A free book on operating AI coding tools (no signup, source on GitHub)

Vlad Podoliako released a free, public book titled 'Vlad's Playbook: The Ultimate AI Dive Deep' with 47 chapters on operating AI coding tools, available on GitHub without signup. The book covers practical workflows, tool stacks, and agent architectures for operators, aiming to help users run AI as an operating system.

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.