AI Guides
Opinionated, practical guides from the Classified AI Builders community on building real AI operations: which tool to reach for, how to expose an AI to other people safely, scheduling that actually fires, and how to keep the bill boring. Drawn from systems we run in production, written for builders.
Every guide is also published as raw markdown for AI assistants and crawlers. The machine-readable index lives at /guides/index.md.
One paste gives your AI assistant the entire guide set: every guide, the index, and canonical links. Works with Zo, Claude, ChatGPT, or any agent that accepts pasted context.
Zo in 10 Minutes
The plain-English mental model of Zo (your own server, your files, your AI), the two setup steps that matter most (bring your own subscription, give it your context), and the first things a new builder should do.
The Classified Method
How Classified approaches building AI operations: files as memory, briefing docs, boring stacks, guardrails as architecture, and verification before done.
Skill vs Automation vs Site vs Service
A decision tree for picking the right Zo primitive, the escalation ladder from conversation to service, and the common wrong picks.
Personas, Scopes, and Guardrails
How to expose an AI to other people safely: allowlist scoping, separating knowledge from access, and why instructions are not a security boundary.
Prompting and Persona Craft
Prompt structure that works, the build loop from aspirational end result to GitHub baseline, designing a persona as a job description, and the failure modes behind vague or confidently wrong output.
Automations That Fire
Scheduling judgment: timezones, rrule patterns, per-run cost, idempotent run design, and how to debug an automation that went silent.
Cost and Usage
How to not get surprised by the bill: the four spend multipliers and the habits that keep AI usage boring and predictable.
FAQ
Quick fixes for the problems new Zo builders actually hit. A living document that grows from real help-and-support threads.
Start Here
The Classified AI Builders Discord and Friday, the community's backup AI. Get answers from your own agent first; bring questions to the humans when you want a second set of eyes.
These guides cover judgment: how to decide, structure, and not get burned. For platform mechanics (settings, features, the API), the official Zo documentation is the source of truth.
Want it built for you?
These guides teach the craft. Classified also designs, builds, secures, and runs custom AI systems end to end. You ask for it, we build it, you own it.
Classified Holdings LLC · The AI-first agency