How Brett, Hassan and the team work with Claude — the architecture, the game plan, and the five things only Brett can do
Written 27 Aug 2026 · status updated 28 Aug
A living document. Where something has changed since it was written, the change is noted in place rather than the original being quietly overwritten.
Four layers. Each one has a single job, and nobody has to learn a new app.
| Layer | What it is | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
| The Vault | Our private GitHub repository | Every document, decision, number, rule and memory. The single source of truth. |
| The Desk | Each person's own Claude session | The only interface anyone touches. Brett dictates. Hassan asks. Neither types a command. |
| The Wire | Files in the Vault, plus one daily email | Messages between people — tasks, notes, what happened — written by the Claude sessions, not by hand. |
| The Front Door | Cloudflare Pages | Any deliverable becomes a real web address anyone can open, including people with no Claude seat. A login is recommended below and is not yet applied. |
The principle underneath: the durable stuff lives in files we own, and everything else is a view onto those files. That is why this survives a change of vendor, plan, model or app — and why nobody can switch it off.
github.com/brettob2424/beacon, private. It already holds:
Why this is the centre. A Claude session opened on this repository wakes up already knowing everything. Nobody briefs it. Nobody pastes context. That is the whole trick, and it already works — it just currently works for one person.
Everyone gets the same interface: their own Claude, pointed at the Vault.
Two people never have to be in the same conversation to be working from the same brain. The repository is the shared context; the sessions are just windows onto it.
This is the part that replaces a chat app, and it is already about eighty percent built.
Messages are files, written by the sessions. When Brett says "tell Hassan to sort out the Amazon connector," his session files it — verbatim, with the reason, ranked against everything else Hassan owes. When Hassan finishes it, his session marks it done and writes what he found. Neither of them opens a task manager. Neither of them types a command. The list is just there, and it is the same list for both of them.
The same holds for everything else: the journal records what happened, the ledger records what we predicted and whether we were right, and the state file records what is currently true.
The one thing missing is a heartbeat — so we add one email. Once a day, an automatic digest goes to Hassan and to Brett:
Brett already lives in email. Hassan already lives in email. No new habit, no new app, no new place to check. The machinery for this already exists in the repo — the daily report has been running for weeks.
Some things have to be seen by a human who does not have a Claude account — Carlos, Hector, Sebastian, an accountant, an investor. For that we already have the answer, and it is already live.
Cloudflare Pages, with Cloudflare Access recommended in front of it. Status as of 27 Aug: the site is live and currently open to anyone holding the link. The Access step below is a recommendation we have not yet applied — stated plainly because a reader can check it in five seconds. Any report, dashboard or brief becomes a real web address. Access puts a login in front of it: the person types their email, gets a six-digit code, and they are in. No password to manage, no account to create, no software to install. Free for up to 50 people.
Three sites are already running on it. This is not a proposal — it is a thing that works today and only needs pointing at the rest of our output.
Why this beats every other sharing route we have tried. A published Claude artifact is private to the person who made it. A Google Drive link needs permissions we cannot set programmatically. An emailed PDF cannot be interactive and goes stale the moment it is sent. A Cloudflare page is a normal web address that keeps working, keeps updating, and can be locked to exactly the people we choose.
We are not using Slack. Claude Tag, the version of Claude that lives inside a chat channel, is Slack-only. There is no Microsoft Teams version, no Discord version, and no announced date for either. So the honest choice is binary: adopt Slack, or do not have Claude-in-a-channel. We do not.
What we lose: an always-on room where Claude sees the conversation and can jump in.
What we use instead: the Vault is the channel, and email is the notification. It is asynchronous rather than live, which for a three-person company spread across locations is arguably the better fit anyway — nobody is waiting on anybody, and everything said is written down permanently instead of scrolling away.
One experiment worth thirty minutes, not a commitment. Jack Dorsey's Buzz is the Slack alternative built for exactly this: AI agents as full members of channels, with Git in the same place. It is free, open source, and there is now a hosted version at buzz.xyz so it can be tried without running any servers. It is early beta and the hosted onboarding reportedly has rough edges. Worth a look, not worth betting the company's workflow on this month. If it matures, it is the natural home for Layer 3.
Everything else in this plan is mine to build. These five are invitations, identities and admin switches that nobody else can press.
| # | What | Why it matters | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Invite Hassan to the GitHub repository and authorise the Claude GitHub connector for the organisation | This single action turns on Layers 1, 2 and 3 for him at once. It is the only true blocker in the entire plan. | 10 min |
| 2 | Add Hassan to Cloudflare Access and put the login in front of the docs site | Gives him — and later Carlos, Hector and anyone else — a real web address for anything we publish, with no password to manage | 10 min |
| 3 | Turn on memory for the YouChews organisation | It is switched off by default on the Team plan, so both of you are currently working without it | 1 min |
| 4 | Say yes to the daily digest email and confirm which address Hassan should receive it at | This is the heartbeat that makes an asynchronous system feel alive | a reply |
| 5 | Decide the Cloudflare account question — see below | It is a five-minute decision with a long tail either way | 5 min |
Total: about half an hour, plus two decisions.
You do not need to sign up. You already have an account.
a6aa0bad3fff5aed0622376f87d27089brettobrien24@gmail.com — the same address the Google Drive and Gmail connectors use. Not brett@youchews.com.To be precise about access: I am not using it. No session of mine has ever logged in to Cloudflare. A token stored on your Mac was created when the account was set up, and the publishing runs as you — a script you double-click in Finder, using your own credentials. Nothing about Cloudflare runs under my identity, because it cannot.
