There is no shortage of material about AI. Search any tool by name and you will find a hundred videos, most of them competent, most of them showing something genuinely impressive happening inside four minutes.
Then you open your own laptop and it goes differently. The repository has a decade of decisions in it, and some of the people who made them have left. The spreadsheet has a column somebody renamed in 2019 and told nobody. There is a reviewer, a date, and a way things are done here that was never written down. You point the tool at that, and the four-minute video stops helping, because the four-minute video was filmed on an example chosen so that nothing would go wrong.
That gap is the reason this site exists.
The problem is not that the demo is new
Starting from an empty folder is real work. People are paid to do it, on deadlines, with something riding on it, and it is one of the things these tools are best at. Some of what we teach is exactly that. So this is not an argument against building from scratch, and a course that teaches it well is a good course.
The problem is that the example was picked. Nothing in it is ambiguous, and no constraint gets in the way. You never have to argue with the tool, or catch it quietly doing the wrong thing. Your work was not picked for you, and that is the whole difference.
So the test we hold ourselves to is a narrow one. It is whether you can open your own laptop on Monday and run the method on the thing actually in front of you. Every lesson is built on a job somebody really had to finish, with the constraints it really had. Every step is on screen as it ran, not summarised afterwards. When it went wrong, that is on screen too, because getting out of it is most of the skill and it is the part nobody films.
Why there is a forum
There is a second problem, and courses do not solve it. Nobody has been doing this for very long. The answers are being worked out right now, in a few thousand places at once, by people who never speak to each other. Most of what they learn gets typed into a private channel once and is gone by Friday.
The forum is where we would like some of it to land. It is a general forum about using AI on your own work. The sections that lead are Questions and help, for a problem you hit on your own project, and Show your work, for something you built or fixed and what it looked like before. There are sections for the course and the book, and they sit last on purpose.
Two habits are the whole culture there. One problem per topic, so a thread can actually be answered. And when your question is solved, come back and say what fixed it, because a thread that ends in silence helps nobody, including you in six months.
Reading it needs no account. Posting takes one reply to the Introduce yourself topic, which opens the rest of the forum. That reply asks for one thing an AI tool did for you recently that you could not have done before, and one thing that still fails every time you try it. The second answer is the useful one. It is usually the start of a real question, and it tells us what to work on next.
What is here
Claude Code on Real Codebases is the video course. You drive Claude Code through a real WordPress ecommerce plugin of about 240,000 lines: onboarding it, catching its failures, shipping fixes. It expects around two years of development experience, and the page says so at the top rather than in the small print.
Claude Cowork for Non-Programmers is the book, written in plain English for people who do not write code and are not planning to start. Files, spreadsheets, documents and the weekly report, handed over, and finished work back.
Both are on the catalogue page, next to the test a subject has to pass before it becomes one of ours: somebody is paid to do this job, we have done it ourselves on a deadline, and what you learn transfers to your own work rather than to our example. The list is short. It is meant to grow slowly.
This blog will carry the working notes. What changed in a tool and which lesson it affects. Something we tried that did not hold. The occasional piece that is too long to leave in a forum reply.
If there is a job on your desk right now that one of these tools ought to be able to do, and it will not, that is the thing to post. Say hello in the forum and bring it with you.
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