The Immersive Lens Podcast

Paul Engin | Dave Ghidiu | Jeff Kidd

Episode 15: Claude

Cover art for podcast episode

 

In this episode of The Immersive Lens, hosts Paul Engin and Dave Ghidiu explore the rapid expansion of the Claude AI ecosystem. They break down how Anthropic is moving beyond simple chat interfaces to create a comprehensive suite of productivity tools - including Projects, Artifacts, and Co-work - designed to transform AI from a basic prompter into a true collaborative partner. The discussion highlights how these features allow for deeper context retention and specialized "skills," making AI more intuitive for complex tasks like software development and course design.

Paul and Dave share their personal workflows, contrasting Claude’s "warmer" and more nuanced persona with other giants like Gemini and ChatGPT. While they celebrate the creative freedom offered by tools like Artifacts, they remain grounded, discussing the practicalities of token limits, the "equity gap" in paid tiers, and the critical importance of data privacy in an increasingly automated world. The episode concludes with a forward-looking verdict: AI is rapidly evolving into a seamless, agent-based operating system that will soon be woven into every facet of our digital lives.




Key Topics

Claude’s Human-Centric Design Paul and Dave emphasize that Claude stands out due to its "warmth" and user-friendly interface, which includes a subtle off-white tint and personalized greetings. This design philosophy extends into its responses, which the hosts find less "stiff" than competitors, making it a preferred choice for intense creative work and complex reasoning.

The Power of Contextual Projects The new Projects feature allows users to upload a massive "knowledge base" of files that Claude remembers across multiple chats. This eliminates the need for constant re-prompting and allows the AI to act as a specialized expert in a particular field, such as a dedicated assistant for teaching Python or managing business reports.

Vibe Coding with Artifacts Artifacts represent a major leap in "vibe coding," allowing users to generate and instantly preview functional web apps, games, or data dashboards without writing a single line of code. By "forking" existing templates from a public library, users can customize complex tools-like a digital piano or a learning management system-and embed them directly into their own websites.

The Rise of Agentic AI with Co-work The episode introduces Co-work, a "research preview" feature that allows Claude to perform tasks directly on a user’s local computer. While this signals a shift toward Agentic AI that can organize files or run automated reports, the hosts stress the importance of its safety-first approach, which requires explicit user approval before the AI executes any major actions on the OS.





Transcript

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Paul: Is that a is he okay? Is he weird.

Dave: Oh my god.

Paul: That was that weird?

Dave: That was really weird. You know, it's like my glasses, it just didn't fit, it didn't fit your sound, okay?

Jeff: It's just a it's just the reverb.

VO: Welcome to the Immersive Lens, the podcast exploring the technologies reshaping how we live, work, and learn. From AI and virtual reality to creative media and design, we are diving into the tools and ideas shaping our connected world.

Paul: My name is Paul Engin, join us as we uncover the people and ideas driving the next wave of interactive experiences.

Dave: And I'm Dave Ghidiu... This is the Immersive Lens.

Paul: All right, Dave. You've been busy. What's going on?

Dave: Been busy. Uh, just uh hot off the heels I was driving back from a conference in Jersey we were doing AI and where the the FLX AI Hub is is really pushing the boundary on what domains AI uh can be supported in. So for instance this is the the biggest summer camp conference of the world. The American Camping Association. So we were showing them how they can use AI for a lot of the stuff they do. Um, but I heard this stat as I was catching up on my uh podcasts on the drive, the eight hour drive, that 80% of podcasts don't make it past their first year.

Paul: Uh-oh.

Dave: I know. And so, and then I was also listening to the Chat EDU podcast, a friend friends of the pod. And and uh they were talking uh they had mentioned that and then I was also listening to a podcast about Polymarket which in there's a few different like apps out there where you can bet on like anything. Right. Have you heard of Polymarket?

Paul: So yeah, can you explain it though just cause uh for clarity?

Dave: Yeah, Polymarket and and there's a few other apps let you bet on anything. And so it's like uh I will bet that and you know how people like used to bet on the Super Bowl and they're like I will bet that the it's gonna be heads at the the yeah. It is more nuanced than that and and you can bet on like oh I bet that FLCC will have 80% of learners graduate this year. You can bet on anything.

Paul: Right. Whether the podcast continues for a second year?

Dave: Well I was thinking I was like okay, I'm gonna go onto Polymarket and make that bet that we will we will beat the odds and make it past the first year. But you can't use Polymarket in America.

Paul: Oh you can't?

Dave: No, but if you have a VPN you can.

Paul: Oh...

Dave: Circumvent it. Yeah so Polymarket's been in the news, there's been some pretty negative press lately. Um one is that they are there's this like affiliate model on college campuses now because they think that that's gonna be a huge boon to their audiences if they can get college students betting on anything.

Paul: Oh interesting.

Dave: Yeah, so they're paying like one fraternity I think it was at Columbia, um I'll have to double check that, got paid $30,000 like within the first week for the number of people they signed up. Um but the the downside to all these apps are like, oh we will bet that bombs will drop on Iran on this date. So it's it's like really, that's the kind of stuff you want to be betting on. So um like all technology there's some good and some bad.

Paul: Yeah, I heard that there was they talk about um leaders being overthrown and all of that stuff and like there's... yeah. I've heard uh good and bad about it, but um it seems like a really interesting concept and obviously it's not uh something that is uh secured by the government so it's not like an FDA or secured loan or whatever um so.

Dave: And so for our international listeners if you could put a place... place a bet on Polymarket that we make it past the first year we will beat the 80% odds.

Paul: That's right, that's right. Go Immersive Lens podcast.

Dave: Alright so you tell me now, tell me what you what you've been up to.

Paul: So um...

Dave: You have something there, I'm curious.

Paul: I do, I have something on my wrist. Okay. And then um I spoke about it in an earlier cast but I went and I got us um a pair of Meta smart glasses.

Dave: And for for those of who are not watching on YouTube, the packaging on this is insane. It's got like springs in it and it like unfolds, it looks like a spaceship almost.

