20:54Brock Mesarich | AI for Non Techies · Tutorial
Claude Cowork + Obsidian Just Changed How I Work Forever
A step-by-step setup guide for giving Claude Cowork a persistent second brain using Obsidian -- free, local, and self-updating.
April 15thThe argument in one line.
Live Artifacts turn Claude Cowork into a persistent command center: build the dashboard once and it self-refreshes from your apps, eliminating the token cost of regenerating everything from scratch every time you need current data.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You already use Claude Cowork and have hit the frustration of dashboards going stale by the next morning.
- You run a solo business or small team across several SaaS tools and want a single place to see your Stripe revenue, link clicks, inbox, and calendar.
- You have been burning tokens on scheduled tasks just to keep an AI-generated dashboard current.
SKIP IF…
- You have not used Claude Cowork at all -- this video assumes you are past the basics.
- You need multi-user or team automation; the use cases shown are personal command-center setups.
The full version, fast.
Static AI-generated dashboards waste tokens because every refresh regenerates the entire page from scratch. Claude Cowork Live Artifacts fix this by producing a self-contained HTML page that calls your connected apps directly, refreshing data in place without re-running the model. The video walks through three production dashboards (Stripe revenue, Bitly link tracker, Notion second brain), the full setup process, and a Zapier MCP workaround that extends Claude's native connector list to 8,000+ integrations.
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00:00 – 01:31
01 · The Problem with Claude Cowork
HTML dashboards go stale fast. Every refresh regenerates the entire page from scratch, burning tokens. The pre-solution workaround was a daily scheduled task that re-scraped email, Bitly links, and Calendar -- expensive and slow.
01:31 – 02:57
02 · Cowork Live Artifacts
Introduces the solution: a self-contained HTML page that calls Claude's connected apps directly. The brain (Claude) plus the live artifact equals a custom command center that refreshes in real time without re-running the model.
02:57 – 04:10
03 · Setup: desktop app and Cowork mode
Live artifacts require the desktop app -- not the web app. Walk-through of switching from Chat mode to Cowork mode and creating a local working folder.
04:10 – 06:50
04 · Stripe revenue dashboard
Demo of a live Stripe dashboard with brand deal categorization, cumulative revenue chart, customer list, and an embedded invoice tracker built by vibe coding directly in Claude.
06:50 – 07:26
05 · Get my 5 use case guide
Mid-video CTA to a Skool community guide with five copy-paste prompts for building live artifacts. Positioned as a shortcut for people who don't want to write their own prompts from scratch.
07:26 – 08:47
06 · Bitly link tracker
Demo of a live Bitly dashboard showing total clicks, top-performing links, country breakdown, platform, and device -- all auto-refreshing when new clicks come in.
08:47 – 10:34
07 · Notion second brain
Live artifact that surfaces all Notion pages and their contents directly inside Claude. Useful for teams using Notion as a project tracker or content pipeline.
10:34 – 11:42
08 · Create your first live artifact
Step-by-step creation flow: click New Artifact, chat with Claude in plain English, answer a few questions, and Claude generates a personalized first artifact based on its existing context about you.
11:42 – 14:11
09 · Connect your apps
Adding native connectors (Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, Spotify) via the sidebar customize panel. When a needed app is not natively available, Zapier MCP extends coverage to 8,000+ tools.
14:11 – 14:56
10 · Your daily command center
Live demo of the generated daily command center: calendar with zero meetings, 16 emails needing replies, Slack messages, and a full Gmail triage panel -- generated from one plain-English prompt.
14:56 – 15:39
11 · Thank you
100K subscriber milestone acknowledgment. Stat that 82% of viewers are not subscribed. Subscribe and like CTA.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- A Claude dashboard that regenerates on every refresh is a token sink -- Live Artifacts eliminate that by calling your apps directly from the HTML layer.
- Live Artifacts exist only in the Claude desktop app; the web version cannot create or run them.
