AI Secret Sauce Night Two: Build Your AI Team

Cowork Chilliwack, Monday, October 5, 7:00 to 9:00 PM

About AI Secret Sauce: four real-world, in-person classes at Cowork Chilliwack for local, tech-savvy entrepreneurs. Over the series I teach five secret unlocks that help you automate your business with AI, and I show every step live, at normal speed, with nothing hidden. See the series and RSVP, or read the Night One recap for the five unlocks.

Night One was the plumbing. Night Two was turning on the tap. On Monday we sat down at Cowork Chilliwack for the second night of the series, with one rule: nothing gets shown, everything gets done. We took a Mac that was nearly empty and, over the evening, set up the tools that let an AI work for you instead of just chatting with you.

Our guinea pig was Tim McAlpine, who owns Cowork Chilliwack and volunteered his own laptop. The room watched his screen while he followed along. If you want to follow along yourself, here are the slides from Night Two, and you can contact me for the handout with the prompts we pasted in. I ran almost the same session for Denise the day before, and her story is here.

Watch the night

If you would rather watch than read, here is the recording of Night Two at Cowork Chilliwack. It is the full session, from installing Claude Code to the interview with the AI team.

What we got done

The handout had eight steps. We finished six of them, and the last two moved to next week.

1. Claude Code, on the desktop app. Tim already had the Claude desktop app, so we went straight to its Code tab. I showed the choices at the bottom of the window: run it on your own computer, in the cloud, or on a remote server. We started a new folder for the night, and I pointed out two small habits. Keep your project folders out of anything that syncs, like Dropbox, because syncing can trip up the files. And for everyday jobs, switch to a cheaper model. It is still very good and it uses far fewer tokens. Type /usage any time to see how much of your limit you have used.

2. Talking to your computer. We installed VoiceInk, a Mac app that turns speech into text wherever your cursor is. You hold a key, say what you want, and let go. My own typing went from about 80 words per minute to about 160 when I started doing this. It is a one-time purchase after a free trial of about a week. On Windows I use a similar app called Whisper Typing.

3. Making Claude talk back. This part is a nicety, but it is fun. Agent Vibes (open source on GitHub) is a free plugin I wrote that gives Claude a voice. Tim pasted one prompt and Claude read the project’s requirements, found what was missing on the Mac (including Homebrew, Node.js and the audio tools), installed it all along with Piper, a free voice engine, and then said “Piper is installed and Agent Vibes is working” out loud. Before AI, you would have read the instructions and installed each of those by hand.

4. Sealed shipping containers. We installed Docker Desktop. Think of Docker as five separate computers inside one. Each program lives in its own container, so installing a new tool can’t disturb the ones already on your laptop. It also means a program can be removed cleanly.

5. A password safe that your AI can use. This was the big unlock of the night. We installed Infisical, secrets management you run yourself, in a Docker container on the laptop. Tim turned off public sign-ups, made a project, and added a first secret. I showed why this beats a file full of passwords: if one key leaks you rotate just that one, and your AI agents can fetch what they need without ever seeing the value. I also explained why I tell Claude to keep new installs private to your own machine instead of open to the whole network. The long version is in the server security stack you’re probably skipping.

6. A security check of the laptop. We ran out of time, so this one is homework. See below.

7. A team of AI helpers. We installed the BMad Method with a single command. It gives you a researcher, a planner, an architect and a builder, each described in a plain text file you can read and change. Then we did the part everyone remembers.

8. Rakazo, my bot interface. Not tonight. See “Next”. If you want the background first, I wrote up why I run nineteen bots on Rakazo and how we moved from Grok to Rakazo with WhatsApp.

Interviewing the team about a real business

We opened the team’s “party mode” and I interviewed Tim, live, about something he wants to stop doing by hand. Here is the short version of what he told them. Booking requests arrive through a Squarespace form on the website. Someone checks the shared calendar, replies with an email template, sends a payment link, and records it all afterward. It works, but it is a lot of back and forth, and in the past an open calendar caused double bookings. He also wants a person to approve each reply before it goes out.

Hold the voice key, talk for a minute, let go, and the whole team reads the interview and debates it. They argued, politely. One suggested just switching on the booking tool Squarespace already has. I reminded them that Tim had told us exactly why that did not work. Another proposed the real fix for double bookings: the moment a draft reply is created, a tentative hold goes on the calendar, so the next request for that time sees it as taken. Unpaid holds expire after a set time. A request is screened before anything is drafted, and a person still presses send.

The team gave us a plan as a clean web page instead of a pile of text, and opened it in the browser. Then Tim remembered more details, such as different rules for members and for outside renters, and for after-hours bookings that need someone on site. We spoke them out loud and the team updated the plan on the spot. That is the whole method: describe the job, let the team challenge it, add what they missed, repeat.

A few smaller things came up along the way:

• Connectors versus API keys. Some services, like Zapier, have a built-in connector in Claude’s settings. Connect it and the keys are handled for you. For everything else you create an API key and keep it in the safe.
• Save what matters as a file. Claude’s built-in pages live inside your account. If you ever switch accounts, you lose them. Ask for a local HTML file when the plan is something you want to keep.
• Turn the voices off when you are in a hurry. Hearing each team member speak in a different voice is a great demo, and slow in real work. We told them to stop and just show the discussion.

Homework: audit your own computer

Here is the prompt from slide 12. It is read-only, so it looks and does not change anything:

Please do a read only security audit of this computer and tell me in plain language what else needs to be done to secure it.

Many laptops have gaps nobody has told their owner about, like a firewall that was never switched on. This is a quick way to find out what yours are.

Next

Night Three moves from the laptop to a server. The reason to run your password safe and your automations on a small rented server, around $16 a month from a provider like Hetzner, is that nothing depends on your laptop being open. We will also set up Tailscale, a private network, so that only you can reach it, and, if there is time, install Rakazo, my interface for talking to a whole team of specialised bots from your phone. Tim’s booking automation is the first real thing to build on it.

If you missed Night Two, you can still join. Everything we did is in the slides and you can message me to get the handout or ask questions.

Want me to set this up for you?

Everything we did on Tim’s laptop is what I set up for local businesses one on one. See the Small Business AI Setup, or get in touch and tell me what you would like to stop doing by hand.

Thank you

Thank you to Tim for the room, the screen and his laptop, and to everyone who came out on a Monday night.

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Keep reading

• AI Secret Sauce: Foundations Class: Night One, the secrets, bots and API keys underneath all of this
• Supercharging Local Entrepreneurs: What We Set Up for Loop and Links: the same setup on Denise’s Mac
• Shipping Fast With AI? Here’s the Server Security Stack You’re Probably Skipping: the password safe, written down
• Why I Love the BMad Method: the multi-agent framework behind the team
• An Easier Way to Manage an Agentic Team: where Rakazo comes in, and how I run 19 bots on it
• Nobody Ever Shows You AI. They Just Talk About It.: why this course is taught in the room

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