# A free book on operating AI coding tools (no signup, source on GitHub) > Source: > Published: 2026-06-19 20:52:12+00:00 # 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 [New to AI? Start with Learn →](/learn) [Read the prologue first →](/how-to-read) [Build/share your tier list](/tier-list) [Day zero (operator path)](/day-zero) [The journey (reader path)](/journey) [Questions people ask me](/questions) ## 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 Read the launch ](/launch) **Vlad's Playbook is public.** 47 chapters, 3 live embedded case studies, the source is open and is the recipe. [New · Live · Updated hourly ](/radar) ### 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) ### 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) ### 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 ](/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) ### 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) ### 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 ](/self-audit) ### 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 ](/claude-code-pricing) ### 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) ### Claude Code vs Codex Ran both in anger. Verdict per job — including the night shift Codex actually wins. [New · Reference ](/claude-code-hooks) ### 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) ### 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 ](/ai-agent-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 ](/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-first) ### 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 ](/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) ### Launch week The launch as its own experiment in the thesis. Four surfaces, seven days, receipts accruing — honest, even the embarrassing ones. [Resources ](/resources) ### Vault library CLAUDE.md skeletons, .mcp.json examples, hook scripts, SKILL templates, the five reusable prompts. Copy, paste, ship. [Reference ](/cheat-sheet) ### Cheat sheet Slash commands, settings, env vars, file paths, keyboard shortcuts. Print it. Tape it next to your monitor. [Vocabulary ](/glossary) ### Glossary Fifty-plus terms you'll need, grouped A–Z. Linked inline throughout the book. Hover any underlined term to read it. [Tier list ](/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) ### 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-playbook) ### 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 ](/showcase) ### 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 ](/research-notes) ### 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) ### Build vs Buy Sequencing wedge, cost ladder, and a 5-question matrix for what to make vs buy. [The case ](/cfo-case) ### For your CFO 600 words to defend the spend — Claude as a labor line, not a SaaS line. [Rules ](/claude-md-rules) ### The 12-rule CLAUDE.md Karpathy's template at 11% mistakes; the operator overlay gets it to 3%. [Setup ](/cowork-setup) ### Cowork setup Vlad's Cowork connectors and scheduled tasks — sanitized and cloneable. [Vault ](/vault-starter) ### Vault starter PARA vs 7 other systems, project-as-entity, and a working vault to clone. [Recipes ](/weekend-builds) ### Weekend builds Eight Saturday-ship recipes — plus the one that's a trap. [Skills ](/starter-skills) ### Starter skills Six drop-in SKILL.md files to paste into ~/.claude and run today. [Roadmap ](/thirty-day-plan) ### 30-day plan A day-by-day roadmap from clean machine to operator in a month. [Index ](/sections) ### Sections Every chapter grouped by theme — the table of contents, by topic. [About ](/about) ### About Vlad, the portfolio, and the newsletter behind the Playbook.