- The Zapier MCP server bridges the gap when Claude's native connector list does not include your tool -- it covers 8,000+ apps.
- You do not need to write a prompt to get started: Claude interviews you about your role and tools, then generates a first artifact from your answers.
- A live artifact auto-refreshes individual data points without reloading or regenerating the entire page.
- Claude's existing context about you shapes the artifact suggestions it offers, making the setup feel personalized rather than generic.
- A vibe-coded form -- such as an invoice tracker -- can be embedded directly inside a live artifact, combining live app data with manual input in one dashboard.
- Pinning your most-used live artifacts to the sidebar replaces navigating between multiple SaaS tabs throughout the day.
- The daily command center pattern -- calendar, email count, inbox triage, messaging apps -- is universal enough to give immediate value to any solo operator.
- The connector marketplace inside Claude Cowork extends beyond productivity tools; Spotify is a native option, signaling broad eventual coverage.
The dashboard that never goes stale
WHAT TO LEARN
Live Artifacts shift the refresh cost from the model to the app -- once built, the page pulls fresh data on its own instead of making Claude regenerate everything from scratch.
01The Problem with Claude Cowork
- Static AI dashboards have a hidden cost: every time you need current data, you burn tokens regenerating the whole page from nothing.
02Cowork Live Artifacts
- Live Artifacts avoid that by producing an HTML layer that calls your connected apps directly, so data updates in place rather than through the model.
03Setup: desktop app and Cowork mode
- The feature is desktop-app only -- if you are using Claude on the web, you cannot create or access live artifacts.
04Stripe revenue dashboard
- Connectors are the prerequisite: a live artifact is only as useful as the apps you have authorized Claude to read from.
06Bitly link tracker
- A live artifact auto-refreshes individual data points -- such as a new link click -- without reloading or regenerating the entire page.
08Create your first live artifact
- Claude personalizes the artifact creation process using its existing context about you, offering relevant suggestions rather than forcing you to start from a blank prompt.
09Connect your apps
- When a tool you need is not in Claude's native connector list, a Zapier MCP server fills the gap with access to thousands of additional integrations.
10Your daily command center
- A useful starting point for anyone is a daily command center -- calendar, inbox count, email triage -- because it maps to workflows most people already have.
- Once built, pin your highest-frequency dashboards to the sidebar so they are a single click away instead of buried in chat history.
Terms worth knowing.
- Live Artifact
- A self-contained HTML page generated inside Claude Cowork that calls your connected apps directly to pull real-time data, updating individual values in place without re-running the AI model.
- Connector
- A native integration inside Claude Cowork that grants the model read and write access to a third-party app such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Notion, or Stripe.
- MCP server
- Model Context Protocol server -- a middleware layer that exposes external tools and data sources to Claude as callable functions, enabling the model to take actions in those systems.
- Zapier MCP
- Zapier's implementation of the Model Context Protocol, allowing Claude to interact with any of Zapier's 8,000+ supported applications as if they were native connectors.
- Command center
- A single dashboard that aggregates data and actions from multiple apps into one interface, replacing the need to context-switch between tools.
- Vibe coding
- Generating functional code through conversational prompting -- describing what you want in plain English and letting the AI produce the implementation -- rather than writing code by hand.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
01:07
“If you built it on Monday, it's basically gonna be useless by tomorrow.”
02:05
“Having a custom operating system for yourself as well as for your team is the future of AI.”
08:10
“I don't need to refresh this entire page. It will automatically refresh the amount of clicks without me needing to go and generate this entire page again.”
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
metaphoranalogy
00:00There's a hidden feature inside of Claude Cowork that has completely changed how I'm using it, and it's a glimpse into the future of how work is going to change in the new era of AI. I personally think this is one of the biggest fundamental shifts I've seen in the AI space. And in this video, I'm gonna break down what it is, how anybody can begin using it right now, and show you exactly how I'm leveraging it to help me run my business.
