The Tech Nation · Newsletter #16 body { margin: 0; padding: 0; background: #edece8; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; } img { border: 0; line-height: 100%; outline: none; text-decoration: none; } table { border-collapse: collapse; } @media only screen and (max-width: 600px) { .px { padding-left: 16px !important; padding-right: 16px !important; } .mh-logo, .mh-logo img { width: 150px !important; } .mh-title { white-space: normal !important; font-size: 17px !important; } .h1 { font-size: 34px !important; } .date { width: 84px !important; } } Issue #16 After the House 20 hot takes Photo: Pol Ducamp Four days, one house,2,000 people. From 21 to 24 September, a whole building in Poblenou was handed over to the people who use Claude. Fifteen Claude ambassadors came from all over Europe and ran more than 50 sessions: masterclasses, clinics, a hackathon for good, a crochet workshop. Rooms were packed, waitlists ran into the hundreds, and every evening the rooftop filled up again, with the Sagrada in the background. The wifi gave up on day one. People came back every day anyway, and on Thursday night nobody really wanted to leave. Here is what the rooms taught: 20 hot takes from the people who ran them, starting with a Claude Code masterclass by Julia Hernández, from Anthropic. Each one comes with something to try this week. Not technical? Jump to 05, 06, 11 and 15. Keep it. Forward it. OCTOBER · Two small rooms open with The Tech Nation: AI Clinic, Thu 8 Oct (8 seats) and Cheese, Tech & Wine #7, Wed 14 Oct. Details halfway down. 01 / 20 · THE MASTERCLASS The Claude Code masterclass, by Anthropic’s Julia Hernández. In five minutes. Julia Hernández Applied AI, Anthropic How to become a power Claude Code user, in a packed room with people standing along the walls. The starting point hits home: nobody taught us Claude Code, we picked it up between two tickets and kept the habits of autocomplete. Here are her slides, condensed. The one rule Give Claude a way to verify, or you are the test suite. instead of"the build is failing" write"the build is failing. run it yourself and read the logs. fix the root cause, don't suppress it, and rerun until it passes." Same move for tests (give it the cases) and for UI (give it the screenshot to compare against). The constraint behind everything "Almost every best practice is context management in disguise." The window fills fast and quality drops as it fills. So: a short CLAUDE.md ("keep a line only if removing it would cause a mistake"), skills loaded on demand, subagents that read for you, and /clear between tasks. Six habits to unlearn Reading every diff lineRead the transcript, spot-check the diff.Approving every promptTen clicks in, you stop reading. Use auto mode.One session at a timeRun three to five. Never be the bottleneck.Chatting instead of delegatingGive the symptom, where to look, what done means.Shipping because it compilesCompiling isn't working. Have Claude run it and show you.Starting over when it driftsEsc early. /rewind to undo. /branch to try both. Six prompt moves that change the outcome Interview me first"interview me, then write SPEC.md"Repro first, then fix"write a failing test for #812, then fix it"Point at the pattern"add /disputes like src/api/refunds.py"Push back on me"disagree? say so before you build"Send scouts"use subagents to map token refresh"Attach the evidence"cat error.log | claude" The cheat sheet /contextWhat is loaded before you even type./clearBetween tasks. Every time./compactKeep the decisions, drop the noise.Esc EscRewind code, conversation or both.Shift+TabSwitch permission modes.--worktreeOne checkout per session. Run three at once. Availability varies by plan and version. /help shows what your install has. Your homework, in this order Today15 minPrune your CLAUDE.md. Turn on auto mode with Shift+Tab.This week30 minWrite one hook and one skill. Commit them, so your team gets them too.Next task1 taskRun it in two worktrees. Try /remote-control once, from your phone.Bonus20 minRun /insights, then do what it says. "The power user isn't faster. They just never wait." Julia's closing slide. Her session condensed by The Tech Nation, not an official Anthropic publication. 02 to 10 Build better. 02 / 20 Alexio Cassani Product & Engineering, FairMind · Claude Ambassador Fix the harness before you upgrade the model. An agent is only as reliable as what surrounds it: the context it reads, the loops that check its work, the guardrails it can't cross, a memory that survives long tasks. Three hours of Harness & Loop Engineering showed that's where the gains are.TRY IT → Next time an agent disappoints you, add one check or one guardrail before you switch models. 03 / 20 Nicolas Grenié Developer Relations, SLNG Anything you explain twice should become a skill. The product is now the skill, everything else wraps around it. At SLNG, the new interface ends with a prompt you drop into your own project. Shared on stage with Manar, in From workflow to skills."Skills are the new product. The UI is just the harness."TRY IT → Find the instructions you've pasted into Claude three times this month. Make them a skill. 