Start with one useful AI task for your business. This page guides you through the tools, task steps, access, and checks your setup needs. Pick a small job first, then test what works before you add more.
This guide is part of AI Agent Implementation Guide (MASTER-2026.1). Next, explore How to Install Our Claude Skill Packs, or The System: AI-Driven Marketing That Documents and Improves Itself.
Where this task fits in the Content Factory
This task supports work across the Content Factory (our four-stage process for using real content). Its inputs and next handoff determine which stage uses it. This playbook coordinates several smaller tasks. Use each linked recipe for its detailed steps.
Start, finish, and next step
- Start when
- A nontechnical owner wants to set up their first supported AI work environment.
- Have ready
- Supported computer and AI plan
- Chosen runtime’s current capabilities
- Authorized website access if connecting a site
- One useful first job
- Follow the steps
- Install the supported desktop runtime
- Enable its work mode
- Install the canonical skills
- Connect the website through the approved credential method
- Configure one first job and verify a real result
Use the detailed instructions in this article for each step.
- Finish with
- A verified skill installation and first working task, with any recurring job separately configured and observed.
- Measure the result
- The runtime can load the intended skill
- The site connection is tested only within authorized scope
- Any test publication is checked then removed as instructed
- The first recurring run has actual evidence
- Hand off next
- Use the install guide for runtime-specific steps and choose the next job after the first one works.
Reference material for the inputs
Related tasks
Open this article’s tasks in the Task Library (our directory of tasks and recipes; see current Task Library). The library connects the current recipe, its smaller tasks, and the records of work performed.
You saw me speak, you want the AI agents, and you are not a technical person. Good. This page assumes you know nothing. Nothing on it asks you to write code, open a terminal, or understand what an API is.
Set aside about forty minutes. Most of that is downloads running while you do something else.
This is the same setup whether you are:
— 19 years old, never had a real job, and want to run an agency
— a creator or athlete who posts constantly and gets no business from it
— 45, you own a plumbing company, and the phone does not ring enough
Same five steps. Same forty minutes. The agents just work on different things afterward.
What you need first
| What | Cost | Why you need it |
|---|---|---|
| A Mac | you may already have one | Windows does most of this too. The one-click website connection in Step 4 is easier on a Mac today. |
| A Claude subscription | from $20/month at claude.ai | This is the AI that does the actual work. The free tier will not carry an agent that runs every day. |
| Your website login | free | So your agents can publish for you instead of emailing you drafts. |
You do not need: a developer, a server, a credit card for anything beyond the Claude subscription, or any understanding of how any of it works.
The five steps
Get Claude on your computer
Go to claude.ai, create an account, and pick a paid plan. Then download the desktop app — not the website, not the phone app. The desktop app is the one that can reach your files and your website.
Why the desktop app: the browser version can talk, but it cannot open your folders or publish to your site. The agents need hands, not just a mouth.
Turn on Cowork
Open the Claude desktop app and turn on Cowork. This is the mode where Claude stops being a chat window and starts being a coworker that can actually do things — open files, build documents, publish pages, and run on a schedule while you sleep.
Install our skills
A skill is a set of written instructions that teaches Claude how we do one specific job — how we write a definitive article, how we score a podcast appearance, how we run a weekly report. You are not buying software. You are handing Claude our playbook.
Install the pack from the Skill Pack Library. Take the whole pack. Do not try to pick and choose on day one — the skills reference each other.
Connect your website — this is the step everyone gets stuck on
Your agents need permission to publish to your site. You are never going to give them your password. That is not how this works and you should be suspicious of anyone who asks.
WordPress has a thing built for exactly this situation. It is called an application password. It is a separate, revocable credential for the WordPress account. Its access follows that account’s permissions, so use the account and scope approved for the job. You can revoke it without changing the account’s main password.
The easiest way is to let Claude walk you through it. Open Cowork and type this:
Your assistant can guide the connection when its runtime supports the needed tools. Store the application password through the approved credential method, then verify the connection on the device and account that will run the job. A saved key does not automatically transfer to another computer or runtime.