Paul: Yeah, it's very compact and it's the case itself is a charger.

Dave: Wireless charging?

Paul: Wireless charging.

Dave: Oh my gosh.

Paul: And um the uh the glasses themselves look like glasses. Like they don't look like the over like the Vision Pro like the big huge like outside of the cameras on both sides of the lenses.

Dave: They're sharp. I didn't even notice them. Now I will say I like these, it's like a dark brown color kind of like thick rimmed. Yeah. Um and Jeff I know you're you're listening, can you tell me what you think of the aesthetics of these?

Jeff: Okay, Jeff does not like it, he's not a fan. But I think they're cool. I like the kind of like the bigger glasses.

Paul: And for the for the folks at home um or or who aren't uh watching it on YouTube, um you have the ability to have a display on one of your eyes. So um the device talks to your phone. Oh Dave, Jeff did you want to say something else?

Jeff: All I was gonna say was, they just look a little small for his face.

Paul: I don't I don't know about that.

Jeff: That's my only complaint. I think it looks a little small on him, that's all.

Dave: Alright so the next iteration they're gonna have to like make kind of like different styles now that they've got the technology down.

Paul: I would say yeah. I will say that they have the large, this is their large. Okay. And then they have a medium size. They have two sizes. And then they have different size bands as well.

Dave: And what does the band do, what does the wristband remind me?

Paul: So um the band allows you to like navigate, so you can do like a middle finger pinch and then um the menu will display um and unfortunately we can't show you, we tried to do the camera so you could see it, but um I'll try to find some footage that we could uh try to uh show you. But the um the middle finger allows you to kind of navigate back or to the main menu when you double pinch like that.

Dave: Yeah, it's so weird watching you like do these things because nothing's changing, but your experience is changing, like what's being shown on your glasses.

Paul: Exactly. Yes, and it's a complete so it's augmented reality which means that I see everything in front of me but there's just a digital overlay that allows me to navigate. And then if I hold my thumb and I just move my thumb across my finger, I'm navigating my menu system. And you can't see me navigating the menu system but I can navigate and um it's it's still in its infancy. There's still like it connects to WhatsApp, um you can ask it to it uses AI and you can ask it to like tell you what's going on or if you need help with something you can say can you help me troubleshoot this and it'll...

Dave: Yeah, and and I see that and you had talked in one of the previous episodes about the utility of like working on your car and you're like okay, okay glasses, how do I change the oil or whatever?

Paul: Exactly. Exactly. And it will it will like have an arrow that points like unplug this hose or use this or you need to do that. Oh that looks like there's a tear in the whatever.

Dave: Yeah. And I will say you let me you let me put them on beforehand, and I was expecting it to be much like the Google Glass where it was just a little image in the corner of the lens, but it was like over the whole lens. Like my field of vision.

Paul: Yeah. It feels really good like I can completely see through it and I can navigate through it and um I can record videos, I can do captioning, I can do teleprompter. Um and the captions are pretty cool, they can do live translation. So if you're talking to someone in a different language, it'll translate live on in English.

Dave: So you can understand them but they can't understand you?

Paul: They need a pair of glasses too. Yeah, yeah. It looks like Jeff just texted something.

Dave: Okay. Passing notes in class.

Paul: And I can see that through my uh I don't know if I want to I want to see it, but uh let's see.

Jeff: I was just giving a production note, but seeing as how you called it out, I just asked Dave to slide a little closer to you so he's a little more centered on the camera, but that's you know.

Paul: That's good. But see you saw that that popped up.

Dave: I saw that, yep. It says, Dave uh are you able to discreetly slide closer towards Paul. Wait, is it on your glasses? You get a text message on your glasses? Oh that's wild.

Paul: So but but you nobody else can see that I'm seeing it.

Dave: Yeah, like yeah I'm looking at you, not it looks like I don't see any imaging on your glasses at all.

Paul: Right, right. So I got the text and notification and...

Dave: Passing notes in class just went to the whole next level.

Paul: Yeah. So um definitely need to play with it a little bit more. I think there's some more we can do with it. I tried to look at the dev kits and they don't have the dev kit for the display, but you can use it for the AI.

Dave: Okay. Yeah, and I've seen some people already doing stuff with the AI. One thing I I like about these is unlike the the minute I put the Mac Vision Pro on, I was like this is awesome, but I there's no utility in it for me yet. And I was like it's gonna be a long time until it becomes like a tool, but this right now I'm like, oh yeah, I totally get it. Like...

Paul: And that's this is where I'm like oh my gosh, if this is but you need a Vision Pro to get to or the Oculus or you need all those. I mean this has several hours of battery life right now as well, and I'm not tethered to anything.

Dave: Yeah, the Nintendo Virtual Boy died so that these glasses can live.

Paul: That's right. That's right. Alright, let me take these off.

Dave: And I I just think they're they're fantastic and for a kind of like the first generation it's just gonna be like I can't wait to see what comes out like next year.

Paul: Yes. And this I I hear rumors that this summer there's gonna be um a lot of movement around the AR glasses and stuff, so um I like 'em.

Dave: And did you hear speaking of Meta, that they acquired Multi-book? And we had talked about Open Claw and Multi-book was their the the AI bots social media venue. And Meta just bought it.

Paul: Wait, is that the one that like the AI bots are talking to each other and like having conversations?

Dave: Yeah. They're it's kind of like Reddit and one of the like sub-reddits or the sub-mults or whatever they call them is like uh isn't isn't my human cute or things like that.

Paul: I don't know, what do you think is it for training, is it for fun, what do you think that Meta bought that for? That seems like a I don't know, it's interesting.

Dave: Yeah, I don't know. I I mean I imagine if it truly is all AI agents conversing in there and there's kind of speculation that it's not, then what a trove of data you're sitting on for agentic AI.

Paul: Yeah. Absolutely.

Dave: Um but also I mean no one does social media better than Meta so why not like scoop that up?

Paul: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Um, so I figured uh today our hot topic, um we're gonna break down Claude's ecosystem.

