How I run my work as a team of AI chats

You're pasting here, you're pasting there, and it starts to be a mess. More than once, I've pasted something into the wrong chat.

So I stopped being the messenger between my own tools. Each chat now has one job and a name, they all work from the same written notes, and one word hands the work from one chat to the next. I call it the relay. The video above is the short version. This post is the written one, with a few things that didn't fit in three and a half minutes.

Why so many chats

Every chat has a context window. That's how much it can keep in view at once. As a chat gets long, the older parts get squeezed down or pushed out, and details slip.

Give each chat one job and its whole window goes to that job. It's the same reason you wouldn't hire one person to do every job in a company.

One job per chat, and a short name

On my main project, Uma is our marketing role, so the work starts from our marketing objectives. Pen owns our writing rules and guidance, so everything we publish stays consistent. The content studio writes the scripts and makes the videos. Ada handles the build and ships it to the site once I approve it.

Why three-letter names? I don't want to type more than I have to, and I don't want to remember long, complicated names.

I don't start with a full team, either. A new seat gets added when one job keeps getting in the way of another, and not before.

The register is the core of it

The relay is what hooks people, but the register is the core of it: one written record for each chat, of what's done and what's still open. It lives outside the chat. So when a chat's window fills up, I open a new chat in the same seat, tell it which seat it is, and it picks up right where the last one left off. Being able to seat a new chat at any point, because of how we document, is huge.

One word moves the work

When one chat needs another to do something, it writes the whole message down. I go to the other chat, type one word, relay, and it picks up the work.

No copying, no pasting.

It works for more than marketing

My example is a marketing team because that's the work I do. It fits any process with several steps or several tools: a designer's process, or a writer's.

I use it across my whole business. It's how I keep track of my time, where each piece of work is and where each client is. If I have a meeting, I hand my notes to one chat, and what came out of that meeting gets sent on to the chats that need it.

The habit that keeps it getting better

It took a while to get here. At one point I couldn't get the visuals in my videos to look the way I wanted. Then it clicked: what if I gave the studio a storyboard, the same way you'd brief a contractor before they start a job? My notes and screenshots went into one written guide the studio works from.

That's the habit: always looking for a way to do the work a little better, and writing it down where the next chat will read it.

Why I stay involved

Some people say to just let AI do the work. I've found I work best when I'm involved in my projects: reading about them, learning them, studying their keywords. That's what I enjoy, and it's what my clients expect from me.

As a consultant, I have to know what I'm talking about. The challenge I face is more about organization than expertise. This solves for that.

What it took, and what it runs on

This took a lot of time and it was expensive to learn. You don't have to repeat that. It's just chats with one job each, plus shared written notes. I run it on Claude's Max plan.

New agents like Claude Duet, Grok Bot and OpenBot are super dope too. No knock against them; I'll try them at some point, because that's the field I work in. But I do all my work in Claude already, and I plan to grow with it.

Start with one chat and one file

You don't need a full team on day one. Start with one chat that keeps the plan, and give it one file to keep current: what's live, what's waiting, what's next. When a second kind of work keeps interrupting the first, give it its own chat and a name, and have the two pass notes through the project instead of through you.

I go deeper on how I set this up for a marketing team on my Claude for marketing page, and the starter files are on GitHub if you want to copy it.