How I use "ai" to build things (on HIVE)

Warm greetings to all readers! I recently applied to get some money from @acidyo's Hive development fund - and the money came through! Suddenly - I am under pressure to perform on behalf of HIVE!

Luckily - myself and my team and many of the people I surround myself with - we have been "building on HIVE" for a long time - most of our ideas are tied into HIVE in one way or another. I just need to figure out how to "show it".

Show your work

This is actually the main reason I joined this quest - what pushed me over the line to apply - I was disappointed in the fact that a previous iteration ran by deathwing did not result in any (that I noticed) follow up posts. As a sociologist myself, this is a grievous error on what could have been a great experiment (hopefully this doesn't turn into the new HIVE motto).

So "showing my work" is the whole point, and now since somebody managed a DHF proposal and sent me a few of those forbidden HBDs - I am morally obligated to take a shot at it. I have no one to blame or cheer but myself - so let's cheer me on as I get started.

Where to begin?

I have been contemplating my experience on such a social chain, I actually got my start making "tutorial-style" posts - about how to use markdown and other semi-technical features of a blockchain that was then known as "steem". Crypto framed my journey from lowly tech-writer to full blown product manager, and now AI is eating everyone's lunch and the PM's reign supreme. Managing ai agents isn't actually "easy" - its just verbose, and still requires a lot of finessing to make useful - ironically similar skill sets to dealing with "devs" and "clients" aka "people".

So I thought it might be relevent, historically appropriate, and actually needed to start a tutorial about "how" to actually use these new generation of tools to "build on HIVE", as is popular to shout about these days.

Step 1 - Get an Agent

In this series we will be using "Claude" in its "Claude Code" version - but you can use any one of them. It sounds funny - they are not people (they act like people) - but they all have different personalities, its true. There are other "non-Claude" agents, many even - and you can use any of them.

If you use google or chat-gpt - they have the exact same functionalities, just replace "claude code setup" with your version's set up.

Step 2 - Getting Setup

When I first tried out "ai", I got about this far. I can ask it anything here - and if I ask it to make me some code it would, and spit it out at me. But this isn't "building", and I didn't know how to get further. You could ask about recipes, or write a book, or get a tutorial like explanation....

Wait....

It seems the world has changed since I last wrote tutorials. Suffice it to say - you probably should be asking agents about "how" to do things. The limit is knowing how to ask, or what to ask about - for example, knowing that for windows computers - you probably should be using VSC - is something you might not know.

• Use VSC (download it) - its by microsoft so it works in windows
• Install your agents' local piece
• Connect both through login

"The payoff line: "That's it. Both links are done. Everything from here is the same chat you already know — you're just having the conversation next to your actual files instead of in a browser tab."

• Claude Sonnet, 2026

Step 3: Agents and Efforts

We have gone as far as we can without tackling the "elephant in the room" - These tools cost Money! Like yes, dollars and cents they will charge you money and take it out of your bank account and then you cannot use it for anything else. And that distinction starts with agents and their efforts.

So for Claude there are currently 3 agent options, 3 "personalities" for you to chose from - from cheap to expensive - Sonnet, Opus and Fable.

Step 4 - Start with Sonnet

The actual "unit of account" is called "tokens", and this brings us back to the important point. These aren't people, beware of anthropomorphism, they are statistical probabilities from a multiplied matrix - lots of linear algebra. The don't "lie", they sometimes output untrue things. They are not "psychopathic" - they have some statistical probability to imitate psychopathy.

Anyway - suffice it to say that we want to start with the happy-go-lucky workhorse Sonnet - which also happens to be the cheapest model to use. We will keep an eye on it, and make sure to give it good context to work with.

Step 5 - The real power of Agents with "Code"

This is what this tutorial has been about - getting you this far, finally into "Claude Code" (or equivalent with your agent). As you can see in the screenshot above, here I am working on a project with dozens if not hundreds of documents - we call these "context".

In the web ui - you can make a document, but in claude code you can review it over and over again, making minor changes and cross referencing it to other documents. This particular project - DOESN'T EVEN HAVE CODE - yet it is strengthened 100 times over by using Claude Code over the web UI - the difference is that powerful.

Which is why I made a tutorial - You can do this too - and its not "about" so-called "code".

Join me as we continue this series into the different projects I am working on, using Github (or equivalent), and other tips and tricks for best managing these new cutting-edge tools of the mid 21st-century.

Freedom and Friendship