Three sites are live right now:
| Address | Status | What it serves |
|---|---|---|
youchews-creative-os.pages.dev | Password-protected — returns a login prompt | The full creative library, 533 ad creatives plus thumbnails |
youchews-docs.pages.dev | Open to anyone with the link | Mission Control, the daily scorecard, the current brief |
youchews-grok-wave.pages.dev | Open to anyone with the link | A video board of unpublished ad concepts |
The decision for you, item 5: youchews-docs.pages.dev currently serves revenue, ad spend, margin and profit to anyone who has the address. That was a deliberate trade to unblock a handoff, and it may still be the right trade — but it should be a choice you make knowingly rather than one that persists by accident. Putting Cloudflare Access in front of it takes about ten minutes and costs Hassan one email code the first time he opens it. My recommendation is to gate it.
On the account email: the cleanest long-term answer is that company infrastructure lives on brett@youchews.com. The honest counter-argument is that moving a Cloudflare account means moving three live projects and a stored token for no functional gain today. My recommendation: leave it where it is, write it down so nobody re-derives it, and use brett@youchews.com for anything new. Consistency matters less than knowing where things are.
Brett, 7am, on his phone. "How did we do yesterday, and what should I worry about?" His session reads the overnight pull, gives him the number, flags the one thing that moved. He says "put that in front of Hassan." It is filed before he finishes his coffee.
Hassan, 9am, his own laptop, his own account. He opens his Claude on the repo. "What do I owe?" He gets the ranked list, in Brett's own words, with the reason attached. He works one item. When he is done his session writes what he found — and Brett's next session already knows.
Carlos, 2pm, no Claude account at all. He gets a link. Types his email. Gets a code. Sees the live creative performance board, current as of this morning.
Nobody typed a command. Nobody pasted context. Nobody asked anybody to catch them up.
# The second pass — challenging all of the above
Brett asked for this explicitly: what might not be right, what could be improved, what is new, and where things are heading. Written against my own recommendation.
1. There is no heartbeat faster than a day, and that is a real cost. A daily digest is not a conversation. If Hassan needs an answer at 11am, this architecture gives him nothing — he texts or calls, like before. I am explicitly trading immediacy for permanence, and that is the right trade for work product but the wrong one for urgency. Keep the phone for urgent. If we find ourselves texting constantly about things that should be written down, the trade was wrong and we should revisit a channel.
2. I may be dismissing Slack too fast, and it is Brett's call to overrule me. The objection is "I will not live in Slack" — and that is fair. But there is a version nobody has priced: one channel, used only as a Claude workbench, not as a workplace. No teams, no threads, no notifications, no culture. Just a room where Claude has shared memory and both of you can see what it did. That is a materially different proposition from adopting Slack as a company. If the daily digest proves too slow within a month, this is the first thing to reconsider — and Claude Tag remains the only shipped product with memory genuinely shared between two people.
3. The single biggest risk is not software, it is the Mac. Everything durable is in git and safe. But the automation — the digest, the data refresh, the publish — runs on one laptop that sleeps, that cannot read its own repo folder because of a macOS privacy restriction, and that has a scheduled job failing every run right now. This plan is only as reliable as that machine, and today that machine is not reliable. Moving the repository off ~/Downloads and onto the Mac Mini is not a nice-to-have; it is the prerequisite that makes Layer 3 trustworthy. I would put it ahead of items 2 through 5.
4. Hassan's setup is heavier than mine makes it sound. The repository is large — several gigabytes of history, because ad videos were committed into it. A full clone is a real wait on a home connection. The mitigation is that he does not need one: Claude Code in the browser works against the repo with nothing installed locally. But if he wants to run the tools himself, he needs a local clone and a Python environment, and that is an afternoon, not ten minutes. I should not pretend otherwise.
5. "Messages are files" is not intuitive to a newcomer. It works because neither person touches the files directly — their Claude does. But the first time someone hears it, it sounds like homework. The onboarding guide has to carry that weight, and if a third or fourth person joins and it does not click for them, the design has failed and I will have been wrong about it.
6. Three identities is two too many. Claude on brett@youchews.com. GitHub on brettob2424. Cloudflare on brettobrien24@gmail.com. I am recommending we document rather than consolidate, because consolidating has real migration cost. That is the pragmatic call, but it is not the clean one, and every future confusion about "which account is this under" traces back to this decision.
Agents are becoming members of teams rather than tools that individuals use. That is the through-line in everything shipping right now — Claude Tag putting one Claude in a shared room, Buzz giving agents their own identity and permissions, compliance tooling extending to cover agent sessions the way it covers people. The direction of travel is that an agent will have a seat, not a subscription.
Our architecture is compatible with that, deliberately: the Vault is where a future agent-with-a-seat would read and write, exactly as our sessions do now. We are not betting against the trend — we are keeping the memory in a place any future agent can reach.
Three specific things to watch:
What I am most confident about: the Vault. Keeping durable knowledge in files we own is right regardless of what any vendor ships, and it is already working — it just needs one invitation to work for two people.
What I am least confident about: the Wire. A daily email is the simplest thing that could possibly work, and simple things sometimes turn out to be too simple. Give it a month. If either of you finds yourself texting the other about something that should have been written down, tell me and we will fix the layer rather than defend it.
What would change my mind fastest: Hassan trying it and reporting friction. That is the only real test, and it costs one invitation to run.
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