Q&A

Short answers to things people most often ask James. Type to filter, or scan the list.

9 questions

• Does Hands-on AI offer corporate or custom AI training for teams? Yes. Hands-on AI offers custom corporate training programs tailored to your organization's goals, industry, and team skill level — from half-day executive workshops to multi-week hands-on programs. Designed and delivered by James Gray, UC Berkeley AI instructor and former CIO/CPO with 5,000+ executives trained globally. Contact jamesgray.ai/corporate-ai-training to schedule a training call.
• How do I connect an MCP server to Claude Code? Use the claude mcp add command to connect MCP servers to Claude Code with three transport options: HTTP for remote servers (recommended), stdio for local processes, or SSE for server-sent events.
• How do I find workflows worth applying AI to? Run a structured audit of your daily and weekly tasks, classifying each by autonomy level (Deterministic, Guided, Autonomous) and human involvement (Augmented, Automated) — to find where AI can save time, reduce errors, or automate entire processes.
• How do I identify the right AI tools for a workflow? Break your workflow into discrete steps using the 6-question framework (steps, decisions, data flows, context needs, failure modes, data readiness), then map each step to AI building blocks like prompts, skills, agents, and connectors to see exactly what to build.
• How do I schedule an automated Claude subagent? Add scheduling instructions to your project's CLAUDE.md file, then ask Claude Code to schedule your subagent — it creates the wrapper scripts, logging, and OS-level scheduled task (launchd on macOS, Task Scheduler on Windows) automatically.
• If I add skills using plugins provided by developers, will they conflict with my custom skills? No. Plugin skills and custom skills live in separate directories and use namespaced identifiers, so they never overwrite or interfere with each other — even if they cover similar topics.
• What is a system prompt? A system prompt is an instruction given to an AI model that defines its behavior, personality, and constraints for the entire conversation.
• What is the best way to name Claude agent skills? Name skills using a gerund verb-noun pattern that describes the action and its context, like 'writing-workflow-sops' or 'registering-building-blocks', so the name alone tells you what the skill does.
• What is the difference between a skill and an agent in Claude Code? A skill is a reusable routine that does one thing when invoked, while an agent is an autonomous system that plans, uses tools, and orchestrates multi-step workflows.