AI Secret Sauce: Foundations Class

Cowork Chilliwack, Monday, September 28, 7:00 to 9:00 PM

Monday night we ran the first session of AI Secret Sauce at Cowork Chilliwack. The room was small, the screen was big, and the title slide had a TOP SECRET stamp on it. That’s how the whole series is framed: a case file, four nights, and a handful of secrets that separate people who play with AI from people who use it well. (If you missed the setup, Nobody Ever Shows You AI. They Just Talk About It. explains why I teach it this way.)

Night One was not about a flashy tool. It was about the foundation. The first session covered the main pillars, the things you need to understand before you can move forward as an efficient practitioner of AI. Get these right and every later night gets easier. Skip them and you spend your time fighting your own setup.

The Five Unlocks

I opened with the map for the night. Five unlocks, each one a way of working that changes what AI can do for you:

1. Get AI out of the chat box and into the apps you already use.
2. Try anything and break nothing. Every edit is kept, and you can roll back any time.
3. Uncover a host of free tools that do the job, and let AI install them.
4. Connect Claude to a software-as-a-service tool through an API key, and automate it in natural language. We did this live with Eventbrite.
5. Customize a team of real AI agents, just by describing them.

Underneath all five sit the same plumbing: API keys, the command line, GitHub, deploying, and agents. That plumbing was the focus of the night.

What I demonstrated

Three topics carried the session.

1. Secret management workflows. Every useful AI setup runs on secrets: keys, tokens, passwords. Where they live, who can see them, and how you rotate them decides whether your setup is calm or a constant worry. I walked through the workflow I use every day, including why a secret never gets pasted into a chat and never gets committed to a repository on GitHub. The written version of that workflow is in the server security stack you’re probably skipping.

2. Setting up the bots. I showed how a bot goes from an idea to a working teammate: what it is told, what it is allowed to touch, and how it is connected to the tools it needs. Watching one get set up end to end makes the concept click in a way slides cannot. If you want to see where that leads, I run nineteen bots, each with one job, on Rakazo, and the BMad Method (open source on GitHub) is the framework behind many of the agent personas.

3. Creating and using API keys to save time. An API key is what lets one piece of software work on your behalf inside another. I showed how to create one, where to store it properly, and how a single well-placed key can replace a chunk of repetitive work. Once you see it, you start spotting places in your own week where it applies.

Why start here

It is tempting to jump straight to the impressive parts: the apps, the websites, the agents. But those are all built on the same three habits. Keep your secrets managed. Set your bots up deliberately. Use keys to hand the boring work to software.

Skip them and you end up with a lot of capable AI and no safe way to let it run without you hovering over it.

What came next: Night Two, October 5

Night Two was the turning-on-the-tap night. At Cowork Chilliwack, 12-8465 Harvard Place, we used Tim McAlpine, the owner, as our guinea pig and set up his Mac live: voice typing, a talking assistant, Docker, a password safe and a team of AI helpers, then used that team to plan an automation for his booking process. Everything from Night One got used on a real business, in front of the room. Read the Night Two recap, with the slides.

Join the next night

Even if you missed Nights One and Two, you can still sign up. The next sessions are Tuesday, October 13, Monday, October 19 and Monday, October 26, 7 to 9 PM at Cowork Chilliwack. Register here, or message me with questions.

Thank you

Thank you to Cowork Chilliwack for the room and the screen, and to everyone who came out on a Monday night. Photos courtesy of a friend in the audience.

More sessions are coming. If you want to hear about the next one, follow along here or message me directly.

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Keep reading

• Nobody Ever Shows You AI. They Just Talk About It.: why AI Secret Sauce is taught in the room, not described
• Shipping Fast With AI? Here’s the Server Security Stack You’re Probably Skipping: the secrets workflow from Night One, written down
• An Easier Way to Manage an Agentic Team: why a team of specialized bots beats one assistant, and how I run 19 of them on Rakazo
• Why I Love the BMad Method: the multi-agent framework behind the personas
• AI Secret Sauce Night Two: Build Your AI Team: the recap of the next session, with slides

Journalists and event organisers: photos, a print-ready poster and a short bio are all on the media page.