The Nine Things Worth Building

The Nine Things Worth Building, In Plain English

A tour of what’s actually inside a real Claude Code setup, told the way you’d describe a desk.

If you read the companion piece — What Claude Code Actually Is — you know the shape of the thing: an AI that lives on your computer, sees your files, remembers you, and works while you sleep. The setup is what turns that shape into something useful, and there are nine pieces to it.

This piece is not a how-to. It’s a tour. Each piece gets one page, an analogy, and a feel for what the piece is for. By the end you should be able to picture your own setup — what would go where, what would be worth doing first, what would be overkill. If you decide to actually build it, the longer technical guide tells you how. This one tells you why.

The nine pieces follow a rough order: foundations first, then the things you build on top of them.

1. The standing letter on the desk

Imagine you’ve hired a new assistant. They start tomorrow. You won’t be in the office when they arrive. So tonight, before you leave, you write a short letter and leave it on the desk. Good morning. I’m Sarah. I run a small accounting practice. The clients I worry about are X, Y and Z. We never agree to anything in writing without my eyes on it. If you don’t know — ask, don’t guess.

The assistant reads that letter every morning before they touch anything. It doesn’t tell them what to do today. It tells them who they’re working for and what the rules of the house are. Without it, every day starts with you re-explaining the basics.

This is the cheapest and most important piece. Most people who try Claude Code and bounce off it are bouncing off the fact that they never wrote the standing letter.

2. The filing cabinet of sticky notes

The letter on the desk is for things that are always true. The filing cabinet is for things you’ve learned and don’t want to keep re-discovering.

Mr Patel prefers afternoon calls. The printer in the back room takes a specific cartridge that’s hard to find. The bookkeeper is on parental leave until March. The shed on the back block has a faulty step on the third tread up.

None of those things would belong in the standing letter — they’re too specific, they’ll change one day, they’d clutter the front page. But you don’t want to keep telling people about the step on the third tread up.

So you write each fact on its own card and file it by topic. People. Suppliers. Properties. Recurring jobs. When the assistant starts a task, they pull the relevant cards out of the cabinet and read them. The cards aren’t loaded by default — they’re loaded when relevant.

3. The recipe cards in the kitchen drawer

There are jobs you do often enough that you’ve worked out the right way to do them. The Christmas cake. The annual review of insurance. The way you close out a finished matter and archive it. The routine you follow on the first of the month for the bookkeeping.

In every kitchen there’s a drawer with index cards. Christmas cake — ingredients on the front, method on the back. The cook doesn’t have to invent it each year. They pull the card, they follow it, they put it back.

Recipe cards for the assistant work the same way. You write down once — here’s how we close a matter; here’s what to send the client; here’s where to file the originals; here’s the diary note — and from then on, “close out matter 4128” is one instruction, not fifteen. The card does the remembering.

4. The locked cabinet

Some rules are not guidelines. No outgoing email is sent without my eyes on it. No file in the contracts folder is ever deleted, only archived. No payment over five hundred dollars without a second signature.

If you write those down as guidelines, they get followed most of the time, and the one time they don’t is the time you’ll remember for years.

The locked cabinet is the equivalent of a physical control: the assistant cannot work around it because it isn’t a rule they’re being asked to remember, it’s a deadbolt. The email cannot leave the drafts pile. Full stop. Not “they decided not to send it” — they couldn’t, no matter how confident they were.

This is the piece that lets you sleep. The standing letter and the cards are advice. The locked cabinet is enforcement. You set it up once and stop worrying about that particular thing forever.

5. The specialists on the roster

Your general assistant is good at most things. They are not the right person to draft a contract from scratch, or do the company tax return, or design the new logo.

For those, you have a roster of specialists you can call. The tax accountant. The graphic designer. The researcher. You don’t ask the general assistant to do their job — you ask them to brief the specialist. Here’s what I need; here’s the relevant background; come back with X by Y. The specialist goes away, does the work, comes back with the answer. Your general assistant never gets tangled up in the details.

