every day is bring your claude to work day

i started a new job last week. openrouter. they make it so developers can use one api to talk to any ai model. instead of signing up with openai and anthropic and google separately, you just go through openrouter and get access to all of them. i’m a bdr.

some of you probably saw this coming from the last couple issues. if you didn’t, surprise. the prospecting guy now sells ai infrastructure to technical founders.

i also want to be upfront about something. i know a lot of you subscribed to see how an sdr does outbound. and that’s just not what i’m doing right now. this role is fully inbound at this point. there are plans to push into outbound eventually, but right now i’m building systems to handle an inbound flow that is... substantial. so the newsletter might look a little different for a while. i’m figuring it out as i go. i hope you’ll stick around.

my first week didn’t look like onboarding. it looked like building. i want to tell you what that actually meant.

claude code is my nexus right now. i do most of my job through it.

it’s plugged into slack, so anytime i have a question i can search slack. anytime i can’t find an answer in slack, i can have it dm one of our ai assistants. when i want to build something or spin up a new slack agent, i have claude talk to the right agents to get them spun up and trained. anytime i need to make an adjustment in hubspot, claude does it. it touches everything.

first thing i did was plug it in and have it map out all the channels. then i had it dm every ai agent in the workspace to figure out what they do.

there are about 13 of them.

dove is a business development helper. sniffer runs fraud detection and jurisdiction checks. ori manages the other bots. they’re full coworkers. they know everything about our business and they are very good at their specific jobs. great assistants.

when i showed up and started building my own automations, nobody said “wait, what are you doing?” or “you shouldn’t do that.” they just said “nice.”

so i started building.

i built a daily slack digest that reads 24 channels at 7:47 every morning and tells me what happened while i slept. action items, context, talking points. delivered to my DMs before i even sit down.

i transcribed every onboarding call with my local whisper model and ingested them into a knowledge base. every conversation, every training video, every product doc. searchable from any claude session.

by day four i’d audited the entire crm and documented the full inbound workflow.

by my sixth working day, i DMed the gong admin at our company and asked for public and secret api keys. and they were given to me. no ticket. no approval chain. just “here you go.” that is how this company approaches enablement. you wanna go build something? here, go build it. it was incredible.

i was shipping production infrastructure within my first week because claude helped me get a sense of everything fast, and this is a place where you’re just permitted to start building. nobody gatekept me. nobody told me to wait. i just started doing things and people were into it.

something emma (the other bdr) said during one of my onboarding calls stuck with me. “let the robot do what the robot is good at and let the humans do what the humans are good at.”

that’s the principle. you’re not replacing yourself. you’re giving yourself a head start so the human stuff can actually be human.

the fastest onboarding is the one you build yourself. not because you’re smarter than the process. but because building for the job teaches you the job faster than reading about it.

none of this is about flexing. i built these things because they’re needed. the inbound volume is real and moving fast, and the sooner i could get systems handling the repetitive stuff, the sooner i could focus on the parts that actually need a person.

emma is the bdr i’m working alongside at openrouter. she’s the one who accepted my linkedin connection request months before i applied, because she recognized me from my content.

she had 20 or 30 people reach out about the role. only two didn’t immediately ask for 15 minutes of her time. i was one of those two.

she pulled my application from the pile manually because we’d been having an actual conversation. she’s curious and conversational and i’ve really enjoyed working with her.

go give her some love.

your side projects are auditions nobody asked you to give. but if you’re talking about them, you probably have an audience whether you realize it or not.

when a carpenter ant relocates to a new colony, it spends the first 48 hours rebuilding its own chamber before contributing to any communal tunnels.

this issue was written with claude code.

if this was useful or you know someone building their own tools at work, please share it. here is a link to subscribe :)

if you respond to this newsletter, it goes to my personal inbox. i’d love to hear from anyone bringing ai into their workflow. let’s chat.