# Unlock AI living guides
Canonical: https://social-archive.org/arc/eYnxtIiJmu
Original URL: https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides
Author: Nate B. Jones
Platform: web
Share mode: full
## Content
Agents 4 guides ## [The Agent Maintenance Loop](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/agents/maintenance) A repeatable loop for inspecting an agent after launch across job, diet, memory, tools, reach, proof, and value, then deciding whether to keep, change, pause, or retire it. Open guide [Agents Find a Real Job for Your First AI Agent Turn one repeated frustration into a written Pain Note, a pattern you have checked yourself, an honest verdict on whether an agent belongs here, and a draft-only pilot you can measure. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/first-agent-job) [Agents The One-Minute Test Route any task to chat, one accountable agent, a small agent team, or the manual path — in about a minute, with a next action for whichever route wins. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/the-one-minute-test) [Agents Automation Discovery A downloadable agent skill that reads your real work traces, audits the evidence, and offers 2–5 automations you can verify against your own history. You pick; it builds and proves only that. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/automation-discovery) Codex 4 guides [Codex The Ultimate Guide to Codex Install OpenAI's Codex app, set up real projects, and run an AI-first workflow where every move ships with a copy-paste prompt. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/codex) [Codex Codex side panel deep-dive Files, Side chat, Review, Terminal, and Browser: the panel that turns Codex from a chat box into a workbench. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/codex/side-panel) [Codex Codex browser & annotations Click any element, attach a note or screenshot, and steer Codex from inside the page you are building. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/codex/browser-annotations) [Codex Codex threading & child threads Threads, child threads, steering versus queueing, and the workspace habits that keep long-running agent work sane. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/codex/threading) General 13 guides [General Make Any Skill Your Own Skills are folders of plain text. Watch a real one work, download it, read it with your own eyes, and rewrite the lines that were never yours. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/make-any-skill-your-own) [General Open Stack A practical routing guide for Open Skills, Open Brain, and Open Engine: diagnose the bottleneck, choose where to start, and personalize the stack. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/open-stack/open-stack-field-guide) [General Open Brain — one memory, every AI What Open Brain is, how the one-database memory layer works, and the 30-minute, zero-code path to building yours — with the full guide on GitHub. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/open-brain) [General Ringer — swarm power without the frontier bill Run ultracode-style multi-agent swarms on inexpensive models: your best model plans and reviews, cheap cross-model workers implement in parallel, and exit codes decide what passed. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/ringer) [General How to Run a Chinese-Model Bakeoff in Ringer Give a Chinese model and your current model the same real job, the same sources, and the same pass/fail check, then see which one earns the work. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/chinese-model-bakeoff) [General Clean My AI Harness Find the hidden setup shaping your AI, see what protects your work and what creates drag, and clean it safely with numbered approval and full rollback. Claude and Codex editions. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/harness-cleaner) [General Build your own token-burn dashboard Track where your tokens go across Codex, Claude, and ChatGPT, then use the burn rate as a fluency signal. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/build-your-own-token-burn-dashboard) [General Build a Healthcare Claim Appeals Agent Assemble Open Skills primitives into an agent that turns your denial letter, EOB, and plan documents into a cited appeal packet. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/build-a-healthcare-claim-appeals-agent) [General Build a Tax Prep Organizer Agent Use the same document-grounded primitives to turn your tax documents and real IRS sources into a structured, CPA-ready prep packet. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/build-a-tax-prep-organizer-agent) [General Build an Email Follow-Up Agent Point the same document-grounded primitives at your inbox: a live MCP ingest loop that reconstructs threads, keeps a commitments ledger, and drafts cited follow-ups that stop at the send boundary. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/build-an-email-follow-up-agent) [General Clean Sensitive Docs with a Local Model Download Gemma 4 E2B in LM Studio, save a tested redaction system prompt as a preset, and turn documents you can't upload into proposed redacted copies — offline, on your own machine. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/clean-sensitive-docs-locally) [General AI Airlock: Use AI Without Leaking Sensitive Documents Install AI Airlock on an Apple Silicon Mac, review what it removes, seal a verified working copy, and use that copy with ChatGPT, Claude, or another AI tool. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/ai-airlock) [General 15 Ways to Cut Token Waste in Codex and Claude What each move saves, why it works, and what proves it — from editing a bad turn instead of correcting it, to turning exact work into code, to the free Token Saver skill. One matched job went from 51,712 reused input tokens to zero. Open guide](https://unlock-ai.natebjones.com/guides/cut-token-waste)
## Media
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