I went live last week with Daniel Nest from Why Try AI. He tests new AI tools every Friday, one against another, on real tasks. So I figured he would hand me a list of things to install.
He mostly told me what not to do.
Here are a few points we mentioned in our talk. To catch everything we talked about, watch the video above. It was really fun and I hope also a bit informative for you.
My entire AI skill system is included in the premium membership: my daily AI skills worth $300, the Weekly Workflows, and a live Money Workshop every month.
I asked him what people chase that they should skip. I was expecting some niche tool. Instead he named the thing almost everyone sells as the whole point: the fully automated setup. Agents running loops. Money while you sleep.
He thinks it is the most overhyped thing in AI right now.
Not because it cannot work. Because it makes people anxious for no reason. You sit there wondering why your agent is not out there earning while your eyes are closed. And most of us do not have processes worth automating that far anyway. Inside a company, sure. One person with a normal inbox, not really.
We also got into the skills library.
Anthropic has tens of thousands of them now. His honest reaction was that it is just paradox of choice. Fifty thousand skills is not a gift if you cannot tell which one is for you. So he flips it. He does not browse the shelf. He asks what boring thing he keeps repeating, then builds a skill for that one thing. He kept compressing images for Substack by hand until he stopped and asked Claude to write a script that does a whole folder at once.
Then the boring but important one. Assume the agent will delete your files.
He has run agents six months with no disaster. He still plans like one is coming tomorrow. One folder for the agentic work, and that is all it can touch. Copies in there, never your only original. A line in his instructions telling it never to delete without asking. A GitHub backup running in the background, so if the drive died today, he could pull it all back.
If you want to actually feel what an agent does, he had a good starting point. Download Codex, it is free on a ChatGPT account. Make a folder, throw copies of your messy work in it. Do not rename anything, do not tidy it first. Then open it in Codex and say: here is my life, interview me. Let it ask what each file is. After a dozen questions it gets your mess, and you tell it to sort the whole thing while you watch the folders appear on their own.
By the way, something I wanted to mention because of the current AI-screening debate on Substack.
I write with AI, but I created systems that help me sound like me. Plus, I usually edit a bit here and there to make it even more my own. If you want my systems, get them here as part of being a paid subscriber, or get them one by one in my skills toolbox.
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Weekly Workflows: one complete, installable AI workflow every week, tested in my own business first
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A little about me
I live for helping people figure out AI without the hype. When I’m not building workflows, I’m adventuring with my rescue dog Mambo, who has zero interest in AI but very strong opinions about what we eat.
Claudia Faith holds a Master of Science in AI. She’s a VC-backed founder who’s worked with Fortune Global 500 companies to deploy AI where it actually matters. As a Fractional Chief AI Officer, she handles strategy and implementation, and offers 1:1 coaching for business owners who don’t want to be the last in their industry to figure this out. If you want help thinking through your own AI strategy, start here.
