Your first AI colleague on your desk

Chapter 1 of The AI Manager says the thing most people get wrong on day one. They use these tools like a search engine. Question in, answer out, next question. What's actually on the other side is closer to a well-read colleague who joined this morning: good at a lot, knows nothing about you, and waiting to be told how things are done here.

You wouldn't manage a new hire through a search box. You'd sit them at a desk with the files they need and a page of how you like things done. That's this lesson.

What the desk is

The desk is a folder on your computer. In it: one page about your business and your rules, a file for each job you give it, and a log of what it did. Claude Code reads the folder and works inside it, where you can see every file it touches.

The free kit from the book does the setting up. Four steps and a short film, nothing to configure. Download the folder, open the page inside it, follow the steps, and you've got a desk with a colleague at it.

Put Claude on your desk

The first morning

Treat it like a first morning, because it is one.

Open the page and tell it what you do, in your own words. Who your customers are. What you want most this year. How you like to sound. That takes ten minutes and it's the most valuable ten minutes in this lesson, because chapter 4 says identity is the biggest lever in any instruction and the one almost nobody pulls.

Then give it one job you were going to do anyway. Reply to the enquiry that came in last night. Chase the invoice. Write the three posts for the week from the one thing that happened. Read the draft. Change what you'd change. Send it yourself.

That last part is a rule, not a suggestion. The desk shows you a draft. It never sends, posts, pays or signs. Chapter 15 is about who answers when something goes wrong, and the answer is you, so the final click stays yours.

What to put in front of it, and what not to

Chapter 14 asks the question most owners haven't: what happens to what you type in? The answer, for a website chatbot, is that it's gone to somebody else's computer, and the law treats it as something you handed over.

The desk is different in one way: your files stay on your machine, and only the piece you hand over for the job goes out. But it still goes out, so hand it with care. The customer's name, the address, the amount: strip them when the job doesn't need them. A letter chasing "the balance on last month's invoice" is just as usable as one that says the sum out loud, and it's a lot safer if it ends up somewhere you didn't intend. Never put a password, a card number or anybody's identity number in front of it. If a step needs one, you type it yourself, in the place it belongs.

What it gets good at

The jobs that pay back first are the ones you do every week and resent. The inbox sort. The weekly plan on one page. The reply to the enquiry that's the same enquiry as last Tuesday. Chapter 2 calls this gathering and landing, and says a machine already does both better than you. Let it.

What it never gets good at is deciding. Whether to take the job. Whether the customer's worth the discount. Whether this week is the week to raise prices. Those stay on your side of the desk, and the colleague's job is to get you to them with the gathering done.

The part I won't pretend about

It'll do something odd in the first week. It'll draft an email that's too formal, or sort your inbox by a rule you never gave it, or ask you a question you thought you'd answered. Every one of those is a line missing from your page, and the fix is to add it, not to give up on the desk.

And it needs you at the desk. This isn't a receptionist that runs while you're on a job. It's a colleague who works when you're there to read what it did. For the jobs that happen while you're out, there's the door below.

From chapter 1 of The AI Manager, You Were Asking It Like a Search Engine, and chapter 14, Ask What Could Go Wrong. Free to read.