A colleague of mine just asked me about getting started with Agents. Here’s what I said.
Start SLOW! There’s so many tools and apps wanting to drop you in the deep end. The way I learned was by graduating through the stages of the Claude app (although you can probably avoid Claude code for now!) Claude has a great list of built-in connectors (See the “Customize” section) to connect your apps, expand its capabilities, all without giving away too much control. Anthropic has worked hard to protect users from disastrous accidents like deleting files, sending random emails etc.
Next: Claude Projects is a great place to start with training your own mini-agent with custom instructions and files. However, it quickly gets limited because it’s so static, so I recommend moving swiftly on to Claude CoWork, which is more interactive. You can add custom instructions in the same way and grant access to specific folders on your computer. This is a great way to see what it can do — reading, creating, organizing, renaming — without opening up your entire machine. Once you do something really awesome, you can even ask Claude to “create a skill” for easy replication of a custom task.
Once you have the hang of that, you can consider graduating to your own always-on agent that you access through Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, or wherever you like. Personally, I use OpenClaw because I’m a power user, but for most people who are ready for the next step I’d recommend Hermes: easier to set up, lightweight, and fun. You don’t need a fancy dedicated machine, just a 15-dollar-a-month VPS server is great (I use Hostinger). This a natural extension of learning how to think “agentically”. Once you have an always-on agent who you can give access to more folders and more assignments, and as you get your head around it, you can hand it more responsibility…
From there it’s not a big jump to have it start building or maintaining websites, creating tools, building automations, creating and posting, running marketing research… Even one day managing entire campaigns and reporting back to you.
But don’t get ahead of yourself. Start slow, be curious and intentionally proceed and remember even just thinking about this, you’re already ahead of the curve 🙂
Enhance post