Dave: I love Claude.

Paul: So um, we're gonna talk a little bit about the chat, projects, artifacts, skills, code and uh the um co-work. And uh kind of see the evolution of where AI is going and I know we touched on this, but I think we're seeing that big transition from just a straight prompt and chat to more of an ecosystem related to each product. And we talked about OpenAI's ecosystem last at the last uh episode.

Dave: And and so we're just going down the gamut. By the way, I use Claude, that's probably what I use the most for my intense work. I'll use Gemini as like a daily thing, but Claude is for my intense work. What what do you use, what which tool or tools?

Paul: So I I use all three right now. I use uh OpenAI um and for OpenAI um I use it for a lot of the coding um because until recently um we didn't have the projects and um I'm gonna talk a little bit about these, but the projects and um I have a I have a paid subscription to OpenAI so um I use the Codex and um I've been happy with what it's been producing. But I use Claude for coding as well, because sometimes I feel I don't need to prompt as much and it will create a more elegant solution to my prompt, if that makes sense.

Dave: Yeah, did did I show you the EKG?

Paul: Yeah. Okay.

Dave: So we'll talk about that. Um in in I find that Claude I it I see more of my personality in the responses it gives and the software that it generates for me than I do with say Gemini which has coding and also like OpenAI's Codex.

Paul: Yeah, and and I use so I use it in that context and I also write anything that's regarding writing, um I'll use Claude. And then for any and this is weird but for anything media production related it's all it's all Gemini because the flow is just you can't beat flow right now. It gives me control like all our intros to our podcast...

Dave: Oh flow by flow you mean the video software.

Paul: Oh yeah the video software in Gemini sorry. So flow is the video um AI system where you can upload a first image and a last image and then prompt it what you want.

Dave: That's insane.

Paul: So um and then all the intros to all our podcasts, you'll see a little robot and he does different things.

Dave: Oh I didn't realize that.

Paul: And I uh... You gotta watch it on YouTube. But um yeah, so um I'll use that. But um one of the things that I really love about Claude is um there is a certain level of warmth to it. And I know this sounds really weird, but it's it's got a slight off-white tint to it so it creates a warmer tone than just a straight white. And then it always greets you. I don't know if you've if you've gotten when you logged into Claude...

Dave: Yeah, it's like what are we going to create today?

Paul: Yeah. Good afternoon, welcome back Paul. Um and it creates that engagement.

Dave: Yeah, and I I will say this with Claude, when I read the responses and see the output from Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini just seem stiffer. Like this is overall it's not just the welcome and the color which is great, but like that's their whole thing. And you know I have a lot of respect for Anthropic for a lot of things they're doing. You know but but gosh they're really like crushing it with the the way that it responds and interacts with humans and they, you know they have that constitution, it's like an 85 page kind of like this is the values of what you are Claude. So they're doing you know they have anthropologists on staff and psychologists, so they're doing like all these fantastic things and it really shines through.

Paul: And I think that's one of the things that and everyone needs to do this, and and they probably have the same feeling when they talk about Android or Apple, but I feel secure when I'm in Claude. I feel like they're gonna take care of my data properly. Whereas I can't say you know with Meta with the glasses I I you know, I take the glasses off when I'm not actively using 'em because I don't want it to record anything that I don't want them to. If that makes sense.

Dave: Yeah, I mean Meta's been in the news quite a bit over the you know the last 20 years for a lot of missteps and like security and privacy issues and Claude has been in the news recently for kind of on the opposite end of that, like hey they're doing all these things right. I think there's that's no surprise that they're the number one AI service for say enterprise. Because people trust them. They're trustworthy.

Paul: Absolutely. And we're going to talk about, I took some screen caps so you can see um about like how they are protecting you. They have like incognito mode and they have a lot of neat neat features and they always make sure that you know you're in control and you're working with um with them. Not and it's not just doing something on its own without you aware of it, you know?

Dave: Yeah. And they're known for uh they're known for not training on your data. Yeah. Which so so I think that's a big piece of it.

Paul: Um so I figured what we'll do is we'll break it down, we'll talk about the chat, then we'll go into projects, modules and skills, artifacts, code and then finally we'll end with co-work. So do you want to talk a little bit about the Claude chat?

Dave: Yeah. And and before we do that, all those things you mentioned are things to help you be productive for the most part.

Paul: Oh yes.

Dave: And and so it's clear to me that Anthropic is positioning Claude to be like this is your coworker, this is the person who's going to take you and your specialty, what you excel at, what you're an expert at, and bring you to the next level.

Paul: Yeah. And it's interesting because they do have like um when they talk about uh the breakdown of these different tools, it's like you know if you start with chat, it's uh everyone knows this, um it's what the audience is used to seeing. And then projects is something that um helps uh Claude remember what you want. And then skills um allows the basically you to work, you have Claude to work the way you want it to work.

Dave: Yeah.

Paul: And then artifacts is what they use to kind of build things, code is all the programming aspects of it.

Dave: It's like a whole suite of productivity tools.

Paul: Yes. 100%. 100%. And some of these tools were just released as of this month. I mean some of these tools didn't exist prior. Um so let's talk about Claude chat first.

Dave: Yeah, start with the chat.

Paul: So um I think one of the things that we can think about as far as the um the chat goes it's really does a good job with reasoning and um thinking about your decisions um and it gives you a different tone in its response uh versus like a a ChatGPT.

Dave: Yeah, and and it just like bleeds user user experience. So when you use ChatGPT there's 5.2, 5. as of right now which is like March 12th, there's 5.2, 5.3, and 5.4. And that's a little cryptic. And when you use Claude, it's 4.6 but they have Haiku which is kind of their fast thinking one. And then you know that's a short poem. Then they have Sonnet, which is their medium grade. And then they have Opus, which is you know for the heavy lifting. So every version of Claude they have this kind of like three layered system. So there's no ambiguity, you know exactly if you're using the fast model or not. So so I like that. But I agree with what you said, like when you use Claude you know you're using Claude because it's just so rich and textured.