04 / 20 Dr. Florian Steiner Claude Certified Architect · Claude Ambassador You may not need a vector database. Start with two files. In LLM Wiki vs RAG: plain markdown, nothing to operate. Root-map.md says where things live, Facts.md says what is true. Claude finds facts instead of re-deriving them every session, and burns fewer tokens.TRY IT → Create Facts.md today. One dated line for each fact Claude keeps getting wrong. 05 / 20 Matt Roberts AI Educator and Enabler, Happy Operators · Claude Ambassador Small business: start with two blocks, not a plan. Claude for Small Business Owners was built on two blocks: skills for the tasks you repeat, a second brain for what the business knows.TRY IT → One skill for your most repeated task. One file with what your business knows. Start there. 06 / 20 Photo: Pol Ducamp Katrin Maikova & Luciana Gutierrez Claude for Non-Techies The context comes from you, not from the model. More than 20 non-techies came to build their own website with Claude Code, and many walked out two hours later with one. Every step started with questions to the participant, not to Claude: who is your customer, what do they do today instead, how do you want to sound. Only then did Claude Code research, write and build."the more you bring, the more you get."TRY IT → Before your next big prompt, write three lines: who it's for, what they do today instead, how it should sound. 07 / 20 Luset Pardo Head of Sales, Lumoo Don't replace your tools. Plug them in. A designer's real garments went in, a finished campaign came out. Lumoo was connected to Claude Code through MCP, so the whole pipeline ran on prompts. No magic wand: two tools working well together."Claude was the steering wheel for this session and Lumoo was the engine."TRY IT → Check whether the tool you use most has an MCP server. If it does, connect it this week. 08 / 20 Francisco Opazo Community & Growth, Softr Start from your own pain, not from a demo. With Mariam Hakobyan, in Build with Claude and Softr MCP. Many had never touched Softr. They picked a real problem from their own life or business, and Claude drove the database, the app and the workflows."They walked out having built real solutions to pain points in their own lives and businesses [...] in under an hour."Francisco OpazoTRY IT → Write down the spreadsheet that annoys you every week. That's your first app. 09 / 20 Rafa Romero Teaches AI, builds apps · Happy Operators The code isn't the bottleneck anymore. The stack is. In the Stripe build session, with Matt Roberts: people spend their first two hours wiring the plumbing (database, auth, hosting, credentials) instead of building the thing. So the session provisioned a real dev stack straight from the terminal, then spent the time actually building."the code is no longer the bottleneck. The stack is."Rafa RomeroTRY IT → On your next side project, ask Claude to set up the whole stack first, from the terminal. Then build. 10 / 20 Jérémie Benhamou Founder & CEO, The Tech Nation · Claude Ambassador Manage your Claude. Don't let it manage you. From the Claude Clinics, run with Manar: if you don't understand what Claude answered, the problem isn't you, it's the answer. You're the manager. Send it back.TRY IT → Next time you're lost, don't nod along. Ask it to rephrase, simplify, summarise, or just do it instead of explaining it. HALF-TIME · A WORD FROM US Want to do this with someone next to you? We're The Tech Nation. We co-organised the House, and the rest of the year we take companies from AI-aware to AI-native, in Barcelona. For you, it starts in small rooms where you build on your own laptop, with someone next to you when it breaks. Two are open: OCT 08 THU AI Clinic Come stuck, or come before you've even started. Leave unblocked. Two hours on your own project: an idea, a first automation, a product already live. when16:00 to 18:00whereNorrsken Houseseats8 people max · 140 € Book a seat → OCT 14 WED Cheese, Tech & Wine #7 Bring your laptop. Leave with a second brain that remembers your work and a first agent that runs. Then cheese and wine. when18:00 to 21:00wherePoblenouseats60 · 16 € early bird Get a seat → That was our one ad. Back to the other ten. How Typeform and Qonto leverage Claude · Photo: Pol Ducamp 11 to 20 Lead, decide, stay human. 11 / 20 Selim Boudis Founder & CEO, Kairros Start with one workflow you actually run. From AI Enthusiast to Agentic Builder: how a non-technical founder went from curiosity to agentic workflows used every day at KOLABS and Kairros. What worked, what didn't. The slot was one hour. The room stayed for an hour and a half."I'm not a coder."Selim BoudisTRY IT → Pick one task you do every week. Automate that one, end to end, before anything else. 12 / 20 Javier Gascón Araujo Javi.ai · Claude Ambassador, Madrid Adoption stalls on people, not on tools. Javier interviewed Marc Ustrell (Qonto) and Pol Borrellas (Typeform) on what changed when their whole company started working with Claude, and how internal champions shifted the mindset. Marc's warning, the day before: "Spoiler: I am not bringing a success story."TRY IT → Name one AI champion per team. Ask them to share what failed, not only what worked. 