What people notice when they see my Cowork setup
A free tool to build yours. A course beta opening now.
I’ve been showing people my Cowork setup, and a pattern has emerged.
They watch me open a workspace with three words. They watch Claude read the project files silently and surface exactly where I left off — what happened last session, what’s in progress, what’s blocked — without a re-brief. They watch me close the session with one command, leaving a record the next session can resume from.
The recurring question is some version of: *Can you teach me to do that?*
I’ve heard it often enough that I’m building a course around it. But before the course, there’s a more important question: what actually makes the system work?
It starts with one file
The CLAUDE.md is a plain text file that lives at the root of your workspace. It contains the operating context the model needs: what you’re working on, how you work, what standards matter, and which rules shouldn’t be renegotiated every session. In a Cowork workspace, Claude reads it at session start — silently, without being asked.
That’s the difference between starting cold and starting with an explicit operating context. Not primarily better prompting. Not primarily a smarter model. A file, read at session start, that preserves the context you deliberately put into it.
I keep seeing serious AI users work without this layer. They re-explain their context repeatedly, watch the model forget what they said ten messages ago, and assume that’s just how it works.
That’s a workflow design problem, not a fixed property of AI.
The first step is building yours
I’ve put together an interview prompt you can paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or another capable LLM. It asks you questions one at a time, probes your answers, and generates a first-pass CLAUDE.md file you can copy into your workspace. A usable version takes about ten minutes. A serious version will keep evolving.
No cost, no email required. Run it, generate the file, and test the difference between a cold start and a session that begins with declared operating context.
Now: the course
The CLAUDE.md is the entry point. The course is the larger system.
I’m building a curriculum that walks you from a blank Cowork environment to a functioning personal AI operating system: workspaces, project files, reusable skills, open/close routines, and the closing discipline that turns each session into usable context for the next one.
I’m running the first cohort free. I’m keeping it small so the feedback is specific enough to matter. In exchange: use the material, tell me where it breaks, and give me feedback I can use to change the course. If any of your feedback is useful publicly, I may ask permission to quote it.
I’m selecting for useful variation, not first-come. If you want to be considered, reply by email. You can also leave a comment on this post. Tell me what you’re currently doing with AI and where it breaks. That’s enough.
This first cohort is free because it is part of the design process. It is how I find out what I actually need to teach.
Robert Ford builds products, writes stories and essays, and publishes The Intelligence Engine — a Substack about building AI practices that compound. His other writing lives at Brittle Views.