How should less-technical people get started with agentic AI tools?
A reader asks:
[Please give] recommendations for how non-technical people can/should get started with Claude Code, especially for automating regular computer tasks.
My first suggestion is negative: don't follow a tutorial, for these reasons:
- Tutorials put you in a passive frame of mind, which puts you at great risk of a zero learning output.
- Knowing something about the underlying domain helps you understand a new tool much better.
- AI can help you make a Claude Code tutorial or quickstart with any emphasis you like.
Next, set yourself up to be and feel maximally safe and minimally confused. You can get a good sense of the potential of AI without making optimizations or taking unnecessary risk. So I'd suggest:
- Not starting on a pay-as-you-go plan, so that you don't risk spending more than you intend (or worrying about it). You can do this by using a free tier or by buying a flat-rate subscription. These change very fast--ask your AI of choice for your current options!--but right now Gemini has a free tier and a $10/month introductory rate for a paid tier. Access to Claude Code starts at $20/month.
- Not giving the tool MCP access to your email, Google Drive, or similar.
- Ignoring advice about configuring elaborate
AGENTS.mdfiles or hooks before you try these out. Complicated configurations are a sure way for a less-technical user (or a technical one!) to feel overwhelmed and grumpy. (I like to create these instructions in light of experience, anyway.) - If you're at all confused in the installation or setup process, ask AI for help; they tend to be very good at this sort of thing. It can feel quite discouraging to fear that you're doing everything wrong; being in the habit of checking with AI when you're not sure can prevent a lot of that discouragement.
In choosing a first project:
- Start small and specific: instead of "automate my invoice creation," try "extract information X, Y, and Z from this folder of .pdf files."
- Relatedly: we hear a lot of bragging about full end-to-end automation, but the last 10% of an automation process is usually the bulk of the headache. Focus on the first 90%, 50%, or 25% first.
- Beware the XY problem and don't be afraid to ask the computer for what you really want: your intuitions about what might be easy or hard for it might not be accurate. Starting small doesn't mean starting with something trivial or easy.
- Consider brainstorming a list of ideas before you start on any of them: again, it can be hard to tell in advance which of them will be easy or hard. Then, if the first one doesn't succeed, you can move on more easily and less painfully.
- "Just ask for what you want" extends to the meta-level, too. Users of new technology often forget what they learn in a session, or at least fear that they will. You can just say: "I'm a new user: please make a document summarizing what we did, the important concepts it used, and what's most important for me to remember for future sessions."
Good luck! I like knowing how new users interact with these tools, so as I say here: if you're not sure whether you should email me, you probably should.