Morning friend ☕️

We’re still on the Builder’s Workshop Series, where we look at the mindset shift behind starting (or optimizing) your own thing with the help of AI.

Last week you got through the door.
And overcome the toughest barrier of all: Your own mindset.

Now you're inside your workshop, and your hands are itching to start.

But it seems so complicated.
Where to begin?
How do you organise youself?

Welcome to Part 2 of The Builder's Workshop: The Bench.

Grab your coffee.
Let's chat!

The tools are astonishing. But that's a trap.

You can ask ChatGPT or Claude for almost anything now and get something impressive back. An idea. A plan. A draft. A design.

So you do. Again and again.
Twenty chats this month, some of them genuinely good.
But your project is exactly where it was in January.

No meaningful progress.

How do you bring things together and actually make incremental progress?

What you need is a bench.

The bench is key to building anything.

In my dad’s workshop, the magic didn’t happen in the tool room.

It happened on the bench.

That’s where my brothers and I put the planks, screws, and tools we needed to make our wooden toys. Then we cut, assembled, sanded, painted everything using hand tools, clamps, vise grips, screws nails and glue.

As the hours and sometimes days went on, you could incrementally see where we were with the toy because it was proudly on display on the bench. I wish I had some time lapse photos (or even just photos) of the things we built, but alas…

Once complete, if we needed to undo, fix or remove something, we came back to the bench.

Without the bench, things would’ve taken much longer to get done. If they got done at all.

I remember my dad building a monster of a bench when I was very young. About the size of an 8-seater dining room table.

It looked like an impressive project when the long and thick plank raw materials arrived. I didn’t know what he was making at the time, and thought wow - wonder what this is gonna be. Looks super impressive and exciting.

But then, as it took shape into a workbench over a couple of weekends, I was not impressed at all. It was just a massive table with nothing but a big blue vise grip on one end.

What an anti-climax!

Now, I can see that it was a swiss army knife for an artisan. You could store planks underneath it. Clamp things on the vise grip or on the edges. Cut on it. Hammer things on it. Paint on it. Sand on it. Weld on it. Angle-grind metal on it.

That table was solid, and took up a large part of our main garage. It served us well for many years on some of my dad’s biggest building projects, and our own toy projects.

Over the years, the scars (burns, cuts, paint, dents) stood testament to it’s contributions like those on a battle-hardened warrior.

Sadly, it’s not there anymore, but damn, the things we built on that bench…

What does the bench have to do with building with AI?

Just like we assembled wooden toys on the bench in the garage, a project done with AI needs something foundational where you can bring it all together incrementally.

Because building is a loop.

You do a session. It leaves something behind: a decision, a draft, a note on where you got to. The next session starts from that, instead of from a blank screen.

The bench is what holds that "something" between sessions.

Using AI to build a project is not just about running clever prompts.
But that’s exactly what most people are used to doing.
Endless prompting, but not coherent place for it to land.

This is good for small problems, but not for big projects or building a side business.

AI is a tool, not the bench.

So what is the bench?

The way I see it, in a digital building context, the bench does 3 things:
1. Keeps things together. All your tools and raw materials sit on the bench, in a coherent way.
2. Lets you to bring your tools to bear. Apply them to the raw materials easily.
3. Lets you version-control your progress. Fix, redo, undo without fear.

Here's my bench.

My bench in the most simple terms, is two things. Plus the AI tools I bring to them:

1. A file system. This is literally just a folder with your project files. Mostly text, because that's what these tools read best. As the project grows, the folder grows with it. And the nice part is you do the thinking while the AI helps build the structure out. The unlock is starting to see your project as an organised set of files, not a stream of chats.

2. A saved history. Version control, in engineering speak. It can be as simple as Google Drive or as powerful as GitHub. Either way, every version of your work is saved, and you can walk back to any point. This is what lets you undo and fix without fear.

That's the bench: a place your work lives, and a memory of how it got there.

Then there's the tools I bring to it. AI that reaches into those files directly, instead of into a throwaway chat. Claude Code, ChatGPT Codex, Google Antigravity. (I use Claude and Codex, and play them off each other.)

Your project might be nothing but text files, no code in sight, and this still works, because the point isn't coding. It's that the AI can finally see everything: all your thinking, all your output, the full context. In simple text files.

Notice what just happened. The AI isn't the bench. It's a tool we use at the bench. The bench is your files and your history. It’s what stays when the session ends.

The unfinished toy, waiting for you to pick up again from tomorrow and build a little more.

Your bench.

If you are building something with AI, you can follow the same recipe. And start at wherever you're comfortable.

Start simple. Anyone can do this today:

That's a real bench. No code, no permission, nothing to buy. Ready to start building on, with your AI tool of choice.

Go further when you're ready:

When the project gets big enough that you feel it, step up a rung — GitHub for proper version control, and a tool like Claude Code or Codex working directly on your files. Same bench, more power.

But don't start there. Start with the folder.

One thing to try this week.

Find one useful thing AI gave you recently. The answer you were glad to have and then lost track of.

Give it a home. One text file. Wherever your project is going to live.

Next time you sit down, start from it. Not from a blank screen.

That's a bench with one thing on it.

Which is a workshop, started.

The takeaway

Building with AI isn't the quality of the conversation.

It's what's still on the bench in the morning.

Where does your project's work live between sessions right now? Honestly?
Reply and let me know.

Until next Monday, friend ☕️

Vaugan