Setting up Claude Cowork for Personal Productivity
A step-by-step guide to setting up Claude Cowork so it remembers your people, your projects, and your shorthand. Stop re-explaining yourself every session.
I go by Jeff. Fun fact: Burmese names don’t have family surnames, so “Min” isn’t my last name.
I’m a founding engineer at Chalkie AI. Before that, I founded four companies, raised capital, led teams, sold an engineering business, and spent years trying to find my way back to the craft.
I grew up in Myanmar and learned to code at twelve, mostly from books. The internet was unreliable, Stack Overflow did not exist, and the compiler was not interested in explaining itself. I learned early that waiting for ideal conditions was not a strategy.
While I was at university, I started Nexlabs. I eventually left to build it full-time. The company grew, and so did my job. I moved from code to sales, payroll, hiring, fundraising, and whatever else was on fire. We built Better HR inside that company, spun it out, and eventually sold the engineering unit to a public company.
That success came with a cost I did not notice until later: I had built organisations that no longer needed me to build. I had more authority and less of the work that made the authority meaningful.
So I returned to engineering. Today I’m building at Chalkie AI and writing about software, leadership, agency, ambition, and the tension between scaling the work and staying close to it.
A short version of thirteen years spent moving between engineer, founder, and operator.
Building AI tools that help teachers create classroom-ready lessons and learning materials. I’m back where I do my best work: close to the code, the product, and the people using it.
Built an AI-native expense journal used by more than 16,000 people in the US, including its mobile app, backend, and multi-agent systems.
Led operations, HR, and compliance for a crypto-backed stablecoin and peer-to-peer lending platform.
Started with a payroll problem and built a regional HR platform serving more than 100,000 employees across four countries.
Grew a four-person development shop into a product studio. Its 30-person engineering unit was acquired by Yoma Strategic Holdings in 2021.
Notes from the work, including the parts I got wrong.
A step-by-step guide to setting up Claude Cowork so it remembers your people, your projects, and your shorthand. Stop re-explaining yourself every session.
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