00:21So without further ado, let's dive into it. Alright. So there's a hidden feature inside of Cloud Cowork that most people are not using, and I am baffled that more people are not talking about it because, genuinely, for me, this has been one of the biggest changes that I've had when using CoWork.
00:34So first of all, let's talk about the problem that this solves, and that is that most HTML dashboards go stale very fast. Basically, if you've ever generated a dashboard inside of Cloud CoWork, it's great. It's pretty cool.
00:46It's pretty novel. But the problem with it is if you built it on Monday, it's basically gonna be useless by tomorrow. In order for you to get up to date information, you have to run an automation or refresh it, and that wastes tokens.
00:57It has to generate from scratch every single time, and I'm telling you that will burn through your clawed tokens that you spend your hard earned money on. Before this new feature came out, I had to run a scheduled task, which is basically an automation that runs every single day at a specific time in order to rescrape my email, pull every link from Bitly, and pull information from my Google Calendar, as well as it had to rebuild that dashboard from scratch every single time.
01:23And, again, this was wasting me tons of credits. But with a new hidden feature inside of Claude Cowork, this completely solves this problem. It's called Claude Cowork live artifacts, and I'm gonna break down exactly what it is in-depth and show you different use cases you can use that I found for myself that you can copy from me.
01:40So what this is is a self contained HTML page that calls from all the different connectors we have inside of Clotus. So if you're connected to Gmail, you're connected to Google Calendar, Notion, any of these different applications, we can not only pull information from in real time, but we could also make changes to those apps directly inside that dashboard as well.
01:58This right here is a perfect graphic of exactly what this is. So think of this. We have Claude as the brain.
02:04It has all the knowledge on us, our business, all of those different things. We have the live artifact, which is basically our own mini software that we have inside of Claude that automatically pulls from our different tools. So if you don't know what a command center or, like, a daily operating system is, this is basically our command center that we can customize to our liking, and I don't think enough people are talking about how important this is.
02:26 as well as for your team is the future of AI. It's a way to stay organized and do different things throughout your business or your work without you needing to use each of these different applications directly.
02:41And this is a fundamental shift that I'm seeing in AI that is really gonna change how we work in the future. And so this is the first glimpse I've seen to where it feels like we're making a big step in the right direction when it comes to building custom software for our own use cases for ourself, but also for our entire team if we have a team that we manage.
02:58First things first, in order to begin using the CoWork live artifacts, we need to have the desktop app downloaded. We're not able to access this on the web application. So if you don't have it downloaded, make sure to download it now.
03:09There's gonna be a link in the description to sign up. Next, once we download the app and we have it open, we are going to see this interface. And one thing I wanna mention is it's gonna start in chat mode.
03:20This is basically how we use Claude like ChatGPT. We could go back and forth, but we can't spin up live artifacts and do plenty of other things we could do inside of co So if you've never used it before, up here on the left hand side, we basically have our different versions that we can use. First of all, we have chat mode right here.
03:34We have co work mode and then code mode. So make sure to click on this little checklist button that will take you to Claude Cowork. And now we're gonna see this interface.
03:43From here, we just need to make sure we're working inside of a folder. So I have Claude code short system folder pulled up. What we could do is we could just come here and select any existing folder we have on our computer that we want to store this information on, or we can create a new one from scratch.
03:58So we could come here and just give it a name, something like live artifacts or honestly, you wanna call it. Create that folder, click on allow, and then now you could see right here, we have live artifacts, and that's the folder we're working inside of. Now let me show you the live artifacts I'm personally using so you could get a sense of what this is capable of before we dive deeper into exactly how to use this.
04:18In order to show you exactly what I mean, let me come over to Claude. Right now, we are inside of CoWork. And if you've never used CoWork before, we are gonna see it up here on the top left hand side.
04:28First of all, we have our chat mode, which is this little chat button. We have CoWork mode, which is right here, and the button on the right is Claude code. Make sure we have co work selected because right now, this is the only place we can begin using the live artifacts that we're talking about in this video.