Paul: Yes. And I think that one of the things that you can think about um speaking about those different models is you can actually select those in the prompt. Mm-hmm. And so the way you can approach this is that if you needed to do a lot of analysis or like uh look at a full research paper or look at hundreds of pages of reports, you can use the Opus um to kind of aggregate that data versus just a simple prompt that um a Sonnet might might work.

Dave: Yeah. And like Sonnets my like daily thing, like find me something. And I think that's a default setting anyhow. But I will say this, and I think we mentioned this about the context window, which is like when you're having a conversation, how long can that conversation go on? How much content can be in there before it kind of starts forgetting and stumbling. And it's insane. Like we used to hit the limits all the time.

Paul: Yes.

Dave: Uh and now Claude actually does this thing which when it gets full, if it should get full, it will say hang on Dave, I'm gonna consolidate this. It used to say you better start a new chat buddy. Now it's like I'm gonna consolidate this and and we can keep going in this chat. Which I think is cool.

Paul: Yes, and that's so that's the um they have a paid subscription and they have uh free um just the free use of of Claude. Um but it's just limited. So um there are occasions when I'm coding unfortunately cause I don't have the paid subscription of it...

Dave: Yeah, you can chew through credits and tokens.

Paul: Oh it does. And I'm like I'm so close. And I'm like and I have to borrow my wife's login and I'm like now logging in cause she's got the full... but then I have to re-prompt I have to move my prompt over.

Dave: Yeah. Do you ever ask it so your in the prompt where you had everything going like can you summarize this so that I can bring it to a new chat and then it gives you like two or three paragraphs, so it captures the important things.

Paul: Yes. Yep. Exactly. I think that's a good point. So um to I think they're actually making this much easier now that you can export your your prompts. Yeah. And then you can import as an MD file and then you can import those into OpenAI...

Dave: I actually didn't know that.

Paul: Yeah, they're starting to I'm glad I came today. Wonderful. They're starting to um work through that porting system to make it easier to move between um these different AI systems.

Dave: That's cool. And I knew that Claude built a tool to bring to kind of ingest say OpenAI things and I know Gemini's rolling that out too, so.

Paul: Yeah. That is nice standardization. That is really nice. And again I I think that I think a lot of things started this way. Even like the web. You had different browsers doing different standards and then they finally built a consortium.

Dave: That took years.

Paul: It did. It did. But I'm glad they finally did because you know now there's some level of consistency in what to develop. Um so the the prompt is something that we really see on a on an everyday basis, the normal um...

Dave: Yeah, it's like what most people engage with AI.

Paul: Yep. Um and the next thing that they enabled was something called projects. And we spoke about this in OpenAI but uh they kind of they it's the same thing, they they created it in Claude now. Um do you want to kind of explain what that is?

Dave: Sure, so projects are you a collection of chats, but it's more than that. You can upload all these files. So for instance, I'm doing an independent study with a learner right now in Python 2. Mm-hmm. So I uploaded kind of all the content that is important to me if I were to teach Python 2. Like an open-source textbook and other files. Like labs I had done in Java but now they need to be Python. So that becomes kind of the intelligence of it. And then in this project, this is where I have all my chats. So every week before I meet with my learner and I'm like okay, this week we're gonna be going over polymorphism or we're gonna be going over inheritance, and so I'll engage with Claude with this chat and it will say, oh remember last week you we we already did inheritance and we touched polymorphism and we said we'd get back to it this week. And as we're writing labs for your learner this week, let's call back to the labs we did in previous weeks. And it's just so smooth. It's it's it really is I think the tagline was something like remember it remembers your world or something like that.

Paul: Yes.

Dave: And it's awesome because it is all about doing Python 2. There is nothing else other than like what we have been doing and where we're going with it. I love it.

Paul: Yeah. And it's related to exactly what you uploaded. So it's not pulling necessarily it can, but it's not pulling from the knowledge base that you you added to the project.

Dave: Yeah. And another project I have is for the FLX AI Hub. So whenever we do talks in different places, they're all kind of stored there. That's kind of like the central nervous system. Each one is a new chat but it's within the project. And so our ethos and our atmosphere is still kind of like matched across the whole thing. Do do you use projects at all in in Claude?

Paul: Um I've used it briefly. Um so with the free version you're only allowed I think it's five. So I'm somewhat limited as to the amount of projects I can use.

Dave: You have to be judicious.

Paul: Yes. But um it is really nice because uh unlike the prompt I can like you said I can feed it um a bunch of information related to what I want to kind of build and then I can go from there. So I could upload screenshots, I can upload um project specs, and then when I'm talking to it, now it has all that information, so now when it's building it'll build related to everything in that knowledge base if that makes sense.

Dave: Yeah. And it also allows you to upload those instructions too. So you can give it kind of guidelines and guardrails and like personality as well.

Paul: Right. So the type of projects um you know some examples that might be uh like research projects, um writing projects, software development, course creation, content production. Um these are all things that you really could do um using projects.

Dave: Yeah, and I will say that for any any educators out there or any instructional designers, this is the AI service to go to for instructional design and course design. Oh yeah. It's it's unbelievable.

Paul: And I think the other thing that is really nice about it is you can set permissions. So if you and I are working on something, you can um set a permission access for me to just view or edit or add to, um so we have a permission capability within the projects as well.

Dave: Oh that's awesome.

Paul: So um you know again, or you can make it private if you don't want if you don't want others to um to have access to it. So I think that it's really uh something that you know, people can play with and and um definitely something that if you are like you said building out a specific course or something, you could just upload your all your old information, your old PowerPoints, and then you can reimagine what your course could be.

Dave: Yeah, so it's great for that like reimagining too.

Paul: Yeah. Yep. Um so from projects um let's talk about Claude it's modules or skills. Um and this is where you can basically have Claude act the way you want it to act. Does that make sense?

Dave: Yeah, so you're saying it's kind of an instruction sheet to help you perform different tasks?

Paul: Yes, so um what skills are is basically it's an external file that you have to create a MD file.

