The Start

My personal discovery came through some colleagues here in Mendoza. A marketing expert presented an integrated model using Claude Code and Obsidian to a group of CEOs.

I thought I was going to a meetup where I wouldn't learn anything new. In fact, I almost didn't go. I was on the verge of backing out, but something, my sixth sense, told me to go for it. From the very beginning, when he presented an AI-generated document outlining the purpose of the meeting, I didn't understand a thing. There were other people there, and I think several of them didn't understand anything either. But there were also others, let's say two or three, who knew exactly what they were showing us.

As the presentation went on, I still didn't quite grasp the concept. I asked a couple of questions of the person who was kindly explaining everything to us, but since I hadn't fully understood what he was trying to convey, my questions didn't clarify anything for me, and his answers actually confused me even more.

Unlike someone else who did understand—he mentioned having the same thing uploaded to a repository and connected to several AIs. That person was on a whole other level. Clearly.

What he showed us was how to build your company using files, managed by a curator, an expert in maintaining consistency across files. Files with the .md (Markdown) extension, which is the format that AI reads most easily. There, you define your company's architecture through folders and files, covering all areas of your business (finance, marketing, operations, legal, HR). Everything your company knows, everything your company does, expressed in organized text files.

Each area has a file with a standardized format, something like this:

title: My Note / date: 2026-09-13 / tags: [AI, learning] / Main title / Normal text with bold and italics. / Subtitle / Bulleted list

And that's how all the files in your knowledge vault are organized within each folder: business rules, brand manual, social media profile, your role, your goals, your responsibilities. It's like having your company's brain written down in a place where AI can read it, understand it, and use it to help you.

I remember spending a couple of days trying to understand what they had shown me. I went back and forth, tried a few things, until I found my way and understood the purpose behind everything they described. I realized it was like expanding your memory — the one we all have in our minds — except in this case, the memory would live in files on your laptop's hard drive, resulting in virtually unlimited storage space.

A New Kind of Memory

We have that stored in our memory. If we need to write an email, we know how. But Claude doesn't know how I write emails. So you create a text file that explains how to reply to emails: say hello, then summarize the problem in three lines, next outline the solution or next steps, and close with a greeting and "I hope this helps." Something like that. Simple instructions. In fact, I could copy and paste ten email replies I've already sent and use them as examples. There you go, that'll work.

I downloaded a repository with an outline of a generic company that the same person had created and made available on GitHub¹ for anyone who wanted to download it, and I started working on it from the terminal, using Claude Code Pro. At first I felt lost, but within a few hours I was already creating folders, writing files, and chatting with Claude about my own company as if he were just another colleague.

On February 27, 2026, I unlocked an AI level. I'm not exaggerating when I use the word "unlocked." It was exactly like in a video game when you advance to the next level and new possibilities open up that you didn't even know existed before.

Suddenly, everything I'd learned in the previous years made sense. It all clicked into place. As you can see, it was just a short while ago. I've been using it intensively for six months, and it feels like four years of progress. It's as if I'd finished another college degree. It feels like I'm finally using AI to accelerate my work, become more efficient, and stay competitive.

It's as if I'd been given Harry Potter's wand, or like Neo when he saw the Matrix. And I'm not exaggerating. There's a before and after that February 27.

The key tool is Claude Code, which lets you use it easily from a terminal. It's designed to create source code, for programming. Claude Code has native functions for working with files, because programmers write code in files. They do it in different languages, but ultimately they create files, the very same ones I was filling out with company information.

Let's consider that a company is more than just people, it's information. How things are done, what's sold to whom, how much each product costs, what was decided at each meeting, what rules must be followed. All of that, sooner or later, ends up written down somewhere, in a manual, a spreadsheet, an email, or a shared document.

If that information is in text files, Claude Code can work with it in the same way it works with code. It can read all the files at once, find what it needs, cross-reference data from different locations, detect contradictions, update a document when something changes, or create a new one based on existing ones. What is a software project for a programmer can be a company's very way of operating, organized into folders and files.

The difference is enormous. It's no longer just a matter of asking a single question in a chat and copying the answer. It's about giving it access to the company's knowledge so it can work directly with it. It also evolves and learns from the changes made to the files.

Some use cases

A practical example. I asked my terminal to research all my competitors in Wispro, visit their websites and official documentation, extract all their features, create a comparison table, and research prices.

In just 40 minutes, it completed the task for a dozen competitors. I'd been trying to do that task for years. I'd tried, managed to gather information on a couple, but it became outdated, and I never did it again. It was one of those tasks you know you have to do, but there's always something more urgent. I created a file for each company and saved all the information on each one; I also put together an executive summary comparing each competitor with Wispro's features, and it also gave me an action plan. Now I can ask at any time whether a particular company has a specific feature or not, and it knows exactly. Before, answering that question could have taken me a lot of time researching online. It simplified something easy to do but that took a long time.

Now, every month, I ask Claude Code to update the information, tell me what's new with each company, and keep the files for each competitor up to date.

Another example where I ended up using Claude Code with files and folders was the trade shows held every year in different Latin American countries. The first step was to provide it with what we already knew: I gave it the list of trade shows we always attend, asked it to broaden the scope, and, based on that list, asked it to research what other industry trade shows are held in the region. This resulted in a much more comprehensive map than the one we had, with options we hadn't previously considered.

I gave him all the commercial proposals we'd received from the organizers, including prices and stand types, as well as the dates and locations of each trade show. With that information, each trade show went from being just a name to having a cost, a specific time of year, and a concrete location. I was also able to put together the complete calendar, with a budget for each one.