04:43First thing that we're gonna notice is in the left hand sidebar, we now have this live artifacts button that we can click on. I'm gonna show that here in a second. But, also, one of the best parts about this is we have all of our live artifacts pinned right here in our menu.
04:59If we have a specific live artifact we want to access, we don't need to go and search for any of the chats. We just automatically have them directly right here, and we could click on them and pull them up at any time. So in order to show you what I mean, let me first show you my Stripe revenue dashboard that pulls live information from my Stripe account and generates this dashboard.
05:19So that way, I don't need to go inside of Stripe. For example, you can now see this interface. It's customized to exactly how I personally want it to look.
05:27We could customize it in whichever way we want. First of all, we have overview. We then have this section right here that is called brand deals.
05:34We have payments, customers, AR tracker. So this is custom to how I wanna use it, and that's one of the best parts about these live artifacts. Next, we could see revenue by brand deal, and this is all fake information.
05:44I didn't wanna show you my actual Stripe account. We can even see cumulative revenue over the last 100 payments, basically breaking down this chart here.
05:52And a couple of other different things, we could see all of our different brand deals here. So I want you to note that inside of this live artifact, it's automatically categorizing every type of payment and then putting it into specific section inside of this dashboard. I could see all the different payments with my Stripe payment information.
06:07I could see the different customers. And then a cool thing inside of here, let's say we want to track all of the outstanding payments and invoices we sent. Well, I built out this, like, payment tracker system, vibe coded it directly inside of Claude, and embedded it directly into our artifact.
06:22So I can just come here and just say invoice for Austin. I could put in an amount, let's say $5,000. We can give it a specific date, and I could actually choose the status of this.
06:31So let's say that this is overdue, and then I could click on payment, and then it adds to our outstanding total that you can see right here as well as we have all of our different payments directly inside of our artifact. So not only is it showing real time information from Stripe, but it also has custom features, like being able to track all the payments that I'm owed.
06:49I put together a guide on what live artifacts are, how you could use them, and I even give you five use cases you can steal from me to begin building these out in seconds. I even give you the exact prompt you could use to recreate the ones that I built. And if you guys wanna access this, this is inside of my school community.
07:05You head over to classroom, click on community exclusives. And if you click on this here, you could see this exact breakdown as well as this PDF guide breaking this all down for you with the prompts you can steal in order to build these in literally seconds. To show you exactly what I mean, there's this little diagram as well as this prompt that you could literally just copy and paste into Cowork in order to recreate these use cases that I found for yourself.
07:26To show you another example of a live artifact that I'm personally using that has been a game changer for me, right here, we have the Bitly dashboard that I could just select in my side menu, and this is connected to my Bitly account via the connectors inside of Claude. And instead of me needing to go to the Bitly software on the web, I can now see all this information directly inside of Claude, and this has been a game changer for me personally.
07:49If you don't know what Bitly is, it's basically a platform that allows you to track how many people are clicking on your links so you could see where different traffic is coming from. So I personally can see how many people are clicking on my school community link from each different video. Right here, shows that the number one link is the 15 skills resource video.
08:06It shows the amount of clicks that it has. It even shows the specific Bitly URL there, and it breaks down by country where everybody is clicking from. It shows which platform they're coming from, and it even shows which device is clicking on these different links.
08:18Before having that live artifact dashboard, I would have to come over to Bitly. I would have to click on links and see all of these different links here.
08:26And to me, this saves me a lot of time and, honestly, just like headache. The fact that now I could just already be inside of Claude, click on my live artifacts, and see this with updated real time information. And one key thing I wanna note here is if somebody clicks on a link, I don't need to refresh this entire page.
08:41It will automatically refresh the amount of clicks without me needing to go and generate this entire page again. Another artifact example that I wanna show you guys because I know a lot of you use Notion. This is a artifact that basically shows everything inside of Notion.
