How many of us opened an AI chat window this week, pasted in a question, copied the answer
back out, then spent ten minutes fixing everything it got wrong about how we actually work?
That's most of us. That's also about 10% of what these tools can do.

This session is the other 90%.

To give a little bit of background, I have spent the last year setting Claude up as a real
working assistant instead of a chat box. It knows my writing voice. It builds my slide decks
the way I build slide decks. It connects straight to SQL Server, reads my meeting notes, and
writes code I ship to clients. Everything you will see is my own setup, running live on my
laptop. Not theory, and not a vendor demo.

**We'll cover:**

- Getting it installed and pointed at your work, in about five minutes
- Skills: writing your standards down once so you never re-explain them again
- Why a skill and a plain file behave differently, and when to promote one to the other
- The skills you don't have to write, because they ship with it or arrive as plugins
- MCP servers: wiring it into SQL Server, your meeting notes, and the rest of your tools
- Memory: what changes when it stops starting over every single session

**Five live demos:** install it and point it at a folder, write a blog intro in my voice, ask
a live SQL Server a question in plain English, pull commitments out of last week's meetings,
and build a working app from scratch in front of you.

However, there is a catch, and we'll spend real time on it. Some of this is still rough. One
of the connectors used to build this very deck accepts a value, returns success, and then
quietly throws it away. Nothing errors. You just don't get what you asked for. I'll show you
that one, along with what I don't trust it with and why you should never point it at
production on a whim.

**Who should come:** .NET developers, DBAs, and anyone who tried an AI tool, found it
underwhelming, and wondered what everyone else was so excited about. Never touched Claude
before? You are in exactly the right room. Already use it every day? The skills and MCP
pieces are where you'll get your money's worth.

**What to bring:** Nothing. Come watch. If you would rather follow along, bring a laptop and
I'll share the setup steps and every file from this session afterward.

No AI experience needed.

Bring your questions. I would rather spend the last 15 minutes on what you actually want to
know than on my last five slides.