You've read about AI

Most founders I talk to about AI have read a lot more than they've set up.

They use Claude in a browser tab and suspect they're getting a fraction of it. They've nodded along to "just put your site in GitHub." They've got a few tasks a week that are obviously automatable and still done by hand. The reading is done. The setup is still sitting there.

Honestly, that's a reasonable place to be stuck. Most of what gets written about AI is either a demo or a pep talk, and neither one tells you what to do on Tuesday morning.

Seeing doesn't always turn into doing

Watching somebody fly through a demo or explanation of a tool feels like a step in the right direction. But a week later, nothing's changed. Watching doesn't build the muscle or demystify the process.

What sticks is doing it, with your own hands, on your own work. After you've shipped one real change yourself, you believe you can do it again. Everything after that is repetition.

The order that works

When I set this up with people, it runs through five similar steps every time.

1. Get the tool installed and logged in.
   On your own machine, connected to your real accounts. If a terminal isn't your thing, the desktop app works just as well.
2. Put your website's code somewhere you own.
   A GitHub repository. Every change from then on is tracked and reversible. It's the step nobody gets around to on their own, and it's the one everything after it depends on.
3. Connect the tool to that code.
   So it can read the whole site, instead of whatever fragment you paste in.
4. Ship one change yourself.
   Describe it in plain English, review what the AI writes, publish it. Small is fine. The point is that you did it.
5. Build one agent for a task you actually have.
   Pick something that's been eating an hour of your week, and point the agent at that.

Most people stall at step two. The site's code lives somewhere between "my developer has it" and "no idea," and tracking it down feels like an engineer's errand. That's usually the whole blocker, and it's usually about an hour of work once somebody sits down to do it.

One habit to get into

We’re all looking for ways to use AI to help, not replace, our own human abilities. Often, we see AI produce things that are very same-y and unoriginal. You push to correct it, and then the next time you use an AI agent, it goes right back to making the unoriginal slop you’ve seen before.

A correction you say to an AI lasts one session. The same correction written down as a standing rule survives multiple sessions, machines, and updates.

So whenever you catch yourself fixing the same thing twice, write the rule down. That's most of the difference between AI that helps now and then and AI that carries real weight.

If you'd rather get through all five in one day with someone sitting next to you, that's what the Install is. But you don't need me to start. The first three steps are usually a morning's work.

-- Shane

Take it with you

The five steps on a single page, with how to know you're done with each one and where people usually get stuck. Print it, work down it, check things off.

AI Setup Checklist.pdf

216.67 KB • PDF File

Download

Worth forwarding to whoever on your team has been meaning to get to this.

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