08:56It makes it very easy for me to see what's going on inside of my company. So if your company is using Notion as, like, a second brain and you guys are tracking all of your different projects inside of here, this could be a really helpful way to basically see what's going on across your entire business. So for example, I have a couple of different pages inside of Notion.
09:13Let me pull up my Notion page here so you could see what it looks like. We have this subpage called AI for non techies. Basically, I break down, like, my weekly goals.
09:21I have different subpages that track all my finances, revenue tracker. Then I even have all of the different videos. So when I go and work on a video, I come inside of here.
09:30I add the different title ideas. Basically, I do a little bit of scripting and video outline. So in order for me to pull this information into Claude, I have this live artifact that will automatically populate this whenever I make changes inside of Notion.
09:42And then I could see all these different pages here. For example, if I click on this one right here, this is a video that I was working on. I could then see everything that was inside of that Notion page.
09:51So if we want to view all of our different artifacts, there's a couple of different ways that we can do this. First of all, we have the left sidebar right here breaking down all of them. We can just pin the ones that we use frequently.
10:01So for example, I use a Revenue Stripe dashboard a lot. I also use a Bitly dashboard. Make sure to just pin the ones you use a lot right there so it's always easy to access, as well as we have our live artifacts button right here that we could just click on, and it will pull up all of our different artifacts.
10:14So let's say we have tons of them added. This is an easy way for us to sort through and just click on any of these. So for example, if I click on this, here is my morning inbox dashboard that pulls from my Google Calendar, and this essentially acts as my entire operating system across my business.
10:29So it's able to pull from the different apps I use, as well as I could see all of my Bitly data and information inside of here as well. So let me show you now how we can begin using and creating artifacts from scratch. So once we have Cowork open, there's a couple of different ways we could do this.
10:43We can come over to the left hand sidebar where we have our live artifacts. We can click on this. Obviously, we're gonna see all of the ones that we've generated before.
10:51We can now click on new artifact on the top right hand side. We have this black button. We click on this.
10:56We could click chat with Claude and basically just explain in plain English what it is we want to create. Then next up, it's gonna ask you a series of a couple of different questions.
11:05So it's asking if I wanna create a school revenue tracker video pipeline and YouTube performance. And this is all custom, basically, based on who you are. So all the context that Claude has on me, it's recommending different use cases for me personally.
11:18So this can be a great place to start if you don't know what to begin building. So, personally, I think I'm gonna go with the daily command center just to show you exactly how that works. It's pretty universal for everyone to use.
11:27So I'd assume that you could probably get value from that instantly. Next, how often do you actually open it? Multiple times a day.
11:33And what matters most for the design? Numbers and charts? Mix of both, to be honest.
11:37So now once we give it that information, we'll go ahead, spin up this artifact, and I'll show you exactly what it looks like. In the meantime, what we need to do is make sure to add our specific apps that we have that we wanna connect to. If you've never done it before, in order to add connectors, we need to come over to the left hand sidebar.
11:54There will be this little customize button, so make sure to select that. Once I select that, we are gonna see a couple of different things. We have all of our different skills here that we have.
12:02We have our connectors and plugins. Next, we need to add connectors. So click on this.
12:07I personally have a big list of different connectors that I personally use. These are apps I use every single day in my business, but also directly inside of Claude. So select any of the ones that you wanna use.
12:17And in order to do that, just come over to browse connectors. From here, we're gonna have basically a marketplace of different apps we can connect to. I have Gmail added, Google Drive, Google Calendar.
12:27It looks like we could even add Spotify. That's pretty cool. So let's say we wanna add Spotify, for example.
12:31We just click on this, and it's automatically connected. And so now I could begin asking Claude to pull information from Spotify.
12:38So make sure to configure all the different apps that you use because, otherwise, live artifacts aren't gonna be as useful because we do wanna pull live information from those different applications, and you need to set up connectors first in able to do that. And let's say you go through all these different connectors that are inside of Claude and the app that you wanna use is not added here.
