What to install before the Wikilook AI Workshop

Get an external drive bigger than the used space on your laptop. A 1 TB USB disk costs less than the AI Workshop and you will reuse it for years.

Install Hasleo Backup Suite Free from the link above. It is free for personal use, it makes full disk images, and it can restore to a machine that will not boot — which is the only test of a backup that matters.

Run a FULL system backup, not a file backup. In Hasleo: System Backup, pick the external drive, start it. It takes an hour or two; start it in the evening and go away.

Make the recovery media while you are there: Hasleo → Tools → Create Emergency Disk, onto a USB stick. A backup you cannot boot to restore is a backup you do not have.

Write down where the drive is and when you made it. Then disconnect it. A backup drive left plugged in is a drive that gets encrypted along with everything else.

Check it worked — browse inside the backup you just made: Hasleo → Tools → Explore Image, open the image on the external drive, and look for your own documents in it. A backup you have not opened is a guess.

You do NOT need a Microsoft account for this. Make a plain local account: Settings → Accounts → Other users → Add account → “I don't have this person's sign-in information” → “Add a user without a Microsoft account”.

Name it something you will recognise — ai-workshop will do. Give it a password you will remember for one day.

Make it an ADMINISTRATOR for the AI Workshop. Windows: on the same screen, Change account type → Administrator. Installing Node, Git and the Claude app all need it, and a session that stalls on a password prompt we cannot answer costs the whole room ten minutes.

Sign in to the new account once, so Windows finishes setting it up before the AI Workshop rather than during it.

Do every remaining step in this guide while signed in to that account.

AFTER THE AI WORKSHOP, take the rights away again: Change account type → Standard, or delete the account altogether. Administrator was for the installing, not for keeping. Deleting the account deletes its files with it, so move anything you want to keep first — and if you pushed your work to GitHub as chapter 06 says, it is already safe.

Check it worked — sign out, sign in as the new account, and try to open your own Documents folder. You should be refused. If you can read your own files from the workshop account, it is not separate and the chapter has not done its job.

Open accounts.google.com/signup in the new Windows account. Create the address — something like yourname.ai@gmail.com.

Turn on two-step verification straight away: myaccount.google.com → Security → 2-Step Verification. You will be connecting this account to software; protect it now, not later.

Put the practice material in: send two or three real invoice PDFs from your main address, or share them in from your main Drive, or use our demo pack and send nothing at all.

Put 10–20 photos in Drive, in one folder, for the video block. Family photos are fine; see the note on faces in the safety chapter.

Keep the account afterwards or delete it. If you keep it, it stays a useful sandbox: anything you want to try on real data gets shared in, tried, and un-shared.

Check it worked — open gmail.com in a private browser window and sign in with the new account. An empty inbox and no access to your real mail is the correct result.

Go to claude.ai and sign up with the Google account from the previous chapter.

Upgrade to Pro: your initials, bottom left → Settings → Plans. Max only matters if you intend to work hard after the AI Workshop; Pro is enough for the day.

Add the card now, in your own time. Doing it in the room costs everybody ten minutes.

Sign in once in a browser and send one message, so you know the account works.

Check it worked — claude.ai → your initials, bottom left → Settings. The plan line says Pro or Max. If it still says Free, the payment did not go through and the workshop will hit the limit in twenty minutes.

Download from claude.ai/download. Take the Windows installer.

Install and sign in with the same account.

Check Settings → Connectors exists and is empty for now. That is the shelf we fill in a later chapter.

Check it worked — the app opens from the Start menu, not from a browser tab, and shows your own name. If it asks you to sign in again every time you open it, you installed it as one Windows account and are running it as another.

ONE LINE, AND IT IS DONE. Open PowerShell (not the old Command Prompt) and paste:

winget install Anthropic.ClaudeCode

That is the installer route: winget is built into Windows 11 and fetches a signed package. Nothing else in this chapter is needed if it works — skip to step 4.

No winget, or it failed? The official one-liner installs the same thing:

irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex

It downloads a script from claude.ai and runs it — `irm` fetches, `iex` executes. It shows no progress while it works, so leave the window open. You are trusting Anthropic's domain with that line, which is the same trust the app itself needs; if that is not a trade you want, use step 3 instead.

