Hey!

Chris here. Welcome to Blueprint—the newsletter to help you build a winning engineering team.

There's been a lot of buzz lately about non-technical people using Claude Code. It feels like everyone is finally waking up to the fact that this tool isn't just for programmers.

And I'm sitting here thinking: where have you been for the last 6 months!?

Claude Code has been a great tool for non-coders for a very long time. All it's really doing is reading and writing files. It's basically externalized memory you can store on disk.

I've been using it for business strategy, building presentations, and thinking through difficult problems. Almost like a really smart friend who records everything and never forgets.

And as the tooling gets more accessible—think Mac apps, web versions, and mobile—more and more people will realize they don't need to be tech experts to use this stuff.

So if that's you, let me show you exactly how to get started. 👇️ 

📒 DEEP DIVE

How Anyone Can Get Started with Claude Code

A step-by-step walkthrough for building your first Claude Code Skill without writing a single line of code.

Why Claude Code Is Different

The reason Claude Code is better than just using the chat interface comes down to one thing: your ability to pick its context.

When you're in a chat app, context gets blurred. You load up a bunch of documents and hope the AI figures out what's relevant. Your ability to target individual files for specific reasons in a specific statement is limited.

Claude Code gives you deliberate, file-level context. This way, you choose exactly what it sees and when.

This is powerful enough on its own, but the real unlock comes when you combine it with something most people still don't understand: Skills.

Skills 101

Put simply, Skills are standard operating procedures (SOPs).

The only difference now is that instead of sitting in a Google Doc that nobody reads, these SOPs live in files that AI executes on every single day.

You create a Skill by making a file that has rules you want the AI to follow all the time. They aren't scripts or code, but principles and rules in natural language that guide how the AI should behave in specific situations.

What makes Skills so powerful is their incredibly tight feedback loop. Anytime you use a Skill, you're watching for how the tool performs. When the agent doesn't follow your rule the way you wanted, you go in and tweak the Skill. You see the problem, fix it, and the AI implements the new approach immediately.

Over time, you build up a collection of Skills that are deeply personalized to how you work and what you need.

Just like there are many ways to archive emails or prioritize tasks, there are many ways to build skills that instruct an AI tool to do those tasks, too.

How You Can Get Started Today

If you've made it this far, I hope you can see how much potential impact this tool can have for anyone, technical or not.

But as with anything, the hardest part is often taking the first step. So I'm going to describe exactly what I would do if I were a non-technical person who just installed Claude Code.

I wouldn't give it a 40-page strategy to execute or design some elaborate system upfront.

I'd start by asking it to do the simplest thing I could think of. And for most people, that's probably email triage.

Here's how that works, step-by-step:

Step 1: Basic Access

Open Claude Code and say: "I have a Gmail account. This is my email address. Is it possible for you to access my email and show me what's in my inbox?" It should come back and tell you yes, and explain what needs to happen.

Step 2: Push Setup Back to the Tool

It might give you instructions on what to do. Here's the trick: you say, "That's your job. Go set this thing up." Then you let it do its thing.

Step 3: Summarize

Now you ask: "Do you have the ability to summarize it for me?" It can, and will tell you so.

Step 4: Prioritize

"Can you give me a list of what are the 10 most important emails in my inbox?" Once again, it can. Starting to see a pattern?

Step 5: Turn Emails Into Tasks

"What in there is a task that I need to do?" It'll figure that out and spit out a list.

Step 6: Export the Results

"Do you have access to my Apple Notes? Can it make a note for me?"

When it tells you yes, follow up with: "Take the top 10 tasks and drop them in a note called 'Today's top 10 items I got to get done,' in priority order."

Step 7: Save the Process as a Skill

After you've just had this stepwise conversation and accomplished your first task, the key part is to conclude the conversation by saying: "Everything we just did, build a Skill for that and store it so that we can do this again next time."

This way, you can wake up the next day, open Claude Code, and you say: "Hey, use that Skill we created yesterday to give me a top 10."

Instead of having that conversation again, the tool will execute the Skill you created. It'll open your inbox, summarize what's in there, and give you a top 10 list of tasks that need to be done all on its own.

Pretty incredible, right?

BEFORE YOU GO…

So much of the value of these tools comes from their exploratory nature.

Every time you accomplish something new, it opens a door into another room. Once you're there, you ask, "What other doors are in this room?" And trust me, there are always 50 other doors.

The constraint isn't your intelligence or technical background. It really comes down to whether you're curious enough to walk through the first door and willing to spend the time exploring what's in the next room.

Because the value compounds through curiosity. Every Skill you build makes the next one easier.

There's already immense opportunity here, and it'll only expand as these tools get better.

You just have to be curious enough to start asking questions.

Talk soon,

Chris.