A Weekly Course
An ongoing Substack course in making your own AI tools with Claude. No coding required. Grounded in craft, simplicity, and the idea that personal tools should feel personal.
First 4 weeks free · Cancel anytime · New week every Thursday
"We are as gods and might as well get good at it."
Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, 1968
The premise
Most AI tools are built for everyone, which means they're built for no one in particular. Field Guide teaches you to build tools that work the way your mind works, that hold the things you actually care about, that disappear when you don't need them.
The course moves slowly on purpose. Each practice builds on the last, and by the end you have a working system, not just a collection of prompts.
What you'll need
Claude Pro
The AI model that powers everything in this course
A plain text editor
Obsidian, Notion, or even a folder of files
Curiosity, not coding ability
No programming knowledge required, ever
About an hour a week
Read, make something small, reflect
The curriculum
Each practice builds a different kind of tool. Together they become a complete personal system.
Before you build, understand what you're solving for. This practice is about intention.
Build a link catcher that saves what you find and actually brings it back when you need it.
A daily log that becomes a record of what you actually did, thought, and noticed.
Track what your body does. A training log that understands patterns without a spreadsheet.
Build a living library around something you love: music, films, books, objects.
A photo journal that holds images the way memory holds them, not just chronologically.
Pull information from across your life into a single, searchable dashboard.
Go back to what you've built. Edit, simplify, and make it more truly yours.
The ninth practice is yours. Build something the course hasn't imagined yet.
The structure
Weeks 1 to 4
Before you begin, what are you building for? Covers philosophy, setup, and shipping your first tool.
Free
Weeks 5 to 13
Build each of the nine tools. One practice per week. By week 13 you have a working personal system.
Weeks 14 to 17
Connect your tools. Multi-agent workflows, research synthesis, and making things run on their own.
Week 18 onwards
Identify the patterns in your own system. Plan what to build next. Make something larger.
七つの原則
Field Guide draws from Japanese aesthetic philosophy. Ways of thinking about making things that last. Simplicity. Asymmetry. Subtle grace. Naturalness. Mystery. Freedom. Stillness.
The shelf
These aren't required reading, they're good context.
Whole Earth Catalog
Stewart Brand, 1971
The Dao of Complexity
Jean Boulton, 2023
Buddha in the Robot
Masahiro Mori, 1974
Earth House Hold
Gary Snyder, 1969
Maintenance: Of Everything
Stewart Brand, 2024
Tools for Conviviality
Ivan Illich, 1973
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Robert Pirsig, 1974
The Craftsman
Richard Sennett, 2008
In Praise of Shadows
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, 1933
Small is Beautiful
E.F. Schumacher, 1973
The Timeless Way of Building
Christopher Alexander, 1979
How to Keep Your VW Alive
John Muir, 1969
The Zen of Seeing
Frederick Franck, 1973
Wabi-Sabi for Artists
Leonard Koren, 1994
Wabi Sabi
Andrew Juniper, 2003
The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bachelard, 1958
Pricing
Foundation
Free
Weeks 1 to 4, no card needed
All phases
$24/mo
Cancel any time. Keep what you've built.
Looking for lifetime access? Ask about it here.
Questions
None at all. The course is built around plain language and conversation with Claude. The closest thing to code you'll encounter is a markdown file, and even that is optional. If you can write an email, you can do this.
Most AI courses teach you to use existing tools better. Field Guide teaches you to build tools that don't exist yet, tools fitted to your specific life and work. It's slower, more personal, and less concerned with productivity hacks than with genuine understanding.
Each week you get a lesson: some reading, a short practice, and a prompt or two to try. It takes about an hour. There's no deadline, no cohort, no Slack group. You go at your own pace. The course doesn't expire.
Both traditions have a strong thread of self-reliance, appropriate tool use, and intentional making. The Whole Earth Catalog believed that access to tools changed what people could do for themselves. Buddhist practice is interested in what's actually necessary. Field Guide borrows from both without being precious about it.
Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand, 1971
The original access-to-tools compendium, the belief that putting tools in people's hands changes what they can do for themselves.
Maintenance: Of Everything, Stewart Brand, 2024
Brand's argument that maintenance is the real work of civilisation, and that the things worth keeping are worth looking after.
Earth House Hold, Gary Snyder, 1969
Field notes, journals, and essays from the poet and Zen student, a model for the kind of attentive, unhurried noticing the course tries to practice.
Buddha in the Robot, Masahiro Mori, 1974
A robotics engineer's argument that Buddha-nature exists in machines, the oldest serious attempt to think about what it means to make intelligent things.
Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich, 1973
Tools should enhance human capability not replace it, Illich draws the line between tools that serve people and tools that serve systems, Field Guide is entirely on the first side of that line.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig, 1974
About quality, care, and what it means to pay proper attention to the thing in front of you, the motorcycle is almost beside the point.
The Craftsman, Richard Sennett, 2008
Doing something well is a form of thinking, Sennett makes the case that skill, repetition, and care are not separate from intelligence, they are intelligence.
The Dao of Complexity, Jean Boulton, 2023
On how complex systems actually work: emergent, contextual, impossible to fully predict or control, useful for thinking about what your tools are really doing.
In Praise of Shadows, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, 1933
A Japanese novelist's essay on shadow, patina, and the beauty of things that don't announce themselves, the aesthetic argument for everything wabi-sabi.
Small is Beautiful, E.F. Schumacher, 1973
Economics at human scale, the case for intermediate technology, which means tools sized for the people using them, not the systems around them.
The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander, 1979
On patterns, wholeness, and how good buildings and good tools emerge from attending carefully to what people actually need.
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, John Muir, 1969
The original countercultural repair manual, warm, funny, written for people who have never touched an engine, self-reliance as an act of affection for the thing you depend on.
The Zen of Seeing, Frederick Franck, 1973
Drawing as a form of meditation, Franck's argument is that to draw something is to really see it, and that really seeing is a practice worth cultivating.
Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, Leonard Koren, 1994
The clearest short introduction to wabi-sabi as an aesthetic, impermanence, imperfection, incompleteness, everything Field Guide is trying to make tools for.
Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence, Andrew Juniper, 2003
A fuller exploration of wabi-sabi's roots in Zen philosophy and Japanese culture, useful context for the seven principles that run through the course.
The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, 1958
On intimate spaces, drawers, corners, nests, and how small contained things hold memory and meaning, closer to the spirit of personal tools than most books about technology.
Cancel any time. Your tools are yours, they live in your files and your Claude account. Nothing disappears when you cancel. The only thing you lose access to is new lessons.
Weeks 1 to 4 are free and don't require a card. Read them, try something, and see if the rest is worth your time.
Start reading now