In Claude Code the specialists are smaller, focused copies of Claude that you can dispatch with a brief and forget about until they’re done. The general session keeps its head clear; the specialists do the deep work. This is how you handle research, long reading, careful drafting — without burning out the conversation you’re in.

6. Whiteboard, notebook, filing cabinet

Information needs the right surface.

The whiteboard is for today’s working notes — the list of phone calls to make this afternoon, the rough plan for the meeting at three. Wiped at end of day, on purpose. If something matters past tonight, you copied it elsewhere before you wiped.

The notebook is for this project. The conveyancing matter that’s running for six weeks. The renovation that’s running for four months. The notebook lives on your desk while the project is live; when it’s done, you tear out the useful pages and file the rest.

The filing cabinet is forever. Tax records. Signed contracts. The standing letter from piece one.

The discipline is putting the right thing on the right surface. Today’s phone list doesn’t belong in the filing cabinet. The signed contract doesn’t belong on the whiteboard. Most people who lose information lose it because they put it somewhere with the wrong lifespan.

7. Leaving the assistant a job and going home

The single biggest shift, once your setup is real, is that you stop being a bottleneck. Here’s the box of receipts. Here’s the bank statement. By tomorrow morning, give me a draft return and a list of anything you couldn’t match. Then you go to bed.

The assistant works through the night. If they get stuck on something — I don’t know which account to put the line about “ATM fee 4.50” against — they ring your phone, ask, wait for the answer. If they’re not stuck, they don’t ring; they finish the job and leave it on your desk.

The crucial discipline: they ring only when they’re stuck or done. Not to say “I’ve started.” Not to check in. Not to share an update. Your phone is for interruptions that actually need you. Anything else, you read in the morning.

This is the piece that changes what you can get done in a week.

8. The colleague who reads your draft

Sometimes the work is good enough that nobody else needs to look at it. Sometimes — the submission to the council, the email to the difficult client, the figures going to the auditor — you want a second pair of eyes before it goes out.

Your general assistant can write the draft. A colleague at the next desk — also competent, also briefed, but coming to it fresh — can read it and tell you what’s missing, what reads badly, where you’ve assumed something the reader won’t follow. They don’t rewrite it; they tell you what to fix.

Sometimes you also need a foreman — when two assistants are working in parallel on two halves of the same project, somebody has to make sure they don’t both paint the same wall, or contradict each other on the trim. The foreman partitions the work and keeps them out of each other’s way.

Both of these — second-opinion reader and foreman — are patterns you set up once and reach for whenever the work matters enough.

9. The right tool for the job

The assistant has a workshop full of tools. A search engine for looking things up online. A way to read and write files on your computer. A way to send emails through your account. A way to talk to your calendar. A way to do maths properly. A way to run a small program when one will do the job faster than reading line by line.

The discipline is picking the right one. Reading every receipt line by line when a small program could add them all in two seconds is bad discipline. Writing a small program to look up one phone number is bad discipline in the other direction. You want the bread knife for the bread, the steak knife for the steak, not the bread knife for everything because it’s the one nearest the toaster.

You don’t have to teach this from scratch — Claude knows what its tools do. You do have to write it into the standing letter when you notice it picking the wrong one.

What to build first

If you read all nine and feel ready to put the kettle on and forget it, that’s the right reaction. Nobody builds all nine at once. The order most people find natural is:

First, the standing letter — fifteen minutes, biggest single payoff. Second, one locked cabinet — the one rule you’d never want broken; “draft, don’t send” is a good first. Third, the filing cabinet, started small — three or four sticky notes that grow naturally as you notice yourself repeating things. Fourth, one recipe card — for the job you do every week and hate re-explaining. Fifth onwards: everything else, only when you notice the pain it would solve.

The whole setup is meant to grow with you, the way a desk does. A bare desk on day one. A standing letter and a single mug on day two. A drawer of cards a month in. Some kit on the wall by month three. The point isn’t to fill every surface — it’s to put each piece in only when its absence is starting to cost you.

The longer technical guide takes each of these nine and shows you how to actually build them. Start there when you’re ready to lay out the desk.