Dave: Markdown.

Paul: Markdown file.

Dave: Which is basically like the the 30,000 foot view is you know if you have one pound sign that's heading one, two pound signs is heading two, so it gives you structure to the file and like you can use number one, number two, number three if you have itemized lists or like asterisks for bullets.

Paul: And then you can put all the skills that you want it to learn, you can put the um guard rails you want it to use, um and you can kind of basically tell Claude how you want it to act when you're prompting. Does that make sense?

Dave: Yeah, so so you have a little bit more control over the exactly the whole experience.

Paul: Right, so like um for the podcast, if I wanted to you know have it every time spit out like you know some topics that we can talk about in a specific structure, I could create a skill MD file and build that structure and then this way I can open up that skill and I can just say you know um we're gonna be talking about Claude, which is kind of what I did for this right?

Dave: Oh yeah yeah.

Paul: Is that inception? In Claude I created a Claude skill that asks for a breakdown of the topics...

Dave: Yeah, that is inception. I didn't realize you did that. I don't I'm so cool.

Paul: Oh what was the experience like?

Dave: It was good. And then inside of it I so I built that and then I um said um so we're gonna talk about all the different um the ecosystem of Claude and um and I gave it in the knowledge base I gave it the skills uh the reference to our URL um and then um what I wanted to kind of focus on. And then now all I'll have to do is add that um you know whatever topic we're talking about and then it will kind of give us a breakdown of what we can talk to.

Dave: Oh cool. I didn't realize you had done that. Was it easy to do?

Paul: Yes. And to be honest with you you can use Claude or whatever system you're on to create that MD file.

Dave: So you can go into regular chat say Gemini or Claude chat and say I want to make a Claude skill that does this, give me the prompt, and it will give you the markdown file.

Paul: Exactly. And then it'll create it and then I use that.

Dave: That's a good life hack, that's a meta meta inception inception. Um but that is called meta prompting by the way. That's my favorite prompting technique is like have AI write the prompt for you.

Paul: For you, I mean it's great, I mean and this way you don't have to overthink it, you can just say it in plain text.

Dave: Yeah.

Paul: So um have you explored it, any feedback on on the use of it?

Dave: Not the skills. I haven't yet. Uh but I've done a lot with the artifacts.

Paul: The artifacts? Okay well that's where we're moving to next. Super. The artifacts. So.

Dave: This is it emerged out of Claude Code. So Claude is probably I think without a doubt the best coding AI. So if you want to start coding uh I think Claude is fantastic. And it's it started as like oh this is a good way for people to share what they've built. And so it's you can think of it like a little App Store that you can publish to. So if I made say a flashcards app, I could put it in in artifacts. And there's a button right in Claude for artifacts. But it also has this this the flip side to it, so there is this artifact store and you can go and look at it and you can say oh I want I want to bring this into my system, I want to fork it, that's what we call it in the biz. So it makes a carbon copy of it and brings it to Claude so you can play around with it.

Paul: And you can modify it to make it fit your what you want.

Dave: Yeah. And the like you do not need to know how to cook code. So for instance let's say that I published an and you know I'm I'm on Claude Code, I make a flashcards app and I publish it as an artifact. And then you come along and you're like oh I want that flashcard app and you you know you copy it and take it down into your own system and then you're like oh but all these questions are about Python. I'd rather have it on JavaScript cause I teach a JavaScript class or whatever it's gonna be. And so then you just go into Claude and you're like convert all these questions to JavaScript. And it will do that. So you again you're just using the AI to reprogram this artifact.

Paul: Right, and I think the way that people can think of artifacts is um an output. So um you know, you're inputting a bunch of stuff in the prompts and what not, but um now you can create apps and docs and tools um as an output um from artifacts. So um you know creating a a card app, um doing something like uh learning tools or interactive demos or a data dashboard, you can quickly use artifacts um and they can be pre-existing artifacts and like you said Dave, you can modify it to fit what you want for your your artifacts.

Dave: Yeah, and being able to and this is one of the beauties of of like vibe coding is like being able to adjust it to exactly how you want it and you are in complete control is it's pretty empowering.

Paul: Yes, I I agree. And it's great because like you said it's a there's a library that already exists so...

Dave: Yeah, I was just poking around through that library.

Paul: Yeah, I found like a forest explorer. I was like oh that sounds relaxing.

Dave: Yeah, there's an office simulator. Uh but the the interesting thing to me is like taking one of those and then opening it up and looking at it and being like I don't I can't figure out all this code, but like I get what this you can learn a little bit about it, but you can totally own it and be like oh that's a cool office simulator but I want to change the characters, I want to change the narrative, I want to change the colors, whatever you want to do.

Paul: Right. And I just saw there's like a piano so I can maybe play with the piano and kind of retool it to maybe teach me a song that I want to know but using the same mechanism that they've built.

Dave: Yeah.

Paul: So lots of different things.

Dave: That's your homework, is to make the piano. Oh there is there is something that's also really cool about these artifacts. Yeah. So one of the problems with vibe coding is that you can create the app but then how do you put it say in Brightspace which is what we teach with or how do you put it on your website? Claude Code artifacts, if you publish an artifact, you can embed it and it will give you the embed code which is really cool so it's like hosting an app for you.

Paul: Oh that's real. So I could take the artifact, get the embed code, put it in our LMS learning management system, and then the students can actually interact with that that's really cool.

Dave: Yes.

Paul: And is it dynamic so if I go into my artifact that I'm sharing, can I update it and then it'll update live like a...

Dave: Can you republish an artifact, I actually don't know the the answer to that question.

Paul: Okay, something we can look at.

Dave: That's my that's my homework. Yeah, man you're giving me homework. Take that, Dave. Alright fair enough.

Paul: So um artifacts are definitely something to explore, look at all the pre-existing artifacts. You can create um even with the free version you can create several artifacts on your own. I don't know the limit of artifacts but I'm assuming like projects you probably have a certain number that you're limited to um as far as the artifacts go.