13 / 20 Gianluca Rosania & Javier Rayón Country Manager Iberia, Workfully · Chief AI Officer, Sesame HR Decisions about people stay with people. Practical HR workflows with Claude, then the hard part: under the EU AI Act, AI used in hiring and HR decisions is high-risk. The algorithm can rank and summarise. It shouldn't decide alone."The algorithm didn't reject you. Someone decided it could."Gianluca Rosania, translated from SpanishTRY IT → For each agent that touches people, write one line: who makes the final call. 14 / 20 Jennifer-Alice Kiunke AI & automation workshops · Make You can't ship what you can't see. Three sessions for Make: The Glassbox Effect: why enterprises can't ship what they can't see, a governed Claude agent built in a couple of hours, then several agents chained into one workflow in Make Grid. The thread: one agent is easy, a system you can trust is visible at every step.TRY IT → Before you add a second agent, make sure you can read what the first one did, step by step. 15 / 20 Bradley Lauretti Singer-songwriter · Americana Barcelona Start with the admin nobody wants to do. A songwriter who also books his own European tours, runs the merch and the ads. His session, From Chaos to Claude, for working musicians: a master venue sheet pulled out of a decade of dead files, a Drive you can find things in, a first Meta ad you understand. And one promise: no music would be made."Ten years of tour history sitting in a Google Drive folder you've never opened? That was me."Bradley LaurettiTRY IT → Open the folder you've been avoiding for years. Ask Claude to turn it into one clean sheet. 16 / 20 Geoffrey Rolin Jacquemyns Program Manager, Plug and Play · Claude Ambassador Automate the remembering. Never the caring. In Sociability Is the Last Human Moat, with Paula Guardans and Bosco Amann: let AI prep your meetings and remember what you said a year ago. Trust is still built the slow way, over coffees you actually show up for.TRY IT → Every Monday, ask Claude: "who haven't I followed up with?" Then write the message yourself. 17 / 20 Stephany Oliveros & Kristina Talova CEO, Lyra AI · with Protofy Get it off the screen. In Physical AI, 20 people (and a dog) wired microcontrollers and built Tetris, Snake and a Tamagotchi in under two hours. Everyone took their project home."Your AI can write a sonnet. It still cannot water your plant."Kristina TalovaTRY IT → Pick one small physical thing to build with Claude this month: a badge, a sensor, a game. 18 / 20 Andres Sepulveda Morales Technology consultant & AI strategist · Red Mage Some things you can only learn with your hands. Crochet Your Own Claude, with Christina Pruneski: two hours, a hook, a skein of yarn, no laptops. Everyone hit the magic ring at the same point, and there was no shortcut. Not everyone finished their crab. Every crab looked different, even with the same instructions."Nobody in the room could ask an AI to fix a dropped stitch."Andres Sepulveda MoralesTRY IT → Learn one thing this month with no screen at all. Notice who you end up asking for help. 19 / 20 Michael Whelehan Applied AI Consultant · Claude Ambassador One real problem, one day, one prototype. The Claude Impact Lab, a format born in Nuremberg: teams take real challenges from real organisations and build prototypes that could actually help people. In Barcelona, one team built Saviesa, where older people teach workshops to students who then help them with tech. From scratch, in under three hours.TRY IT → Ask a local association what slows them down. Give yourself one day to prototype the fix. 20 / 20 Fernanda Grace Lins Claude & Coffee · Claude Ambassador The room you need doesn't exist yet? Host it. Fernanda opened the week with two Claude & Coffee sessions, a community born in Barcelona, under one motto: Keep Curious. People sharing what they build, teaching each other, finding each other."Create what you crave."TRY IT → Invite three people who build with AI to a coffee this month. Rooms start small. Photo: Pol Ducamp Were you there?Five questions, no form. Just hit reply and answer in any order, any language, one word or ten paragraphs. 1The one session you'd tell a friend about, and why? 2One thing you do differently since that week? 3What was missing, or what annoyed you? (Yes, you can say the wifi.) 4Who did you meet that you wouldn't have met anywhere else? 5If you had a room at the next one, what would you run in it? No survey tool, no star ratings. We read the nice ones with a coffee. Claude reads all of them and tells us what to fix. See you on the 8th, or the 14th. And yes, we’re already scheming the next one. 🦀The Tech Nation team LinkedIn Instagram the-tech-nation.com People · Tech · Impact Photos by Pol Ducamp. Hot takes drawn from the speakers' sessions, slides and public posts. Got this from a friend? Subscribe →