Finally, I linked each trade show to the leads it generated within Pipedrive, our CRM. A CRM is the system where a company records its customers and prospects and tracks each sales opportunity from the first contact through to closing. Leads are exactly that, people or companies that showed interest and could become customers.

When a company invests in a trade show, it comes back with a stack of contacts and an opinion of whether it went well or poorly. Now I track this monthly. I see how many opportunities each trade show generated, how many turned into sales, and how much revenue they represented. And since I've also entered the cost of participation, I can calculate the return on investment for each one. Claude Code created a complete website for me—which I can only open in my browser—and set up a dashboard so I can view the metrics for all the trade shows together and for each one separately. All of this was automated in just a couple of days. Now I can ask it to update the metrics, and to do so, it reconnects to the CRM, fetches all the updated data, and regenerates the metrics—all in less than a minute.

I think I've got your attention now. You're thinking about stopping reading, grabbing your laptop, and starting to create your own Vault for your company or project, or even to write a book. That's what I did: I started a new one from scratch and loaded it with just the basic structure of a book so I wouldn't be missing anything. This very book you're reading is being written exactly this way.

After a month of using Claude Code, I realized that all the people in my company and my family should start using it too.

The first person I spoke to was my son, a systems engineer. My son is much smarter than I am, but we have different kinds of intelligence. We always talk about work because he works as a programmer at one of my companies. Technology has always been a common topic of conversation between us.

When he was 15, I bought him a kit PC and told him, "Put it together." Of course, he did. I remember there was one connector he plugged in wrong and he had to ask for help, but he figured it out on his own. He's one of those people who understands how the world works.

When it came to AI, he was very reluctant at first. He said it was useless, that it generated terrible code, and that he always had to keep fixing bugs. I made him buy Claude Code, but he used it as a code editor, as an assistant, and he still wasn't convinced. When we had this conversation, he still wasn't using spec files to define his projects in his day-to-day work.

So when I told him all this, he looked at me as if to say, "And how is this supposed to help me?" I didn't know how to explain it any further either. I just showed him the use case and how it worked for me. But that idea kept bouncing around in his head until he saw the value in it for himself, and only then did we get on the same page and he understood the benefit I was getting.

The Master File

The main file for everything is called CLAUDE.md. That's where all the written instructions for what we want from Claude go. It's the first file it reads when it starts up, and everything that happens afterward depends on what's written there.

I copied my first CLAUDE.md from the version that came in the repository. To be honest, I didn't really understand what I was supposed to include and what I wasn't. But then I dug deeper and started adding my own rules, especially regarding the curator agent, which is responsible for keeping all the files linked and connected to one another.

That file contains the user manual, the rules of the game, and the keys to understanding each other. It's much simpler than it seems. Keep it under 200 lines of text; otherwise, we lose effectiveness. They're all specific, concrete instructions. Nothing ambiguous.

We have to provide information about our company, such as the name, industry, size, and any other details you want to include. The clearer you are here, the better everything that comes next will work. We have to specify Claude's role in this project. We'll tell him things like, "You'll be Leonardo's assistant to help him develop his expansion plan in Latin America." We'll set the tone and style we want him to use when responding.

We'll show him how the folder and file structure is organized so he can always find everything quickly.

You always have to be careful not to try to do everything all at once. With AI, you have to break everything down into small tasks and tackle them one at a time. At the beginning, it's always best to run a small test on one part and see if it's what you wanted. If not, you correct it and iterate until you get the desired output. Don't rush. AI moves too fast and tends to lose its way.

Here's a structure I recommend, it looks something like this. Inside CLAUDE.md, we tell it to read knowledge/company.md and knowledge/team.md. These are two files inside a folder called "knowledge." There, I explain much more about the company and the team, what we do, what we sell, where, and why. I describe in detail how many people work here, who they are, and what they do.

If a new person joins the company tomorrow, they should be able to read those files and understand what the business is all about. That's the proof that they're well written.

I can also upload agents and their skills: what they're for, what their tasks will be, and how they'll perform them. I define the business rules, such as that business hours are from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. or that prices always include taxes or not. Anything that's a fixed rule goes here.

We'll detail everything it's prohibited from doing. For example, breaking any of the previously defined rules, or inventing new ones that don't exist. In my projects, I've prohibited it, for instance, from using my thoughts. I occasionally store what I think and want to keep. I save them in a numbered file. There I put down my thoughts on everything, straight up. So I have a rule that it's forbidden to use them or even mention them. It's like a security key, and Claude doesn't have that key.

You just write text, but Claude Code reads that text every time it runs. The first thing it does is read these rules, and from then on, it never strays from the context. This is what sets it apart from a casual conversation in ChatGPT, here there's structure, there's memory, there are rules.

The key is to write as if you were explaining things to a new hire at your company. What would you tell them? What would they need to know to do their job well? Well, all of that goes into these files. The difference is that this new hire never forgets a thing.

We already have this new person at the company. They work 24 hours a day, and if you ask them to do something at 3 a.m., they'll do it with the same quality as they would at 10 p.m.

Plus, you'll be updating that every day. If you want to ask them to change the tone of their suggestions, just update that file—that's it. If the business rules change, update the file. If you bring a new person onto the team, you add them to the file. The system is alive and evolves with your company. You just type in your terminal what change you want to make and that's it.

After I explained all this to him, my son looked at me and said, "Yeah, I've got it. But not like you, I designed mine for a company. I use it to manage my development environment." What he was using for programming, I was using to organize my work at the company.

1. GitHub. Collaborative development platform founded in 2008 that allows hosting, sharing, and versioning code and files using Git. Owned by Microsoft since 2018. https://github.com ↩