Pete Kaminski

In this conversation: The patient teacher-brother who listens to Dave's 20-minute monologues, says "yeah" a lot, and then quietly demonstrates a completely different way to use the same tools. Pete brings a year of Claude Code experience, a structured methodology, and the ability to live-demo complex workflows on the fly.

Topics He Introduced

Putting Claude on Rails — his core methodology: always write a project plan first
PKAI Course — his Agentic AI with Pete course, now in its final sessions
Field Trips — the topical office hours that became the real course
Obsidian as a Tool Ecosystem — demo of links, DataView, sidebar Claude
Git as Version Control — snapshots, reverting, why Dave needs it
Inference and Token Economics — how LLM conversations actually work
The Agent Economy — agents as the new software market
Structured Data vs Structured Interactions — the key insight Dave helped him articulate

Stories He Told

Tim Bonnemann's Signs

"He's like, Pete, I do these workshops... I need these 8.5x11 sheets of paper... Your Cloud thingy can help me print those, right?"

A student who just needed to print workshop signs discovered Claude Code. Pete used this to demo his project planning approach live in class.

Danielle and "What's a File?"

"Pete, I haven't understood a single word that you've said for the past 5 minutes. What's a file?"

A 30-year-old professional who had used computers her whole career raised her hand to say she didn't know what a file was. Her entire computing life had been in Google Office. Pete cites this as why you need basic computer skills training. See What's a File.

The Jankifiers

"We call them Jankifiers, and the idea was... two-thirds of these are written by me, but some of them are written by students who knew nothing about programming."

Early AI teaching tools — single HTML files that do silly text transformations. The Catifier, the Interleaver, the Alphabetifier. Students with no programming background made real software. See Jankifiers.

Projects and Interests Discussed

PKAI Course — his course, now 1,200 pages of wiki
Freya — his chief of staff agent with personality and memory
Spelunk Vault — a template for nonfiction book writing in Obsidian
Course Topic Finding Guide — a 7,000-word finding guide Freya built from the course wiki
PKAI Starter Helper — open-source getting-started materials he's extracting from the course

People He Mentioned

Heather — potential business partner for building custom agents
Tim Bonnemann — student who needed to print workshop signs
Danielle — student who didn't know what a file was
Claire — student who wrote the Catifier
Dan — student who wrote a transcript cleaner
Kaliya — mentioned in context of course field trips

Follow-ups and Action Items

Send Dave the Jankifiers, starter guides, and Obsidian reference materials
Tomorrow's final course session: revisit "structure your interactions" insight
Make a slide showing "40 words in → full project plan out"
Add "real-time transcript copying" as a documented course technique
Consider adding basic vocabulary/FAQ resource for beginners

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