Five Weeks Ago They Only Used AI to Chat. Here’s What They Built

We ended our first AI Circle the way any good program should end: with pizza, a little fear, and a lot of laughing.

Monday night, the group got together one last time for a “before and after” show-and-tell. Everyone shared what they’d built with Claude over the past five weeks.

And honestly? I wasn’t ready for how far people had come.

Where we started

Five weeks ago, most people in the room had only ever used AI to chat. Ask a question, get an answer, close the tab.

Nobody had connected it to their email. Nobody had built a workflow. Most hadn’t heard of Claude Skills.

And here’s the part I keep coming back to: none of them are developers.

Where they ended up

By Monday night, everyone was using AI to automate real parts of their work and bring their ideas to life. A few examples:

• Anastasia Lucinschi built an event calendar workflow. Claude scans her emails, spots any changes, updates the calendar, then drafts an email summarising what changed.
• Octavia Niekoop automated her invoicing. Then she found a whole list of other tasks Claude could take off her plate. Maybe even a new income stream. 😀
• Lama Helou built a new website from scratch.
• Laura Balan has Claude creating her Instagram reels and posts in Canva, then scheduling them automatically with Metricool. She’s not even a marketer.

Others in the Circle are now using AI to:

• Track competitor prices in real time
• Research information and fill a database while they do something else
• Handle client reporting
• Run invoicing and special promotions on autopilot

The “wait, what?” moment

Over the five weeks, we learned how to build three things:

• Claude Skills — sort of like AI agents that know how to do a specific job your way
• Plugins — skills that link to one another
• Artifacts — interactive pages and tools Claude builds for you

Artifacts got the most “wait, what?” reactions. Especially the landing pages Anastasia created for her company to improve the UX and SEO.

That moment, when someone realises they just built something they would have hired an agency for, never gets old.

Learning together (and playing a little)

The Circle mixed a few online sessions with in-person meetups at some fun spots around Bucharest, including PadelMania Romania and Gateway Virtual Reality Studio.

That mix mattered. The online sessions taught the tools. The in-person nights built the group. People helped each other get unstuck, swapped ideas, and cheered each other on.

Now everyone is saving hours every week, getting more done, and in a few cases, starting businesses.

Thank you

A huge thank you to Ana Toniuc for being our AI guide, and to everyone in the Circle who helped each other along the way.

Special thanks to Andrei Stefan, who gave everyone a demo of the VR escape room. It had all of us laughing, and a little frightened at some points. 😆

Want to join the next AI Circle?

You don’t need to be technical. You don’t need to be “good at AI.” You just need a few workflows you’d love to stop doing by hand, and the curiosity to try.

The next cohort is coming soon. If you’d like to hear when it opens, or see some of the AI skills our members are building, join the waitlist or have a look at the AI Workflow Library — several of the workflows above are written up there, with the templates attached.

Five weeks ago, this group only used AI to chat. Imagine where you’ll be five weeks from now.