Today's Episode

Carl Vellotti is back.

His first episode hit 30k views. My most popular episode in months.

Today, he’s giving you the advanced playbook for Claude Code.

Claude Code hit $1 billion ARR in December. Fastest product ever to reach that milestone. Under 6 months.

Carl has been building with Claude Code every single day. He’s made all the mistakes. He’s learned all the expert workflows and tips.

In today’s episode, he shares everything.

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Key Takeaways

1. Claude Code hit $1B ARR in 6 months - fastest product ever. Anthropic optimized for power users doing deep work. Fewer users, insanely deep usage. Carl: "I spend all day in Claude Code. It gets to the point where you never really have to leave."

2. MCPs connect Claude to everything in 2 minutes - Model Context Protocol invented by Anthropic. One command to install Linear, Google Workspace, Slack. Essential stack: documents first, task management second, communication third, data sources fourth.

3. End-to-end PM workflow takes one morning instead of one week - Survey creation → analysis → PRD → presentation → 19 tickets. All through MCPs. Carl didn't use templates. Opus 4.5 handled everything.

4. Skills are pre-built templates but don't always auto-trigger yet - Solution: specify explicitly. "Create presentation using your presentation skill." Build Skills for anything you do more than twice. That's the compound effect.

5. Real Google Slides, not images - Carl's presentation skill created 19 fully editable slides from PRD. Takes a few minutes because Claude creates slides in parallel. "This is saving you hours. We used to spend entire afternoons turning PRDs into decks."

6. GitHub turns Claude into remote worker - Create issues from your phone. @mention Claude. It works while you're away. Carl's journal is a private GitHub repo. Voice transcriptions → issues → Claude updates markdown.

7. Workflows beat agents for production - Level 1 workflow: 5,000 tokens, 40 seconds. Level 3 agent: 90,000 tokens, 90 seconds. Carl's rule: "If something can be expressed as code, code it. Leave agents for cognitive work."

8. Production best practices separate hobbyists from pros - Set error workflows. Add retry logic (3 attempts, 1-second delays). Pin data during development. Use reasoning effort appropriately. Write detailed tool descriptions.

9. Real challenge is building reusable workflows - Learning basics takes a day. First workflow takes hours. But having 50 workflows built over months means everything is automated. Carl: "Because I have workflows for all these things already built, I can do it all in one shot."

10. Tools improve faster than you can learn them - Carl: "By the time you see this, there might be Claude 5." Your workflows from today will 10x when better models drop. PMs who started 6 months ago aren't just 6 months ahead, they're 100x ahead because systems compound with every improvement.