A free book on operating AI coding tools (no signup, source on GitHub)

A field manual

VLAD'S PLAYBOOK

The Ultimate AI Dive Deep

For operators who want to stop juggling tabs and start running AI like an OS. 47 chapters. One operator. Belkins, Folderly, the Newsletter, and a portfolio of others.

by Vlad Podoliako · Edition 10.7 · June 2026

3-10B tokens / mo · 5 companies · 47 chapters · 25 widgets · $0 to read · no email gate

New to AI? Start with Learn → Read the prologue first → Build/share your tier list Day zero (operator path) The journey (reader path) Questions people ask me

Before

Ten tabs. Twenty minutes. No decisions yet.

gmail.comhubspot.comapp.slack.comnotion.socalendar.google.comsentry.iodashboard.stripe.comapp.ahrefs.comchat.openai.comlinear.app

After

One channel. One coffee. The week is closed.

#ops · 6:30 AM

1.HubSpot — 2 deals advanced overnight, 1 went dark

2.Folderly — deliverability holding 96%, no incidents

3.Mentee A — prep doc generated, three open threads

4.One investor on calendar at 2 PM, conflict resolved

The why

“It has always given me satisfaction to be able to create what I have in mind.”

— Vlad Podoliako

Forty-Six Chapters

Read straight or jump where you need it. Each chapter stands alone.

01 AI as an Operating System

The Day I Killed My Tabs

02 The Five-Tool Stack

Five Tools, Not Fifty

03 Why Claude Forgets You

AI Is a Temp Agency, Not a Genius

04 Obsidian as Working Memory

The Vault — Where AI Becomes Useful

05 What a Skill Is

Recipes the Chef Reads Before Cooking

06 Parallel Subagents and Fan-Out

The Swarm

07 Scheduled Tasks

Make AI Work While You Sleep

08 Chat, Cowork, or Claude Code?

Three Doors to Claude

09 Blast Radius and Key Hygiene

Don't Get Owned

10 Hosted Agents, Local Models, Frontier

The Wild Stuff

11 Build a Skill in 30 Minutes

How to Build a Skill, End to End

12 Connectors and MCP

Types, install paths, custom servers

13 Claude Code in 10 Minutes

The 10-Minute Quickstart

14 Slash Commands and Settings

The Cheat Sheet

15 When to Skip Permissions

Permissions, Sandboxes, and Sharp Edges

16 Hooks and Custom Subagents

From Autocomplete to Coworker

17 25 Operator Tips

Hard-Won Wisdom from Hour 200

18 Headless Claude and CI

claude --print in Production

19 Shipping a Product in a Saturday

How to Build Products with AI

20 tmux, Worktrees, Named Sessions

Running Six Claudes at Once

21 Which Mode Right Now?

Interactive, Plan, Auto

22 Resume, Replay, Fork

Session Management

23 A Saturday Build, Hour by Hour

Vibe Coding, with the Misfires Kept In

24 The Tier List

Every Tool Ranked Without Mercy

25 Evals — Smoke, Regression, Golden

Evals or Hope, Pick One

26 How Do I Get My Team to Adopt?

Getting Twelve People to Use This

27 Voice Agents — STT, LLM, TTS

Phone Number to Production

28 Six Failures, Six Bills

The Receipts I'd Rather Not Show You

29 Why Is My Bill So High?

Token Math, Caching, Batch, Routing

30 When to Drop CC for the SDK

Building with the Anthropic SDK Directly

31 Six Stages from Idea to Deploy

Ideation, Foundation, Creation, Polishing, Security, Deploy

32 Agent Archetypes (Rick Platform)

OpenClaw, NemoClaw, Hermes

33 Browser Agents with Playwright

Login, Click, Scrape, Post

34 Persona Agents and the Four NEVERs

Writing on Your Behalf Without Becoming a Bot

35 Codex or Claude Code — or Both?

Day Shift, Night Shift

36 When Do I Outgrow Claude Code?

Beyond CC — CrewAI, LangGraph, SDK

37 Context Files — CLAUDE.md, memory, skills

Where Conventions Live, Where They Die

38 Run Until Done

Goals, Loops, and the Evaluator That Tells the Agent to Stop

39 Skills You Should Steal

A tour of the 1M-skill ecosystem, the 73% that's broken, and the gaps an operator can fill

40 Prompting, or the Knob You Probably Shouldn't Tune

Why most prompt engineering content is wrong for operators

41 Send the Link, Not the File

Every Deliverable as a Live Artifact

42 Codex on a Loop

The Second Opinion, Proof-Checked While You Sleep

43 Codex as Saviour

When a Second Prior Deletes 90,000 Lines and Hardens What's Left

44 Dreaming — Memory That Curates Itself

The Surfacer That Proposes, Never Writes

45 The App Store Without Swift

A Native iOS App, Real Recurring Revenue, and Not One Line of Swift I Wrote

46 Designing with AI

A Model Can Generate Any Interface in Seconds. It Still Can't Tell You Which One Is Right.

47 The Measurement Layer

When the AI Output Is the Product, a Three-Line Eval Isn't Enough

Now · Edition 10.7 · June 2026

Vlad's Playbook is public. 47 chapters, 3 live embedded case studies, the source is open and is the recipe.

