A New Way to Operate

For most of my life my work lived in folders that could not see each other. Over the past two weeks it moved into one place, and the change has been hard to overstate.

You have done this before. You go looking for a document you know you wrote, a good one, and you spend twenty minutes opening folders, guessing at file names, searching for half a phrase you still remember. Somewhere in there is the exact thing you need. The folder keeps it safe and keeps it buried, two hundred files away from the project it belongs to.

I am thirty-two, and almost all of my working life has lived inside folders like that. Google Drive, Microsoft, iCloud. My generation grew up on them, and they were a real step forward. Work that once stayed locked to a single desk could travel, sync, and open on a screen across the country. I am grateful for every bit of that. Still, a folder is only a filing cabinet. It kept my work in separate drawers, and the pieces inside never learned that the others were there. A note from four years ago sat in one place, and the plan that would have answered it sat in another, untouched. When I sat down to build something new, all of that work sat with me, unable to reach across and connect.

Two weeks ago a friend changed that for me. He and I have been building a few projects together, and he works as a software engineer at a large company. One afternoon he walked me through the setup he lives in every day, and within a couple of hours I was standing inside a way of working that was completely new to me.

The setup is three tools. The first is VS Code, a code editor, which in practice is one window onto all of your files, every project open in the same place. The second is Claude Code, which is Claude, the AI assistant, running directly inside that editor rather than in a browser tab. Because Claude lives in the editor, it can read and work across every file in front of it, the whole body of your work at once, instead of the few lines you would paste into a chat. The third is GitHub, where developers store a project in the cloud and keep a full history of every change, so you can always return to an earlier version.

Connecting them is simpler than it sounds. You install VS Code, create a free GitHub account and link it, then add Claude Code to the editor and sign in. From there, everything I work on lives in one place, my prompting, my writing voice, my profile, every project. And I decide where each piece goes. Some of it I push up to GitHub, some stays only on my machine, some stays private. The control is mine, and for the first time the whole of my work sits together where one tool can read across all of it.

The value of that showed up fast. When I sit down to write, Claude already understands my voice and my history, since my own work is sitting right beside it. I am still the one writing. What changes is the starting point. It has read me, so it works as a real complement to my own thinking instead of a blank slate I have to brief from scratch every time. The projects feel the same. I can point to a decision I made weeks ago and Claude already has it, the record living in the same place. The work has a memory now, and it stays where I leave it when I close the laptop.

This is the part that surprised me. I had treated the browser versions of these AI tools as the whole story, and they are only the front of it. The browser tools have improved, and with an account they remember a fair amount, your saved chats, your custom instructions, and a memory of facts you have shared. What they still lack is your actual work. You bring the context to them, pasting in a document, uploading a file, describing the project, and they see only the slice you hand over. Inside the editor it runs the other way. Claude reads directly across my real files, the whole body of my work as it stands, every session, with nothing for me to paste in first. My context lives with my work, so Claude meets me where I already am.

For two weeks now I have barely opened Word or Excel, and Google Drive and iCloud have gone quiet. They still have their place, and I will use them again, yet it is genuinely eye-opening to add up the hours I used to spend moving between programs, and to see that time go into the work itself instead.

Here is the part I want anyone hesitant to hear. I am not a technical person. My background is in operations and leadership, not engineering. What I brought was a clear picture of what I wanted and the patience to sit with something unfamiliar for a few days. That was enough.

It did not all happen at once, and the order turned out to be the lesson. The first day was only a couple of hours on the phone with my good friend, and all we did was set up and link the three tools, VS Code, GitHub, and Claude Code. He walked me through the motions of each one. It still looked like a foreign language to me, this environment I had never seen, and I did not pretend otherwise. What I understood even then was that the real learning would start the moment we hung up and I began to play.

One thing I would tell anyone starting out is to lean on the guides for the setup itself. Watch a video, and follow a walkthrough online. Installing the three tools and linking your accounts is the same for everyone, and many of us need that hand to get it right the first time. The moment to stop following along is once the tools are running. How you organize your folders and files, how you name things, how your projects sit together, that part should be yours. There is no single correct layout, only the one that matches how your mind already works. Build it around yourself, not around a tutorial.