12:56Well, there is a way around this, so let me show you exactly how I'm personally doing this right now. I'm personally using Zapier. So I set up a Zapier MCP server, and Zapier basically connects to 9,000 plus different applications.
13:08So in order to do this, we can click on this plus button. It's gonna take you to Zapier MCP. We're gonna click on allow.
13:15Then it's gonna pull this up in your browser, so I could just click on open Claude. And we basically just need to grant access to Zapier. And once we're inside of Zapier MCP, there's a couple things we need to do to configure this.
13:25So we're gonna click on add new MCP server. And then for our clients, we want to select Claude Cowork. Right here, I have a couple of different apps already connected like HubSpot, Stripe, Skuulp, etcetera.
13:35So in order to add your tools, you just come here, search for the tools that you wanna add. Let's say I wanna add ClickUp. I could select all these different actions.
13:42These are different things that can perform for you. You click on connect, and then all you have to do is configure your ClickUp account. And just like that, we now have ClickUp added to our MCP server.
13:51So we could add all the different apps we use. There's 8,000 plus we can connect to. And then in order to connect this to Claude, we just click on connect.
13:57Click add to Claude. It's gonna bring you back to Claude, and then just hit connect, and we will be connected here. I do wanna preface and say that's only necessary if there's an app inside of Claude that you can't natively connect to.
14:08That's just a hack that honestly has saved me and my community members so much time. Alright. And it spit out this new daily command center live artifact.
14:15Looks like we have nothing on the calendar right here. Shows that we have zero meetings, zero hours. It shows we have 16 different emails I need replies to.
14:22And then I also connected Slack, and there's no messages that I personally need to reply to in Slack. Then we have all our Gmail triage, which is basically all these different emails here. And, guys, this is what it was generated from one single simple prompt.
14:36So we could customize this however we like, but that is how simple it is to generate these different live artifacts. Again, if you don't wanna go through the hassle of writing out a specific prompt in order to generate these live artifacts, inside the school community, we do have this guide that breaks down five different prompts you could use with different use cases that are universal to everybody.
14:53So this is a resource that you definitely use if you want to access it. And, guys, I just wanna say, I hit a 100,000 subscribers on YouTube this week. I cannot thank you guys enough for being a part of this community.
15:03And if you are not a subscriber, I do wanna say that 82% of you guys are actually not subscribed to this channel, which I was pretty surprised by. So if you guys wanna help the channel out as well as stay up to date and understand everything that's going on in the cloud ecosystem, make sure to subscribe to this channel. It really means the world.
15:18But thank you guys so much. It's been a long journey to get here to a 100,000 subscribers. I can't thank every single one of you individually, but just know it means the world to me.
15:27So thank you guys so much for not only sticking around to the end of this video, but also staying and watching my YouTube channel. With that being said, guys, subscribe, like, leave a comment. It goes a long way, and I will see you guys in the next video.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Every dashboard Claude Cowork generates has an expiration date. Build it Monday, and by Tuesday morning it's showing you last week's numbers -- unless you burn tokens regenerating it from scratch. Live Artifacts are how the host solved that: persistent HTML pages wired directly to your apps, refreshing in place without touching the model.
Named ideas worth stealing.
01:31model
Live Artifact Stack
- Claude (brain + context)
- Live Artifact (self-contained HTML)
- Connectors (app integrations)
- Real-time data layer (no model refresh)
The conceptual architecture for a persistent AI command center: Claude holds knowledge and context, the live artifact is the interface, connectors are the data pipes.
Steal forExplaining why AI-native dashboards beat traditional SaaS dashboards in any pitch or explainer
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
06:47product
“I put together a guide on what live artifacts are, how you could use them, and I even give you five use cases you can steal from me to begin building these out in seconds.”
Mid-video placement (~43%) with a live Skool community demo shown on screen. Positioned as a shortcut rather than a pitch -- the CTA solves the friction of writing prompts from scratch.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