Dave: Yeah, but it really is like a low risk way to explore coding. It's so fun. It's so fun making artifacts, so if that's your takeaway, that's your homework all you listeners and viewers.

Paul: Yes, explore the artifacts in Claude.

Dave: Make an artifact. And send it to us.

Paul: Yeah, that'd be great. Actually do we have an email? Are you asking for any specific reason? I don't know, I don't I don't have uh I don't have any fan mail, but if someone wanted to email us do we have an email now or not yet?

Dave: Oh yeah, we oh I thought you meant like is there an email in our mailbox. Yeah. I think it's is it info@theimmersivelens.com?

Paul: info@theimmersivelens.com. Okay, awesome.

Dave: I thought you were saying that because we got fan mail no. No, because we have a theme song.

Paul: We do have a theme song, but they got to wait till the episode comes out. We we don't want to tease it. Actually by the time you hear this one you would have already heard it. So so start sending us mail if you want to hear the theme song more often.

Dave: That's right, maybe I'll play it during this uh during this episode as well. Alright, as we're talking about it. Yes. So um the the next thing we'll talk about is the Claude Code.

Dave: Oh my gosh.

Paul: And um can you tell us a little bit about Claude Code?

Dave: It's a game changer. This is basically when you type into well sort of, there's kind of two interpretations of Claude Code. One is you can use Claude just natively naturally and say make me a web app, make me a web page, make me an Android app, whatever. But Claude Code is this software that sits into if you ever see me like computer nerds programming on TV or in the movies, they're usually programming in like a terminal, it's very text based, it's called an IDE, an integrated development environment. And Claude Code sits inside there, and so imagine there's kind of two panes adjacent to each other. And so in the one pane is Claude Code and you just type in plain language, like make me an app that does this. And then in the text base the the the text box it actually like writes the code, and you can say and then you can run the code and see it. And that doesn't sound any different than kind of what we're talking about until you start thinking about apps or websites that have 10, 20, 30 pages in it. And you can just stick Claude Code on it, you can say hey my website's right here, it's in the IDE. Make it accessible. Go through every file and make sure that there's ARIA tags, that there's role tags, that there's alt tags on all the images. And it will go through all of them. So it's borderline like agentic AI now because you're tasking it with something that requires multiple steps and multiple reasoning things. It's unbelievable.

Paul: Right, and just so I'm clear what when we're talking about this um I believe this is a paid you have to have a paid tier to use the um Claude Code?

Dave: I don't know, cause I have a paid tier.

Paul: Yeah, I'm pretty sure you do. Okay. Um so I think that um with uh Claude Code I think it you could get the Pro version and then you could have access to it. Um but basically uh you are you can point it to a folder and um in the like I'll say Visual Studio Code you can open up that folder so this way when it's writing all of the JavaScript or Python or whatever it's doing, it's writing into that folder and creating all the derivative files and connecting them all.

Dave: Yeah, so it's fantastic for say like software management. Not just think beyond one file.

Paul: Right.

Dave: And and because it lives in your IDE and you can push it right to GitHub, which is like super nerd for like you can kind of publish things right off the bat.

Paul: Right, and GitHub is a repository that allows you to upload your code and then you can save branches and iterations of it.

Dave: It's like Google Drive for computer nerds.

Paul: Yes. But you'll always see things called uh Git or GitHub um and Bitbucket that's another one. And it's an yeah, but it's just a repository of where people upload their code and download their code and fork their code and branch their code and.

Dave: Yeah, and I I'm teaching the a vibe coding class this semester, the first time. And I was really hesitant to introduce Claude Code and so we did GitHub the very first like week, and I let people get used to it and then I was like okay now we're gonna program in GitHub with the IDE once they got used to programming. So like we scaled up so it's really really approachable. But then I showed them Claude Code and I was like this might be a bridge too far, and they were like Dave why did you not show us this earlier, this is a game changer.

Paul: And and I do want to reiterate the vibe coding classes for non majors, like you do not need to know how to program.

Dave: Yeah I actually got somebody in the art department that was asking me can you show me how to create an app and I go well if you want to know the nuances of programming yes, if you want to just vibe code something, I know a course that you can take. So um I think you might have somebody...

Dave: Awesome. It will be offered online uh in this in the fall.

Paul: Oh awesome, that'd be perfect for everybody to to take yeah.

Dave: It would be perfect. Yeah, it's it's also this because we're talking about AI it's this really weird scenario because a lot of the conversation in academia right now is like how do we how do we monitor what level of AI learners are using. And I'm like if you're if you come into this class and you're not using AI for everything, you're doing it wrong. You know, so like this is something I don't have to worry about is like how much how relying... In fact the only way you could cheat is if you copied someone else's work, which would be 100% detectable because if you and I were vibe coding the same app even on even on Claude at the same time, it would be radically different. So like there is no cheating, this is like pure creativity.

Paul: Right, it's all derivatives of of somebody else's work. Um but we do learn about web technology, so it's really a web technologies class. You will you will learn something.

Dave: Well you need to understand how everything connects and where things go and um back end front end.

Paul: Yeah, just so you're aware of it so you understand when it's asking you to do something you're not like thinking what what?

Dave: Yeah, exactly.

Paul: Um but I think that uh Claude Code is really great, it does you can even give it existing um projects. So you can point it to a project maybe that you were working on and then say can you look over this code and make it more efficient and it'll...

Dave: I feel like I use Claude just as much as you do but you know way more about it than I do. I didn't know you could do that, I'm gonna try that too.

Paul: Yes, cause um once you bring it in and you're it can do the full analysis on it. So um I think one of the things that um I really like about it is uh like I said when I used it for um my initial there's a game I want to develop and uh it started and it was looking great and then I ran out of tokens.

Dave: Mm. And we're not we're. Yep.

Paul: Um so I think that um unfortunately this eats up a lot this and what we're going to talk about next, co-work, eats up lots of tokens compared to straight prompt.

Dave: Yeah.

