The Tech Nation · Newsletter #14 "this is an agenda, not a newsletter" strip > the September dates > the dossier: the 17 rungs of a personal AI transformation, with a reply-with-your-number CTA. 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Your AI transformation happens in September. Early September is a strange moment. You are sad to leave the summer behind, and at the same time you cannot wait to start the things you thought about on the beach. We are exactly there. At The Tech Nation we work on AI transformation across its whole height. Building AI native SaaS on one end, running events for a few hundred people on the other, and everything in between. We genuinely love it, so we could not help ourselves this summer, and we prepared a lot of things for September. Which means an apology up front: if you read us from somewhere other than Barcelona, this issue is going to be frustrating. We promise we are not trying to give you FOMO. This one is less a newsletter than an agenda. But we did not want you to leave empty handed, so there is a method at the bottom. Seventeen rungs to transform yourself, on your own, wherever you are. Scroll down and find your number. The September agenda · Barcelona Cheese Tech & Wine · Thu 3 Sept, 18:00 How to start building your own agent team. Two hours, laptops open, no slides. Manar and Jeremie work live on Claude Code and show you the agent team that now runs most of this company, how each one was written and where each one actually runs. You leave with what you need to start yours. Then the rooftop: sea view over the whole city, wine, proper French cheese, and people worth talking to. 16 euros, and we send the setup tutorial ahead so nobody loses thirty minutes installing things. Get a seat → Cohort · Thu 10 Sept · 6 seats This one is on a boat. Two hours to Claude, while sailing. And no, no seasickness and the wifi works. We stay inside the port of Barcelona, it is completely calm. You bring the project you are actually stuck on, it goes up on the screen, and we build it, debug it and structure it with you. Six seats only, 140 euros, no package and no long commitment. We have been wanting to do this one for a long time, so do not wait on it. Take a seat → Claude Community House · Sep 21–24 One building, one week, the European Claude ambassadors in it. Four days in Poblenou. The Claude Clinic on Monday morning, where you bring the workflow that is broken and leave with it fixed. Claude Conversation in the afternoon. Workshops, demos and talks on parallel tracks all week, run by the ambassadors and by Anthropic's own team. And the Claude Impact Lab on Thursday, a full day building on the problems the week surfaced. Co-organised by The Tech Nation with the Claude ambassadors network, supported by Anthropic's community team. The whole programme, session by session, with every registration link, lives on one page:claudebcn.com See the programme → The AI Afterwork · Make Connections Four nights on the rooftop. Not one. Every evening of the week, 18:00 to 22:00, the House empties upstairs. A bar, a DJ, and the whole skyline. It is where the day's conversations actually finish, and where the people you wanted to meet inside are standing with a glass. Mon 21.09Opening night18:00 → 22:00 · DJ PapaBook →Tue 22.09Ambassadors' night18:00 → 22:00 · State of MindBook →Wed 23.09Open floor18:00 → 22:00 · SAÈZBook →Thu 24.09Closing night18:00 → 22:00 · Selen UsBook → 20 euros a night. 70 euros for all four. The pass gives you a code that registers you for each evening at no extra cost. Do the maths: the fourth night is free, and you stop deciding every morning whether tonight is the night. $ promo --for readersTTN20 · 20% off everything, so 56 euros the four nights One night above, or all four below. The pass is the one we would take. Take the 4 nights pass → The dossier · from Jeremie Seventeen rungs, from opening a chatbot to a company that runs itself. We have a framework we use with companies, the AI Maturity Path, five stages from AI aware to AI native. It works well in a boardroom and it is useless on a Monday morning, because a company does not transform. The people inside it do, one at a time. So here is the personal reading of the same path. Seventeen rungs, in the order we actually watch people climb them. Nobody skips three at once, and everybody thinks they are one rung higher than they are. Find your number, then read the one above it. That is the only one that matters this month. Rungs 1 to 4 · the habit 01You open an LLM. Occasionally. When you remember it exists.02Ten prompts a day, minimum. This is the real first threshold. Below ten it stays a curiosity. Above ten, your hands change.03You pay for it. Twenty euros a month buys the model that is actually good. Working on the free tier and concluding that AI is overrated is the most common mistake we see.04You use what is built in. Projects, connectors, memory, files. Most people pay for a Ferrari and drive it in first gear. Rungs 5 to 7 · you start building 05You open a coding tool. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor. Yes, even if you have never written a line of code. The gap that opens at this rung is the widest on the whole ladder, and it is not a technical gap, it is a permission gap.06You start burning tokens. One afternoon you hit the limit. That message is a promotion: it means you are finally using the thing at full speed. From there you either upgrade, or you learn to optimise hard, shorter context, the cheap model on the grunt work. Most people end up doing both.07You have shipped whole things. A site, an app, a workflow that runs without you. Not a demo. Something somebody else uses. Rungs 8 to 11 · it becomes a system 08You have a second brain, configured. Your context, your files, your rules, in one place the model reads before it answers. This is the rung that turns a generic assistant into yours.09You manage skills. You stop re-explaining yourself. Your procedures live in a library the model loads at the right moment, and you maintain that library the way you maintain code.10You plug in your real tools. Connectors and MCP into the stack you actually work in: your bank, your CRM, your calendar, your repo, your inbox. The workflow now runs on live data instead of on whatever you pasted into a chat window.11You route by model. You pick per task, on cost and on speciality. The fast cheap one for the grunt work, the strong one for the call that matters. And you know roughly what a request costs you. Rungs 12 to 14 · you stop doing, you start running 12You have agents. Not prompts you reuse. Agents with a job description, a scope, and a line they are not allowed to cross.13You have a team of them. Several, who know each other and hand work over. You stopped executing and started managing.14They run without you. On a cloud or a machine you never look at, on a schedule, on real signals. You read what they did. Rungs 15 to 17 · past the edge 15Your team hires. When the work needs a role that does not exist yet, the team writes it. You approve a job description, not the work.16They have real authority. They decide, they spend, they talk to people outside the company. You audit afterwards instead of approving beforehand. This is a trust problem long before it is a technical one.17The org chart is mostly agents. Humans do the parts that need a human, and the company runs on a structure that used to need forty people. Nobody we know is here yet. Somebody will be, and sooner than the ladder suggests. For the record: we sit at thirteen and we are pushing on fourteen. Everything above that, we have not done. If you are further up than us, we would genuinely like to talk. So. What's your number? Hit reply and send it to us. Just the number, nothing else, it takes four seconds. If enough of you play, we publish where this whole list actually stands in the next issue. And if you have been looking for a reason to post on LinkedIn since you got back, this is it. Say publicly which step of The Tech Nation AI Maturity Path you are on, and tell us why you are there. What you built over the summer, what you are stuck on, the rung that took you two years. Tag us so it reaches us, and we will be in your comments. $ tag --usThe Tech Nation and / or Jeremie Benhamou Fair warning, we are going to turn the whole thing into an ego boosting contest through the comment section, and we are going to enjoy it enormously. Yes, it is a ruler. Yes, everyone is going to round up. We rounded up too. You're building something.You want to move faster. Let's talk. Let's talk LinkedIn Instagram the-tech-nation.com People · Tech · Impact Got this from a friend? Subscribe →