The long way, via npm — only if the two above did not work, and the ONLY one that needs Node.js. Install Node.js LTS from nodejs.org/en/download (the Windows Installer .msi, 64-bit, default options), reopen PowerShell, then:

node --version
npm --version
npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code

Check it:

claude --version

If PowerShell says the command is not recognised, close every PowerShell window and open a new one — the PATH is read at start.

Make a folder to work in and start it there:

mkdir ai-workshop
cd ai-workshop
claude

First run asks you to log in; it opens a browser and comes back.

Say hello, then ask it what files are in the folder. When it asks permission, read the question before answering yes. That habit is most of the safety.

Check it worked — type claude --version in PowerShell. A version number means it is installed. “not recognized” means the terminal has not read the new PATH yet: close it, open a new one, try again.

Install Git for Windows from git-scm.com. Default options are right. This also gives you the credential helper that stops GitHub asking for a password every time.

Create a free account at github.com with the workshop Google address.

Turn on two-factor authentication. GitHub requires it for contributors and you will hit the wall later if you skip it.

Tell Git who you are, in PowerShell:

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "you@example.com"

In the workshop folder, ask Claude Code to create a repository and push it. It will walk you through the browser login the first time. After that, “save this to GitHub” is one sentence.

Check it worked — git --version answers with a number, and your repository page on github.com shows at least one commit with today's date on it. A repository with no commits is a folder with extra steps.

In the Claude desktop app: Settings → Connectors → Browse connectors. Add Gmail, Google Drive and Google Sheets.

Each one opens a Google consent screen. Read it. Grant it to the WORKSHOP Google account, never your business one.

Ask Claude to find invoice attachments from the last three months. If it lists them, the connector works.

Disconnect anything you are not using when the day is over: same screen, Disconnect. A connector you forgot about is a door you left open.

Check it worked — ask Claude: list the subjects of my last three e-mails. Real subjects mean the connector works. An offer to help you set up e-mail means it does not, and the consent went to a different Google account.

In Claude Code, run:

/plugin

and install the caveman plugin from the marketplace listing.

Turn it on with `/caveman full`, off with `/caveman off`. Try one question each way and compare the length.

Decide which you prefer. Some people find it abrupt; the point is that you choose, not that you must.

Check it worked — type /caveman full in Claude Code and ask anything. The answer comes back short. /caveman off puts it back to normal.

Pick one from the box on the right and create a free account.

Create a project called ai-workshop and three tasks in it: install, invoices, app.

Connect it to Claude if it has a connector; otherwise we drive it from the browser. Either way, you end the day with a written list of what works and what is next.

Install Obsidian from obsidian.md. Free for personal use, no account needed.

Create a vault INSIDE the workshop folder, so Claude Code and Obsidian are looking at the same files.

Decide your front matter together with me. A starting point that has survived here:

---
title: What this is
kind: note | guide | register | task
status: draft | active | done
created: 2026-10-16
tags: [AI Workshop, invoices]
---

Decide your filename grammar. Mine separates the human part from the machine part, and it is the only reason I can still find something written two years ago. Yours can be simpler — it has to be YOURS and it has to never change.

Write one note in the style, then ask Claude Code to write the next three. Check that it followed the rule. That check is the skill.

Check it worked — write one note, close Obsidian, and find that same note as a .md file in the folder on your disk. If you cannot find it on disk, the vault is not where you think it is, and that matters the day you want the AI to read it.

Create a Google AI Studio account at aistudio.google.com with the workshop Google address. Free tier, no card.

Get an API key there and keep it somewhere safe. Do NOT paste it into a chat window, ours or anybody else's.

Install nothing else yet. The video MCP we use will be named in the pre-flight mail, and it takes two minutes to add on the day.

Have your photo folder ready in Drive. That is the input.

Sign up free at lovable.dev and generate one small page from a sentence. Notice how fast it is and where it stops.

Do not install the rest. Read the box, so you know what exists.

Bring the question you could not answer with Lovable. That is usually the thing worth learning.

Google AI Studio and Gemini — the free tier is generous and Gemini is strong at video and long documents. Account only.

Supabase — a Postgres database with an API in front, free tier. This is where a toy app grows up.

n8n — workflow automation you can self-host. What you reach for when the automation should run without you.