Read the launch →

New · Live · Updated hourly

Radar — what's moving in AI, ranked by lead time

A self-updating index of what's travelling through the AI ecosystem, ranked by where it sits on the gradient — papers to repos to community to analysis. The receipts are on every row. See it before the crowd does.

New here? Start here

Learn the basics first

New to AI, Claude, Claude Code, or Cowork? The official free courses in the right order, a five-word primer, and the learning ladder — then the book.

New · Model file

Fable 5 — the withheld model, buyable

Anthropic shipped the model it said it wouldn't — split in two. Pricing, the full benchmark table read honestly, the fallback architecture, and the June 22 clock.

Dynamic Workflows

Opus 4.8 — the swarm that runs itself

Claude writes a script that plans, fans out hundreds of parallel subagents, and verifies its own work. What it is, the validator loop, how to turn it on, and when not to.

New · Showcase

Good taste, on tap

Stop your AI from generating generic slop. A before/after of Leon Lin's public taste-skill (45k★, credited) — and the moon-base and three-design receipts I built with the discipline.

Memory

Dreaming — the loop pointed inward

A local, propose-only twin of Anthropic's Dreaming: it digests your sessions, surfaces candidate memories that each cite a verbatim quote, and re-verifies every one against the raw transcript — and never writes to memory itself.

New · Method

The Self-Audit

The swarm pointed at the agent's own setup. Five auditors, an adversarial red-team, 41 findings — including two refutations that would have broken the system if executed. Your config rots faster than your code.

New · Reference

What Claude Code actually costs

Every plan and API rate, verified — then the receipts: the real monthly bill, the $1,108→$4,312 cache mistake, and the three levers that cut it.

New · Comparison

Claude Code vs Codex

Ran both in anger. Verdict per job — including the night shift Codex actually wins.

New · Reference

Hooks that can't be talked out of

Ten real configs with verdicts — what each caught in production, and the three hook ideas that failed expensively.

New · Setup

Claude Code + MCP

The setup guide grounded in a real roster: the servers worth wiring, what each one costs and earns, and the ones that got cut.

New · Examples

12 agents that actually ran

A receipts gallery: the book swarm, the 4 AM watcher, the $0.40/min voice agent — every example with a cost and a failure on record.

Sovereign Stack

Don't get deprecated

Open-weights LLMs that survive the deprecation calendar — Ollama, the hardware ladder, the heretic question, and the nano-gpt Saturday.

Method

HTML-ization

Stop sending dead files. Every report, pitch, and audit ships as a live interactive artifact — two real ones embedded and clickable.

The launch

Edition 10.7 is public

Typewriter hero, animated stat odometer, three live embedded artifacts, all 47 chapters as a click-anywhere mosaic, a post-credit scene.

Live diary

Launch week

The launch as its own experiment in the thesis. Four surfaces, seven days, receipts accruing — honest, even the embarrassing ones.

Resources

Vault library

CLAUDE.md skeletons, .mcp.json examples, hook scripts, SKILL templates, the five reusable prompts. Copy, paste, ship.

Reference

Cheat sheet

Slash commands, settings, env vars, file paths, keyboard shortcuts. Print it. Tape it next to your monitor.

Vocabulary

Glossary

Fifty-plus terms you'll need, grouped A–Z. Linked inline throughout the book. Hover any underlined term to read it.

Tier list

Rank without mercy

Drag-and-drop your own tier list across AI tools, connectors, and infra. The live LMArena leaderboard for reference.

Orchestration

Swarms

Multi-agent orchestration — the four-pattern visualizer, ten swarm skills shipped, seven patterns I use, the orchestration prompts to steal. Three real multi-session screenshots.

GitHub

GitHub for non-developers

Five non-code uses, eight gh commands you actually need, what you can safely ignore. Six worked examples — Vlad's Playbook, AFC, Karpathy, Simon Willison ×2, profile READMEs.

The stack

66 skills · 32 agents · 12 plugins

Vlad's full Claude Code setup. Every skill folder, every custom subagent, every plugin — sanitized and shareable. Freshly pruned by the Self-Audit.

Research

What shifted this week

External findings that move what an operator does Monday — model releases, deprecations, benchmark shifts. Dated, sourced, signal-not-receipt discipline.

More from the shelf

Decisions, setups, and reference — the rest of the Playbook.

Decision

Build vs Buy

Sequencing wedge, cost ladder, and a 5-question matrix for what to make vs buy.

The case

For your CFO

600 words to defend the spend — Claude as a labor line, not a SaaS line.

Rules

The 12-rule CLAUDE.md

Karpathy's template at 11% mistakes; the operator overlay gets it to 3%.

Setup

Cowork setup

Vlad's Cowork connectors and scheduled tasks — sanitized and cloneable.

Vault

Vault starter

PARA vs 7 other systems, project-as-entity, and a working vault to clone.

Recipes

Weekend builds

Eight Saturday-ship recipes — plus the one that's a trap.

Skills

Starter skills

Six drop-in SKILL.md files to paste into ~/.claude and run today.

Roadmap

30-day plan

A day-by-day roadmap from clean machine to operator in a month.

Index

Sections

Every chapter grouped by theme — the table of contents, by topic.

About

About

Vlad, the portfolio, and the newsletter behind the Playbook.