Christian Juul Wendell
How I use Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and the terminal to run operations for small businesses and associations — with visual guides and practical takeaways.
Understanding the tools
Conversational
Upload a document, discuss strategy, draft emails. The thinking partner.
Agentic
Full project context. Reads your files, runs commands, builds things.
Power Mode
Same engine, no GUI overhead. Direct terminal integration.
Routing Heuristic
Writing or reviewing?
↓
DesktopBuilding or changing files?
↓
CodeOn a server or in a pipeline?
↓
TerminalArchitecture
How Claude Remembers
Your project filesystem
Three layers of memory
Project rules, conventions, and context. Read at the start of every session. You write it, Claude follows it.
Facts Claude saves on its own — your preferences, past decisions, technical details. Persists across conversations.
Session summaries and structured entries. A searchable, versioned history of everything Claude has worked on.
Unlike ChatGPT's memory, this is fully transparent — every memory is a file you can read, edit, or delete. The CLAUDE.md file is the most important: it's how you teach Claude about your project, and it's the difference between starting from scratch and continuing where you left off.
How Claude Connects to Everything
+ hundreds more: Notion, Salesforce, databases, calendars, email…
MCP (Model Context Protocol) lets Claude talk to external tools through a single gateway. Instead of switching between apps, Claude reads your messages, manages your repos, and updates your tasks — all from one conversation. There are hundreds of community-built connectors, and the list grows daily.
Custom Capabilities
Route emails through the right account with correct tone
Cross-reference accounting data, flag discrepancies
Multi-source parallel search with expert review
Spreadsheets, reports, presentations from data
Save, summarize, and persist work across sessions
Manage servers, containers, and deployments via SSH
Skills are reusable instructions. Agents are autonomous workers. Together they let Claude handle complex workflows without step-by-step guidance.
Real examples
I sit on three nonprofit boards — as treasurer, chairman, and general member. None of this is my day job. Claude handles the operational work that would otherwise eat my evenings.
Board Communications
Draft agenda emails, meeting summaries, and follow-ups in the right tone for each organization. Claude knows which account to send from and adapts the formality level.
Financial Oversight
Pull transaction data from accounting software, cross-reference against budgets, and prepare reports for the board. What used to take a full evening now takes one conversation.
Infrastructure Management
Manage a home server running Docker containers — media automation, backups, network services. Claude connects via SSH and handles config changes, troubleshooting, and monitoring.
Document Production
Budget spreadsheets with working formulas, grant applications, strategy documents. Claude builds them from data and context, not templates.
Knowledge & Memory Systems
Built a personal knowledge base that captures decisions, architecture, and session history. Every significant conversation becomes searchable, versioned knowledge.
Patterns
Claude Code isn't plug-and-play. You'll spend your first week learning how CLAUDE.md files work, how to structure project instructions, and how memory behaves. But the investment compounds — every hour of setup saves ten hours later.
Most people should start with Claude Desktop for conversations and document work. When you find yourself saying "I wish Claude could just edit that file directly" — that's when you move to Code.
This single markdown file is how you teach Claude about your project. Put your conventions, rules, and context here, and Claude reads it every session. It's the difference between starting from scratch and continuing where you left off.
The biggest surprise wasn't the coding capabilities — it was the operational leverage. Having an AI that can draft a board email, check the accounting, and update server configs in the same afternoon changed how I think about personal productivity.
Impact
3
Organizations supported
Treasurer, chairman, and board member
40+
MCP tools connected
Email, calendar, accounting, files, servers
0
Lines of code required
Just patience, curiosity, and CLAUDE.md
This isn't about replacing people or automating everything. It's about one person being able to handle operational complexity that would normally require dedicated staff or expensive software. Claude doesn't make decisions for you — it makes your decisions actionable.
Resources
These guides distill what I've learned into practical references. Each one works offline — save it, share it, come back to it.
A visual decision tree for choosing between Desktop, Code, and Terminal.
How the memory system works, what persists, and how to build your own.
Architecture overview of the Model Context Protocol and what it enables.
Essential commands, shortcuts, and patterns for Claude Code without a coding background.