# Field notes
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AI
How to Set Up Claude Skills: Turn Repeat Work Into One Sentence
A skill is one folder with one SKILL.md file. Three steps to set it up, the one line that decides whether it ever gets called, and the month-end close I handed over.
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AI
Will an AI Automation Course Help? The Order of Your Own Work Comes First
A course is a fixed curriculum, and the way you write mail is not. Before you look for an AI automation course, ask how you actually work.
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AI
Prompt Tuning and Telling: Not Fixing the Answer, Making the AI Remember You
You cannot ask the company that built the AI to work your way. So you fix the format, then the order, and then you stop fixing answers and start storing memory.
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AI
How I Use Claude Cowork All Day (and Keep the Token Bill Down)
Almost nothing is written down about Cowork, because not many people live in it yet. Four steps to run it, and the three places the tokens leak.
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Company
An Electronic Parts Store Built by AI: Part Number to Quote in Three Steps
One of our subsidiaries sells electronic parts. 662 item pages went up in a day, and then the search data showed which ones nobody was clicking.
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AI
How to Cancel Claude and Get a Refund: Cancel 24 Hours Before Billing
Payments are non-refundable outside one narrow legal exception. Asking for a refund does not cancel anything, and cancelling has a deadline.
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AI
Claude Pro Usage and Max Pricing: The One-Minute Check
No comparison table can tell you whether to move up to Max. Your own usage screen can, and it takes a minute to open.
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AI
Claude Team Plan Pricing: Who Gets the $100 Seat?
The gap between an individual Pro seat and a Team seat is $3. I ran the table through a four-person budget, and the question stopped being whether to buy it.
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AI
Lighten the Load, or Narrow the Path
Building the software was one job. Teaching my team to use it was another: one sentence for the people who were already good, a different one for the people starting out.
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AI
What Disappeared Was Not a Job. It Was a Step.
Sorting the mail was never the finish line. Once the AI started asking customers for the missing fields, a quote request went from five human touches to one.
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AI
Building AI Agents Is Easy. Keeping Them Running Is Not.
Three agents all reported done, and all three disagreed. I found out days later, then shut it down and rebuilt for a month.
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AI
AI Automation: How My Company Runs While I Sleep
Automation did not start with a hundred agents. It started with a sorting table: three rules, and my overnight mail lands where it belongs.
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AI
The Three AI Agents I Actually Use
Everyone asks which agent to buy. The three I use all do the same thing: they read my past, not my future.
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AI
Teach Your AI First
Most people chat with AI. I taught mine, and it stopped being a tool and became an advisor.
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AI
Why I Pay for Claude
The rankings flip every day. My criterion is simpler: which one actually works on my computer.
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AI
Written with My AI Assistant
I froze at the empty page. Then I split blogging into three jobs and handed two of them over.
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AI
The Day My Agents Started Doing Sales
I automated my inbox and felt clever. Then agents that run other agents showed me something embarrassing.
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AI
Ten Years of Email, Five Categories
A decade of my inbox sorted into five kinds. Five kinds means five playbooks, and an inbox that runs itself.
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AI
The Company Where a Photo of a Receipt Becomes a Ledger Entry
I studied spreadsheet automation for months. The answer was to stop opening the spreadsheet.
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AI
What It Actually Costs to Run My Companies on AI
Two Max accounts, weekly rate limits and an API bill: the honest monthly number, and why the usual comparison is wrong.
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AI
Forty Bots Run My Day Now
My day started in the inbox and ended in the inbox. I was doing the system's job.
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AI
I Gave the AI an Employee Badge
Every report was already history the moment I exported it. Then I let the AI read the books directly.
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AI
I Can't Write a Line of Code. I Built Our ERP Anyway.
Everyone is chasing full autonomy. I run semi-automatic on purpose, and there is an order to this that most people skip.
# About
I am a Singapore-based operator and the founder of BRIGHTEN PTE. LTD. Through BRIGHTEN Group I build and run companies across trading, AI security, and SaaS (five of them at present).
My work is mostly about turning operations into systems: making the accounting, the sales pipeline, and the daily reporting run themselves.
What you will find here are practical field notes from that work: what was built, what it cost, what broke. Not tutorials.