AI with Kyle Daily Update 180

A reader posted in the WhatsApp group yesterday: "Have you done a video on setting up GitHub? With people in this group spending lots of money on code I'm guessing it becomes important. Any tutorials on linking GitHub to Claude, Manus etc would be amazing."

Yep. Great idea! And well aligned with my new push to bring you more 101 guides. So here we are.

GitHub.

The word that has scared off half my non-technical audience for the last two years. Sounds technical (ok and a little bit silly). Certainly looks technical. The website itself is a wall of jargon that makes you want to close the tab and go and do something easier. Like learn Greek (which I am, badly).

But it isn't really. Not the bit you actually need.

Today's the gentle 1-0-1 walkthrough. By the end you'll have a free account, an app on your laptop, and one repo to your name. Total time… about 15 minutes. Tea included.

What GitHub Actually Is

Forget code for a second.

GitHub is a shared folder. That's it. That's kinda the whole thing. It sits in the cloud, all your files live in it, and every tool on every device you own can connect to that folder and stay in sync.

Same idea as Google Drive. Same idea as Dropbox. The only reason it looks scary is that the developer crowd built it for themselves and the website is decorated in their lingo (issues, pull requests, actions, whatever). You can ignore 95% of that. What you actually need is the folder.

Because it’s devs they’ve even given it a fancy term: repository, or repo. But to keep things simple a repo is a folder. End of.

Why You Should Care

If you're vibe coding without one, here's what your project life looks like.

Maybe start a website in Lovable. Then you decide to keep working on it in Claude Code on your desktop. Then you switch to Cursor on your laptop. Now you've got three versions of your project in three different places, none of them in sync, and you can't remember which is the latest.

This is the reportDraft-final-v2-(4)-FINAL-FINAL-actuallyfinal.docx problem… for code.

It's a nightmare. People lose hours to it. People lose actual paying work to it. And the fix is just… one repo. One source of truth that every tool talks to. You commit changes, every device pulls them, you keep working from wherever you are.

Done. Cool?

The Terminology That Sounds Scary But Isn't

You'll hear five words thrown around. Once you know what they actually mean they stop being intimidating.

Repo. Your project folder. That's it.

Commit. Saving. You've made some changes, you give them a name ("added homepage hero"), you commit. New save point.

Push. Sending your saved changes from your computer up to the cloud repo.

Pull. Grabbing the latest version of the cloud repo down to your computer. Opposite of push funnily enough.

Branch. A copy of your project to mess about with experimental stuff in, without breaking the main version. When the experiment works you merge it back in. When it doesn't, you bin the branch.

That's basically the lot. Yes there's more. No you don't need to know any of it on day one. There's a brilliant zine by Julia Evans called How Git Works if you ever do want to get under the hood. Not sponsored or affiliated. Just cool.

The 5-Minute Setup

Right, the nuts and bolts.

1. Go to github.com and create an account. Free. Use your Gmail. Done.

2. Download GitHub Desktop. GitHub Desktop is a normal Mac/Windows app that means you never have to touch the terminal. Push, pull, commit… all buttons. No command line. None.

3. Open GitHub Desktop, log in with the account you just made, and click "create new repository." Give it a name. Set it to private.

4. Commit your new repo and it’ll be sent to Github.

That's it. You have a repo.

I know…what was all the fuss about eh?

You now have a folder on your computer that's connected to the cloud. Every save you make from now on can live in this repo and be available on any device you log into.

Connecting It To Your AI Tools

OK a cloud folder for your project is neat and all. But how do we use it. Here's where it gets useful.

Every modern AI coding tool plugs straight into GitHub. Lovable has a little Octocat icon in the top right - click it, connect, sync. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor - all of them open a GitHub repo as a project. The repo becomes the single source of truth and the tools become interchangeable. Start in Lovable, finish in Claude Code, pop into Cursor for a tweak. Same project.

So: connect them all up to your repo. