Jarom Watts runs sales for Easy To Use Products, an Amazon business. He came to me sideways, sitting in as a fly on the wall on a session I was running for another company, then asking afterward to buy his own.
At session one he had never used a terminal. He kept reaching for his mouse to move the cursor in it, the way you would in any other window. That is what the starting line looks like for most people, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Three hours after that session ended he sent me a review I never asked for:
"I came in feeling intimidated by the whole world of AI, and I left feeling genuinely excited and capable."
"He met me where I was, didn't talk over my head, and made sure I understood each step rather than just rushing through."
The first evening
Session one was scheduled for two hours and ran three, because he had questions and kept wanting to go further. He called the hands-on part "the fun stuff." We got VS Code working as the place his projects live, installed a memory system, and set up a briefing agent that reads his calendar and messages and hands him a summary every morning. Along the way I showed him a dialer and a website I had built for myself, so he could see the ceiling is higher than people assume.
That evening, four hours after I left, this landed in my inbox:
"I looked more at different speech to text tools and I didn't like the ongoing pricing, so I remember how you built your own and I worked with Claude in VS Code to custom program my own!"
"So cool to see it do programming for me (including downloading Python on my machine)."
"Opens a whole world of possibilities for me!"
A non technical sales director hit a real problem, dictation software wanting a subscription he did not want to pay, and solved it by having Claude write him the software instead. He had never written code. That morning he had never used a terminal. We had not covered any of this yet.
Session two: the API he finished alone
Session two we did a focus map, the exercise where you get everything out of your head and figure out what actually matters this quarter, then worked on his Amazon seller account.
He wanted the Amazon Selling Partner API. Dashboard services will sell you that data for around a hundred dollars a month. Jarom is frugal and wanted his own. Claude pushed back at first, having read his profile and decided the work was too technical for him. I told him to push through anyway.
The SP API takes a developer application with a pile of forms. He was still mid-application when I left. An hour later he forwarded me the approval email. Global market access, granted:
"I could not have gotten this far without Claude's help! So cool that I can take screenshots and it literally walks me through step by step and tells me what to fill out for the forms I encountered."
"I couldn't have had Claude help me this much without you helping me set up Claude in a powerful way, so thank you for the big unlock, Evan!"
Screenshot the form, ask what it means, fill it in. Nobody taught him that. He worked it out because he had stopped assuming a hard form was a wall.
The laptop he wiped
Two weeks later he wiped his original laptop and lost the entire session one setup. Everything, gone.
He rebuilt it himself with Claude, without calling me, and then went further and did the homework I had given him, pushing everything to GitHub so both machines stay in sync and any new machine picks up where he left off. He dictated the email about it with the speech to text tool he had built himself:
"So feeling very empowered that if I just trust Claude, I know what it is that I want to accomplish, I can make things happen. So thank you for the training you've been giving me."
That is the moment the engagement was over, functionally. Everything after was polish.
Session three: the number he had needed for years
Session three he opened by saying he wanted to think about the business from the top, then, without me suggesting it, told Claude to act as his CEO and interview him. That top level view is the thing he does not do naturally, and he went and did it on his own.
The interview routed him straight back to the Amazon work already on his agenda. So he set up the Google Cloud CLI mid-session, pointed Claude at his Amazon account, and pulled a cost number he had been chasing for years. His words when it came up: "that's the number I needed."
The old reflex was still in there. Claude asked about a reply he was waiting on and he jumped to his email and spent three minutes scrolling for it by hand. I asked why he did not have Claude find it. "Oh yeah, I should be doing that." That gap between knowing a thing and reaching for it under pressure is most of what a third session is for.
Three quarters of the way through he asked if he could copy the session principles onto his whiteboard. I said I would do him one better and handed him the printed Foundation certificate. He pinned it to the board next to his computer.
Where he landed
He said it himself before the session was over:
"I know I can do this on my own."
He is not finished. He wears every hat in that business and arrives at everything a little scattered, and three sessions do not fix that. But he builds his own tools now, he gets himself through technical processes that would have stopped him in June, and he does not need me in the room for any of it.
Which was the job. You are supposed to stop needing me.