Docker — how all of the above run on one machine without fighting each other.

Expo — how the phone app in the AI Workshop gets onto your phone. You install only the Expo Go app; the rest is handled.

Install Expo Go from the store link above. It is free and it does not need an account for what we do.

Put the phone on the SAME Wi-Fi as the laptop. This is the one thing that most setups get wrong: a phone on mobile data cannot see a laptop on Wi-Fi, and the code will scan and then hang.

That is the whole setup. On the day, Claude starts the app with `npx expo start` and a QR code appears in PowerShell.

Android: open Expo Go and use its own scanner.

iPhone: use the Camera app, not Expo Go — Apple does not allow the in-app scanner, and the Camera offers to open Expo Go for you.

If the venue's Wi-Fi blocks devices from seeing each other, which guest networks often do, we start it with `npx expo start --tunnel` instead and it goes out over the internet. Slower, always works, nothing for you to prepare.

Check it worked — with the laptop serving the project, Expo Go on the phone lists it, and opening it shows your own screen rather than the Expo example. Both devices have to be on the same Wi-Fi.

“unable to get local issuer certificate”, from pip, npm or git. Your antivirus is opening every secure connection to inspect it, and the tool does not know the certificate it signs them with. Avast, AVG, Kaspersky and ESET all do it. Either turn HTTPS scanning off while you install — Avast: Menu → Settings → Protection → Core Shields → Web Shield → uncheck Enable HTTPS scanning — or export the antivirus root certificate and point the tool at it.

“running scripts is disabled on this system”, when you start anything in PowerShell. Windows blocks scripts for a new account. Run: Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned, answer Y, and start the command again.

“claude is not recognized”, or command not found, right after the install succeeded. The terminal reads its PATH once when it opens. Close it, open a new one, and check node -v and npm -v answer with version numbers before you try again.

Claude Code starts but says it cannot see your files. You are in the wrong folder. Run pwd, compare it with where the work actually is, and cd into the project folder before you start Claude Code. It reads the folder you started it in, and nothing above it.

The connector says connected and Claude still cannot read your mail. The browser is signed in to more than one Google account, and the consent went to the wrong one. Sign out of all of them, sign in only with the account from chapter 3, and connect again.

An installer asks for an administrator password you do not have. The workshop account is a standard user. Go back to the account chapter, make it an administrator for the day, install, and take the right off again afterwards.

Everything is slow, the fan is loud, the browser stops answering. It is memory, not the AI. Close every Chrome window except the one you need, close Teams and Outlook, and read “Will it run on your machine?” again. Eight gigabytes works; eight gigabytes with forty tabs does not.

Nothing above helps and the workshop is tomorrow. Write to info@wikilook.com with the last twenty lines of the terminal, what you typed, and which chapter you were on. We answer the same day, and you come to the room either way — a machine that will not install is a thing we can fix in person in ten minutes.

Disconnect the connectors first, because they are the ones with reach: claude.ai → Settings → Connectors, then Disconnect on Gmail, Drive and Calendar. Then check the other side at myaccount.google.com → Security → Your connections to third-party apps, and remove anything you do not recognise.

If you made a Google account only for the day and will not use it again, delete it: myaccount.google.com → Data & privacy → Delete your Google Account. If you would rather keep it, keep it — it costs nothing and it is a clean place to try things next time.

Take the administrator right back off the workshop account: Settings → Accounts → Other users → the account → Change account type → Standard user. Keep the account itself. That is where the practice files live, and a standard account can still run everything you built.

Delete any API key you created. A key in a file on your disk is a key that works for whoever reads that file, and it keeps working until you revoke it at the console that issued it. If you are not sure whether you made one, search your project folder for the word KEY.

Look at the repository, not just at the folder. If anything real ended up in it — a client name, an invoice, a password — make the repository private or delete it, and check the history rather than the current files: a commit remembers what you removed afterwards.

Decide about the Claude plan on purpose. If you will use it weekly, keep it; if you took it for one afternoon, cancel before the renewal date. Your chats stay readable on the free tier, so cancelling loses the capacity, not the work.

Write down what you kept, in one line, somewhere you will find it: which account, which repository, which plan renews when. Six months from now this is the difference between a system you own and a subscription you forgot about.