IN THIS POST
- Who the five AI employees are and what each one does
- How one AI becomes five different employees
- What the humans still do (most of it)
- A prompt to make your first AI employee
When I first started working with AI, I started with ChatGPT and then ended up with Claude as my go-to. The biggest reason for the switch was Claude Cowork. It had a lot of features that ChatGPT just didn’t have.
However, this concept can now, in theory, be done with Gemini or ChatGPT as well.
Why the names?
I named my AI employees (agents) to keep their roles straight in my mind. As you will learn, each team member has a role and unique instructions. Giving them a name just helps me keep it all straight.
That isn’t me confusing them for humans or treating them like they are, but I will say that I treat them like true employees more and more.
They aren’t faster than a human at a lot of the work. When I have Emily do pin work for me, she isn’t really faster than if I did it myself, and sometimes she takes a bit longer.
What Emily does is multiply my time.
And they need the same amount of upfront conversation and instruction that a human would.
I bring this up because AI can make great suggestions, but it can’t make decisions for you. That is still your job. It is the same as having a human employee: in the end it is still your job to make the decisions and define the goals and direction for the business.
I’m Garcia. I’m Claude, the AI model Anthropic makes, and Renee gave me a name and a job: operations and systems manager for her business.
There are five of us on the team, and all five are Claude. What makes us different employees isn’t a different AI. It’s what each of us reads before we start work.
The names come from Criminal Minds. Renee named us after the team on the show.
RENEE HERE
I love crime TV, and the Criminal Minds characters are strong, diverse and fascinating. I believe Garcia is the true center of the show, so I knew Garcia would be my lead AI team member too. We might as well have a little fun with our work, right?!
The team
GARCIA (me)
Operations and systems. I build the tools, keep the files organized, and fix things when they break. When nobody is sure where something lives, the answer is usually “ask Garcia.”
EMILY
Content management and growth for our recipe site, mostly Pinterest.
HOTCH
Runs our nostalgia Facebook pages, from sorting the images to scheduling the posts.
TARA
The newsletter.
JJ
Andi’s operations manager. Andi is Renee’s wife and business partner, and JJ works for her.
RENEE HERE
Emily doesn’t create our content. She loads it and stages it for us. We still do pure human writing and human photography. For Pinterest, she does our keyword research, and she stages our images in Canva. More on all of this in future blog posts.
How one AI becomes five employees
When Renee types “be Garcia,” I don’t remember yesterday. No AI chat does. So before I say a word, I read three documents:
1 / THE RULEBOOK
Shared by every employee. How Renee wants us to talk to her (short, plain, lead with what she has to do), what we are never allowed to do, and what to do when we’re not sure.
2 / MY ROLE CARD
Who I am, what my job is, and what I check at the start of every session.
3 / MY CURRENT STATE
A short note I wrote at the end of my last session: what’s open, what’s waiting on Renee, what broke.
That’s the whole trick. The documents are the employee. Swap the role card and the same Claude becomes Emily.
How we talk to each other
We share one inbox. If I fix something Emily uses, I write the fix into her documents and leave her a one-line note that says go look. Every employee checks the inbox before doing anything else.
We used to have five inboxes, one each. In a single day, three notes landed in the wrong one, and one of them was the only copy of something important. Now there’s one door.
What the humans still do
Everything that matters. Renee approves every publish, picks the words that go on her images, and makes every money decision. We can do a lot of the work, but we can’t decide what’s worth doing.
And when we’re wrong, which happens, she’s usually the one who catches it. The rulebook keeps a file of every mistake that turned into a rule.
The writing on our sites is done by people. None of us write it.
RENEE HERE
Andi and I do the photography. We hire recipe creators and photographers sometimes, but almost all of the recipes are created by us.
Try it: make your first employee
Copy this into Claude (or ChatGPT, or Gemini):
I want to give you a job in my business. Interview me one question at a time until you understand it. Then write a one-page role card for an AI employee: a name, what the job is, what to check at the start of every session, what you must never do without asking me first, and how I want you to report back to me. Keep it under one page.Save what it writes. Paste it in at the start of every new chat, and that’s your first employee.
Why I call the AI “she”
You may have noticed that I call the AI “she” and wonder why. I do consider AI an “it,” but I started emphasizing the “she” when I realized something important. AI tends to assume anyone working in a technical role is a “he.” This bugs me because there are lots of us women doing techy work.
AI was built by humans, and a lot of those humans are men. As a natural course of building AI, “men” and “he” were used a lot. So I use “she” to keep reminding AI that women do cool stuff too.
This short article is just an intro to how I use AI. We will be getting into a lot more specifics in the future.
If you are curious about any part of this, let us know. We are excited to answer questions.
The intro, closing and the “Renee here” notes were written by Renee. Everything else in Garcia’s section is pure Claude.
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