Paul: And I feel like this is where that discrepancy is going to start happening and I don't like that there's going to be some people that are going to be paying $100 a month and get full access to everything that they want and they'll be able to build and then you're going to get people that you can't you can't spend...

Dave: Sure. Yeah the equity thing is is it really is an issue to to think about and like that I I think about quite often. That was kind of one of the conceits for the this vibe coding class was like no one should have to pay anything. So we work around those limits and we try and understand them. There's other tools like you can use Gemini, you can use Copilot or uh Codex. Uh you can use AI Studio. So um but I think in industry you're gonna have to have an allegiance to an AI.

Paul: I yep, I think so too. You're gonna probably gravitate toward a one that you're you're leaning toward and and it's tough because I really do like all three for slightly different reasons and um but we're gonna get into Google next probably our next podcast.

Dave: Looking forward to it.

Paul: Um and um I that has more of an all-around thing for me uh but um so definitely if you're into coding and um even if you're not...

Dave: If you're not, right. That's true.

Paul: You could do it straight prompts and uh Claude will really is a great collaborator for you to build just about anything you could imagine and you can always ask it questions if you don't understand what it's doing. So you can say, you know that's the beauty part isn't it? Yeah, I mean I remember when I first started doing it, I said alright let's build this app. And it went it went crazy with all of these different um frameworks. And I was like, let's let's simplify this for a and this I said for students that only know PHP, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. And it retooled everything and it broke it down into something more simple for someone uh like a student to understand versus like a new programmer. Like they don't know all the shortcuts and complicated code maneuvers.

Dave: Exactly.

Paul: And I definitely encourage anybody if they're not sure what's going on with their code or what when they're doing it, don't be frustrated, just ask.

Dave: Yeah, just ask. Ask the question and they'll it'll answer it for you.

Paul: Um and then we're gonna end this with uh the Claude Co-work. And what is that?

Dave: Co-work is kind of like an agent that lives on your computer and can do things for you. So let's say that you you have a business and I don't know, maybe you run lemonade stands year round in 18 different neighborhoods, like you're you're a mogul.

Paul: Oh man.

Dave: And so you have you might have files all over your computer, maybe some of them are in the cloud, maybe some of them are like on your desktop, maybe some of them are in like your and you're like oh it's tax time, I gotta reconcile all these things. You can say to Claude Co-work, hey it's tax time buddy, I gotta round up all my invoices, all my expenses, and create a report. And it will do that.

Paul: That's that's really nice.

Dave: Yeah.

Paul: Um and so everyone understands what this is is basically um giving access to Claude to do stuff on your computer on your behalf. So having direct access to files and folders, so you could have it point to your downloads folder for instance and you could say um organize my downloads folder uh between um images and programming and do a and date. And if you think there's a more efficient way to organize it, let me know. And it will, and this is where I love Claude, it will do it, but then what it'll do is it'll give you instructions on what it's doing and then it'll say do you want me to do this. And you have a choice of cancel, always allow, or allow. Before it before it actually does that.

Dave: So it comes up, it develops a plan.

Paul: Yep.

Dave: Yeah. And I think that that is really good. And I don't know if in the back end they do like a little virtual machine where it actually like is reconstructing reconstructing everything and then it says okay this is the way it's going to be and then it's like ask for approval.

Paul: Yeah, and that is a nice thing because that I think alleviates a lot of fear that people have, especially like the wild west of we talked about Open Claw and like how things can go awry pretty quickly.

Dave: Yeah.

Paul: And so this is a nice way to mitigate that fear.

Dave: But we're also starting to see like Claude is more than a chatbot, it is an it this is agentic AI. You are saying here's a job that requires you to make multiple moves across multiple places in multiple contexts to generate this report on lemonade.

Paul: Yes.

Dave: Yeah. It's fascinating.

Paul: And it's cool because they also say um to use Co-work this is how it it kind of positions it. It says, Claude work can work with local files and tools available on all paid plans for Windows and Mac OS. This is a research preview and agent safety is still in development. Stay safe.

Dave: You don't see that all the time.

Paul: No, and then again I love the fact that they give you that control um that they don't they're not just gonna do anything that you need to approve everything before um unless you always I guess I guess you could say always allow. But it would just be for that specific uh action.

Dave: And I've Claude Code does the same thing where it's like for for this session, for this task, and I I've gotten to the point where I'm like you've never led me astray Claude, you've always produced. Can you can you go back to the platforms that it that it runs on? You said it was like Mac OS, Windows.

Paul: Huh. So I have a Chromebook. I can't use Claude Code.

Dave: But could you do it as a Chrome extension?

Paul: I can, there is a Chrome extension called Claude and it does all that stuff to a lesser degree because it doesn't have access to like to a file structure or anything like that. Um but safety for you right? That's why you like the Chromebook because they can't mess with your OS.

Dave: They can't, it's an immutable OS uh and I just love the interface and I love like the convenience of it. But it can do schedule tasks, planning mode, record a workflow, multi-tab workflows, uh and it has logs for it. So and you can control browser actions from the from the so it does have it does his best it can with the with the parameters of a Chromebook. And for me who's you know very privacy and safety first like this is a good like I I enjoy that.

Paul: That's awesome. Yeah. And I love Claude. I would trust Claude to have access to my computer, I'm not suggesting anyone else have that opinion, I'm saying.

Dave: Well, you know, we Mac just came out with the the Neo.

Paul: The Mac Neo for $599?

Dave: And that could replace it and you could have Claude uh and it's a pretty safe OS. You know, just...

Paul: I and 600 is a very approachable price for a laptop.

Dave: Yeah, and you can get education discount.

Paul: Yeah, for it was like 50 bucks. I don't know. I do think that the the actual MacBook Air I think that's the best computer on the market. Like if I had to buy one and had 1100 bucks, that's what I'd spend it on. I would never buy a PC over that. Like a Windows machine.