If you would rather do it yourself, here are the exact clicks:
- Go to
yoursite.com/wp-adminand log in - In the left menu click Users, then Profile
- Scroll all the way down to Application Passwords
- In the name box type:
claude - Click Add New Application Password
- It shows you 24 characters in six little groups. Copy them right now.
- Paste them into Cowork and say: save this for yoursite.com
Read this before you click, because it only shows once
WordPress displays that password one time, at the moment you create it. You cannot go back and look at it later — not in the settings, not anywhere. If you close the tab without copying it, it is gone forever and you have to make a new one.
So: copy it the second it appears. This one detail is responsible for more wasted afternoons than everything else on this page combined.
You scrolled down and there is no “Application Passwords” section
Three reasons, in the order they are likely:
1. Your site is not secure yet. Look at the address bar. If it says http:// instead of https://, WordPress hides this feature on purpose. Ask your host to turn on the free SSL certificate — every host has one, it takes them ten minutes.
2. A security plugin switched it off. Wordfence, Solid Security and iThemes all do this by default. Go to that plugin’s Login Security settings and turn application passwords back on.
3. You are not an administrator on your own site. Whoever built it may have given you an Editor account. Ask them to make you an Administrator. It is your site.
Your site is not on WordPress
If you are on Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy Website Builder or Shopify, there is no application password to make. Your agents will still research, write, score and prepare everything — they just hand you the finished piece to paste in, instead of publishing it themselves.
That is a real difference in how much time you save. If you are serious about this, it is worth moving to WordPress, and it is the one technical decision worth paying someone to do once. Ask us and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth it for your situation.
Turn on your first agent
An agent is a worker that uses a skill, context, tools, and the permissions for a task. A scheduled job gives that work a trigger, a saved result, and a failure check. Start with one job using your runtime’s supported controls. Type this into Cowork:
One agent, running for a week, that you actually read, beats twelve agents you set up in one excited evening and never look at again. Add the second one after the first has reported twice.
How you know it worked
Type this into Cowork:
Publish a test post to my site called “Hello from my agent” and send me the link.
If a link comes back and the post is really on your site, you are finished. Delete the test post. Everything else from here is just telling your agents what you want.
Setting this up for your son, your assistant, or your VA
A lot of you are not going to do this yourself, and that is fine. Hand this page to a 17-year-old and they will have it running before dinner. Two things to get right:
Give them their own Claude account, not yours. $20/month is cheaper than untangling whose conversation history is whose.
Make them an Administrator on the website, and let them make their own application password. Name it after them — claude-marcus, not claude. Then the day they move on, you delete that one key and nothing else breaks. This is the whole reason application passwords exist instead of shared logins.
What this actually costs
| Item | Monthly |
|---|---|
| Claude subscription | $20 to $100 depending on how hard you run it |
| Our skills | free |
| Website hosting you already pay for | no change |
Start at $20. Move up only when Claude tells you that you are hitting limits. Most people do not need to.
When you get stuck
Tell Claude what happened, in normal words, and paste in whatever error you saw. It knows this setup — the skills you installed include our own troubleshooting notes, written from our own mistakes. “It says 401” is enough for it to fix the problem.
If that fails, come to us. Do not spend an evening on it. The whole point of this is that you spend your time on your business.
What to do next
Once your agents are running, the next thing to read is The System — what the agents are actually building for you and why it compounds. Then the Agent Roster, so you know which one to turn on second.
Already have a business with reviews, a unique technique, and a clear ideal client? Inventory Goals, Content, and Targeting on the Social Amplification Engine start page. If that screen passes, agents can run plumbing, the Content Factory, Dollar a Day, and weekly MAA (Metrics, Analysis, Action: results, meaning, and next steps). If it fails, it tells you what to fix first — it will not sell you ads.
Technical readers: the credential model, storage location and error codes are documented at Publishing Without wp-admin. You do not need it to follow this page.