Claude Code has a

web searching tool,

find all the latest news, uh give me a

daily brief on like everything that's

going on, anything important that

happened overnight. give me the

publication date, the source name, why

it matters, uh, and build me priority

updates, industry trends, opportunities,

researches and studies, tool updates,

people to watch, and I just literally

just do slash daily brief, hit enter, it

goes builds all that. And then

you can see exactly what it comes up

with here, which is priority updates.

YouTube cracks down on AI generated

content, tells me the source, when it

was published, why it matters, gives me

an angle, so like a hot take I can have

about it if I want to create content

around it, and gives me a whole bunch of

news stories from uh overnight that it

just goes and researches for me.

Do you give it like publication links or

No, you just tell it to look up.

Yeah.

Wow.

Just searches for itself.

And and you probably didn't make this

prompt from scratch, right? You probably

just got cloud to make it.

Exactly. So I went to Claude and I said

I want to build a sub agent that

slashcomand that spawns sub aents that

goes and does research for me.

Yeah.

On the internet for the latest stories

about tech and AI and all that. Please

build me a prompt. I can put in a claude

code that will build this out for me

that also gets me other interesting and

relevant pieces of information. And the

reason why I do that is Claude is so

creative and thinks so much outside the

box that I wanted to build the prompt

for me so that it comes up with other

things it can include in that sub agent

that I didn't even think of.

And that's what built this

and then you can always modify it

afterwards. Yeah,

exactly.

All right. All right. So I guess the the

TRDR from this interview is set up your

Claw live project and uh whenever you

have something kind of that you want to

do every week or maybe every day like

set up a tell cla to set up a slash

command and a sub agent to just do it

for you. Kind of TLDDR, right? Yeah,

I'd say that's the TLDDR and I would say

just experiment, right? Reserve time

every day just to talk to Claude and see

what it can do. I I think a lot of

people go with very specific ideas of

what they want. But like this all came

from me being like, "Oh, I'm going to

spend the next hour on my couch with my

MacBook right in front of my face just

seeing what Claude Code can do." And it

that's what spawned all that. So just

spend time experimenting and you'll

you'll come up with cool ideas like

this.

Awesome, Alex. So So um where can people

find you online and also uh your

startup?

You can find me online two places.

YouTube, Alexfinnofficial. If you just

search Alex Finn, I'm sure you'll find

me. Uh, and then X,

Alexfinx.

Create a bunch of content about AI on

both those platforms. And then I

launched a startup uh in January this

year, so about eight months ago now, uh,

called Creator Buddy, which is basically

an AI that's built on the Twitter

algorithm, the Twitter API. It pulls in

all your posts and can tell you what's

working well, what isn't working well

for you, what you should talk more

about, and just helps you come up with

way way more ideas uh that perform well

on on X. And uh been going pretty well.

We have I think close to 600 paid subs

now. We're up to $300,000 ARR. It's all

one man show. Built the entire thing

myself. Uh so it's awesome. And you can

try it for free.

It's It's basically you and Cloud,

right, that built this startup.

Exactly. Me and Claude, uh, my $200 a

month employee, Claude Code.

Yeah, that's great. All right, man.

Well, I I really admire the hustle and

the energy, man. But you got maybe drank

too much coffee, but you got you got I

drink coffee and pre-workout all day, so

maybe I should slow it down a little

bit.

Cool, dude. All right. Well, um, I hope

to see you online and and for those of

you listening or watching, we'll put

links to Alex's prompts in the

description. Yeah.

Appreciate you, Peter. This was great.

Amen.