Dave: It's a yeah. Well and the just the way it runs and another side, another yeah we'll do another episode. But um the other cool thing about Co-work is you can schedule tasks. So if there is like a report you're talking about on your lemonade stand that has to be run every Friday, then um you could schedule that task to happen every Friday and get your your report and even email it to you. So you could just get it in your email and you don't have to do it and so as long as it knows where to gather all the files live and access to those files, you can create that automatic uh automated task to do that for you.

Paul: That is awesome.

Dave: Yeah.

Paul: And you also mentioned that now it has access to Excel and PowerPoint too right?

Dave: Oh my gosh, better better integration than Copilot, Microsoft's own AI is not nearly as good as Claude's.

Paul: So can you explain what does that mean, does that mean like I go into Excel or does it through the prompt um trigger something and it can go into Excel and work through it?

Dave: So Microsoft is bringing Anthropic's Claude Co-work to its Microsoft 365 Copilot AI platform.

Paul: Mm-hmm.

Dave: And so it can live in Excel. Now I don't have I don't use Excel and I don't use Word, so I haven't really played with it.

Paul: Oh yeah. And and and we'll talk about how Gemini is integrated next episode.

Dave: Uh but the people have been using Anthropic and if you go to Claude you can like it has Excel integrations in it.

Paul: Right, and it can create Excel files um through Claude.

Dave: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah. And now it can broker information between Word and Claude.

Dave: Oh that's great. Yeah.

Paul: Um so I think that this is really great for lots of different things um and definitely something to explore. It is uh only a paid tier that you can use Co-work. um so that's one unfortunate thing, but...

Dave: It is and hopefully by the end of this series people will have 20 bucks a month that they want to part with. Because it's very easy to say like hey if this saves me 21 a month in my labor, my time, it it like levels up what I do, totally worth it.

Paul: 100%. 100%. And so that's something that you can evaluate and maybe you take a stab at one month just doing one month of Claude, one month of ChatGPT, one month of Gemini and you see which tool you think um helps you the most in your specific situation because like I said I think I will always I will either need to move just to Google if I had to pick one or I'd have to do a Claude Google combo because...

Dave: Yeah, that's what I do. Claude Google. Yeah. Because the image generation and the video generation really is heavy with uh OpenAI and Google. And Claude does not have any image generation right.

Paul: And that's a spoiler for next week.

Dave: Oh I'm sorry. Okay teasing, we're teasing. We're teasing for next week. That's right. Um so um and again one thing you're gonna realize is that a lot of these tools they have similar similarities in all of these so it's really gonna be at some point seeing what you're most comfortable with using and then um using it. And realizing that you know unless it's something specialized, it's really for the general tasks, you know OpenAI has all these similar things on their ecosystem, um Claude has similar obviously you know projects, projects, artifacts, GPTs. Um and Gemini has similar.

Paul: It all kind of looks the same too like when you go from service to service.

Dave: Exactly. So I think those little distinctions are gonna be like for me, I need video. So if I need to do video and image production, I can't just use Claude.

Paul: Sure. In fact Claude doesn't even do uh images or audio.

Dave: So those are those little things that you're gonna evaluate once you're. But I agree with you, if you have 20 to part, I would definitely take a trial run on all three of these tools and see which one helps you the most.

Paul: Yep.

Dave: So. Um anything else you want to add about these tools or um?

Paul: I just love Claude. It's awesome.

Dave: Yeah, and again I feel the safest with my content um around um you know the whole privacy, um that was one thing I wanted to mention is that um with Claude you have the ability to go incognito mode. And um when you're in incognito mode it's a little icon on the top right, and it just it does a nice subtle things like it turns it black like now I know I'm in an incognito mode, you know?

Paul: And it looks like the little ghost.

Dave: Yes, like a Pac-Man ghost. That's the button you press. That's cute.

Paul: Um and so like now you know that you're safe. And I still would never what they're saying is incognito chats aren't saved to history or used to train models. Um but I would definitely still not upload anything sensitive to these platforms because there is a learn more and I assume for regulation purposes they still retain data for a few few days even after you're done with the chat and then it will eventually get deleted. Does that make sense?

Dave: Yeah, they're Claude is known for being the best for protecting your data of all the the AI services out there. Um and and so I I trust them. I mean I'm still not uploading like personally identifiable information, but uh I feel pretty comfortable with Claude.

Paul: Yeah. And then um I'll just end with you know I you can see where this is all going and um where we started with the chat, now we have these ecosystems and you kind of mentioned this before, but it's gonna be where things are it's gonna be integrated into your everyday things so like you know when I look at Atlas, the chat is just integrated into it. So if I want to engage I don't have to leave it. And you mentioned at some point there'll be an operating system that is just all AI based.

Dave: Yeah, like and you can do that now like in Gemini you can say like start a playlist from YouTube Music and it will do that for you. I think OpenAI has the same thing with like Spotify and Canva and all these other integrations.

Paul: Yes, and when we get into Google next you'll I mean it's integrated into like I can just click ask Gemini and it's just on my browser and everything all my tools that I use. So um I totally see this evolution happening and you can see it. You can see the alright now we have artifacts, projects, now we have co-work, and then integrations with tools and then now they can start building so now it's gonna be a framework that's gonna be an operating system. Um so I think that's all the time we have uh today. Hopefully everyone enjoyed their um the talk about Claude ecosystem. Um Paul Engin.

Dave: And I am Dave Ghidiu. If you enjoyed today's conversation be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Let's be careful out there folks.

Paul: And share it with a friend or colleague. Until next time, stay curious, stay connected, and thanks for looking through the immersive lens with us.

VO: This episode was engineered by Jeff Kidd. Recorded at the Finger Lakes Community College Podcast Studios located in beautiful Canandaigua, New York in the heart of the Finger Lakes region. Offering more than 55 degrees, certificates, micro-credentials, and workforce training programs. Thank you to Public Relations and Communications, Marketing, and the FLX AI Hub. Eager to delve into passion, discover exciting and immersive opportunities at www.flcc.edu. As part of our mission at FLCC, we are committed to making education accessible, innovative, awesome, and aligned with the needs of both students and employers. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts, guests, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Finger Lakes Community College. Music by Den from Pixabay.


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