With the tools running, the next couple of days went into giving Claude my history, old and current both. I opened flash drives I had not touched in years, old cloud folders, and the files I work in every day, and had Claude read across all of it and pull out what mattered. College essays and writing from years back, so it could learn how I put words together. Past versions of my resume, each one a record of what I had done and how I described it at the time. Details from projects I built long ago, and from the ones I am in the middle of right now. I was not handing it a writing sample. I was giving it the long arc of my work, so it could see where I have been and where I am today in a single view.

Then I went past the written record. In came the leadership and coaching work of the past several years, the frameworks I have studied, the tools I return to, and honest notes on my strengths and my gaps, with the real situations that exposed them. The point was for Claude to understand more than how I write. I wanted it to grasp how I think under pressure, how I make decisions, and how I lead, so that anything it helps me build reflects that and stays true to who I am, rather than a generic version of it.

With all of that in place, the old projects and the current ones, the writing, the leadership work, I built a profile of myself on top of it. Who I am, what I value, how I think, how I write, the standards I work to. A detailed portfolio of me, written down in one place the tool can return to in every session. Then came the cleanup. Years of scattered files and folders, spread across drives and accounts, got pulled into one structure and organized into something I could build on going forward, rather than an archive I had to dig through to find anything.

All of that was week one, and nearly every hour of it was groundwork. From the outside it looked like very little. It was the slow, unglamorous work of gathering a life of files into one place and teaching the tool who I am. Week two is where it paid off. With the foundation set, I started connecting things, automations that pass context from one part of my work to another, a clear structure for how my folders and files relate, and a real tracker for each project so every one of them has a home. All of it stood on the groundwork of that first week. From there I moved into application development, the kind of building I had assumed was years and a hired team away. There is more to share on that soon.

It does feel strange at first. You are looking at the workspace developers have used for years, panels, a terminal, a running history of every change, the machinery that usually stays behind the curtain. The first few days ask a little patience. By the second week I preferred it. The polished online consumer apps stay simple by keeping you inside the small set of things they were built to do. This environment is the opposite. It looks rougher at the start, and then it lets you build, arrange, and automate almost anything you can picture. That freedom turned out to be worth far more to me than the clean surface I gave up.

What this opens up is wider than I expected. I already use it across the daily work of Ravine, the research, the content, the media, the writing and the charts. What is new is that I can build the things themselves. From a single rough wireframe, an iOS app is coming together, the kind of project that once meant hiring a developer and waiting months, and now it is mine to build on my own timeline. This is the part that charges me up. The tools at my disposal are close to limitless, and I am stepping into a level of creation and development I used to watch from the outside.

What pulls at me most is where this points Ravine. It has always run on research, content, and teaching, and now I can add real tools to it. As I keep building, I can put working utilities into the hands of other Bitcoiners, things they can open and use, alongside the words and charts I have always made. For years my contribution to Bitcoin lived in ideas. Now I can build directly for the people I most want to serve, and that changes what Ravine can become.

If any of this pulls at you, take a breath before you rush in. Sit back and picture how you want your work organized, how the files and folders connect, what small automations could link one corner of it to another. Then begin with yourself. Make one file that is entirely about you, your story, your work, your strengths, what you value, what you are still working to improve, and the way you write. Point Claude at the essays and reports you have written over the years, even resumes going back a decade, and let it learn your history and your style. That profile becomes the ground everything else stands on. From it you build the prompting and the voice that sound like you, and later the automations that keep returning to it. There is one good place to begin, and it is you. Everything else grows out from there.

I keep coming back to the words operating system, because they are honest about the size of this. An operating system is the quiet layer everything else runs on, the floor under the programs you see. For most of my life the floor under my work was a set of folders that kept everything safe and kept it apart, and I took that for granted as simply how things were. It was one way of doing it. A better one is here now, and it changes the math of what a single person can do. The power that used to require a company, a team of engineers, a real budget, and months of waiting now fits on one laptop and answers to one person. The leverage once reserved for large organizations is within reach of anyone with a clear vision and a little patience, and the work you have already done can compound into whatever you build next. The door is open, and the only real question is whether you walk through it.

With gratitude,

Kevin Katynski

Founder, Ravine

Disclaimer: Educational, not financial advice