Second Brain Workshop: build a second brain with Claude Code

The Second Brain Workshop is AR Labs' workshop series on how to build a second brain with Claude Code, for people who run their own businesses. A second brain is a folder of plain markdown files about a person's direction, goals and projects that an AI agent (a language model run in a loop with tools) reads at the start of every session, so its advice fits their situation instead of being generic. It is aimed at coaches, freelancers, small-business owners and other independent professionals, most of whom are not technical. The tool used is Claude Code, Anthropic's coding agent, which can read and write files on your computer as well as code, and VOX, the lab's working system, serves as the worked example of where such a setup can lead.

What it teaches

The workshop's central contrast is between a chatbot and an agent with context. A chat assistant starts fresh each time and gives general advice. A second brain loads your own documents every session, so it can answer "what should I focus on this week?" or "does this new idea fit where I'm going?" from your goals, and it can do some of the work as well as describe it. The workshop calls the first moment a participant sees this happen "the aha moment", and the whole session builds towards it.

The foundation is a three-level hierarchy of documents, each informing and constraining the one below. The vision says where the person is going over three years and changes rarely. The roadmap says how they will get there in the first year and changes quarterly. The goals file holds the top three things they are doing now and changes weekly.

flowchart TD
  V["Vision: three years"] --> R["Roadmap: year one"]
  R --> G["Goals: top three now"]
  G --> P["Projects with context files"]

Around that sits a simple folder structure: a main instruction file that tells the AI who you are, how you want help and what you are focused on; a projects folder in which each project has its own context file; and a working folder for current priorities.

How the sessions run

The material is organised in four parts:

1. Why. The problem a second brain solves, and what it is: a planning partner, a forcing function that makes you think clearly about goals and priorities, and an extension of your own abilities.
2. Foundation. Participants write their vision, roadmap and goals documents using three guided prompts. Each prompt sets the AI up as a coach that asks one question at a time and reflects back what it hears; the vision prompt, for example, works through aspiration, philosophy, audience, impact and a picture of success. The prompts work in any AI assistant, so nobody is locked into one product.
3. Structure. Participants create their main instruction file from a template, including a section for memories, and learn progressive disclosure: the AI only knows what you show it, so general context loads every time and detailed context loads only when a task needs it, through folder-level instruction files.
4. Going deeper. Skills: packaged instructions, here a markdown file describing a repeatable workflow, that the agent loads only when a task needs them. Participants create a first /goals skill that loads their goals, asks how each is going, offers to go deeper on one, and updates the file. The same pattern extends to a quarterly vision review or a weekly plan.

What exists today

The first session, an introductory presentation to a group of business owners, ran in February 2026. It covered the difference between agents and chatbots, context engineering (choosing what goes into a model's context window at each step), and live demonstrations of our own system: asking it for current goals, the projects under a goal, the categories in a weekly schedule, and editing a task list in Notion live. The session drew freelancers and small-business owners as well as coaches, which led us to broaden the audience and design the second session as a multi-hour, hands-on deep dive.

The materials for that second session are complete: a facilitation plan with checkpoints, the full narrative, the three foundation prompts, a homework sequence, and skill templates for goals check-ins and vision, roadmap and goals reviews. They are written to work between sessions, without a facilitator. No later session is recorded, and the series is paused.