AI Guides › Workbench
By Nigel Guy · 6 min read
Most people collect AI tools the way they collect bookmarks. They sign up for six, try each for twenty minutes, and conclude they are "learning AI" while nothing they make has ever been used by another person. A pile of tools is not a skill, and it is certainly not income.
The rule: climb one rung at a time, and do not move up until the rung below has produced something a real person has used.
A note on provenance. This guide was prompted by a social-media "pack" of tools mapped from a weekend to a business you own. We could not verify that pack or its exact contents, so nothing below depends on it. What follows is the durable part: a ladder you can build from tools whose pricing and features we checked on the vendors' own pages on 2026-10-04.
| Rung | Time | Tool to use | What it does | Cost at time of writing | Catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Chat properly | One weekend | Claude (Free plan) | Drafting, analysis, rewriting, with your own documents | Free; Pro is $20/month monthly billing (about £15 at time of writing; check the £ price at checkout) | Free has lower usage and no Claude Code |
| 2. Research from your own sources | One week | Gemini Notebook (Google's notebook tool, linked from NotebookLM help pages) | Upload sources, ask questions of them, generate summaries, reports, quizzes, slide decks | Check Google's current plan page; we could not confirm limits | Each notebook is separate; it cannot reason across notebooks |
| 3. Build something that runs | One to three months | Claude Code | Reads files, edits them, runs commands, schedules repeat tasks | Needs a paid Claude plan (Pro, Max, Team) or an Anthropic Console account | Easy to over-trust; you must review what it changes |
| 4. Sell the outcome | After rung 3 | None new | Package one repeatable result for one buyer | Your time | The hard part is the buyer, not the tool |
Max starts from $100/month (about £75 to £80 at time of writing; check at checkout). You do not need it to start.
Pick a task you already do for work or for someone else, such as a customer email reply, a weekly report, or a meeting summary. Do it with Claude on the Free plan, using a real document, not a made-up one.
The bad default is asking a vague question and accepting the first answer. The fix is a brief. Use this and fill in the brackets.
You are an experienced [ROLE, e.g. operations manager] helping me with [TASK].
Context: [WHO THE AUDIENCE IS AND WHAT THEY ALREADY KNOW].
Goal: [WHAT A GOOD RESULT LOOKS LIKE, IN ONE SENTENCE].
Source material: [PASTE YOUR DOCUMENT OR NOTES].
Steps:
1. List any facts you need that I have not given you, and ask me for them before writing anything.
2. Draft the piece in [FORMAT AND LENGTH].
3. Check your draft against my source material. Mark any claim that is not in it.
Constraints: British English. No invented figures, names or quotes. If something is missing, say so rather than guessing.
Fill in the role, task, audience, goal and your source text. Weekend finish line: one piece of work you would genuinely send, produced in less time than doing it by hand.
Chat answers from general memory. The upgrade is making the tool answer from material you supply. Google's help pages describe a notebook tool in which you upload sources and then use a Chat panel for questions and a Studio panel for outputs such as reports, flashcards, quizzes, slide decks and infographics. With five or more sources it can auto-label them. Notebooks are independent, so group sources by project.
Use it this way: load five to ten documents on one topic you actually need to understand (a contract set, a market, a course), ask it to answer only from those sources, and open the cited passages to check. The week-one finish line is a one-page briefing you have verified against the originals.
Claude Code is Anthropic's agentic tool. Despite the name, you do not have to be a developer for every use, but you do need to be comfortable in a terminal or the desktop app. Per Anthropic's docs, you can install it from a terminal with the native installer, Homebrew or WinGet, or use the Desktop app's Code tab, which needs a paid subscription. A project's CLAUDE.md file holds standing instructions it reads each session, and skills package repeatable workflows. It can also run on a schedule through routines or desktop scheduled tasks.
A sensible three-month path:
CLAUDE.md with your standards, so the output stops needing the same corrections.Anthropic also offers free courses at Claude Academy, including Claude Code 101. Use those before paying for anyone's course.
Do not sell "AI services". Sell one outcome to one type of buyer, using the workflow you built in rung 3. Examples that are plainly hypothetical: a weekly competitor summary for local estate agents, or a monthly tidy-up of a small firm's document folder.
Use a one-line offer card:
| Field | Your entry |
|---|---|
| Buyer | One specific kind of business |
| Outcome | What they get, in a sentence |
| Input they give you | Documents, access, a brief |
| Your check before delivery | How you verify the output |
| Price | Set after you have timed the work three times |
The asset only you can build is your own verified process: the sources you trust, the checks you run, the examples of finished work. A tool cannot supply those. Keep them in a folder and show a prospective buyer one real before-and-after.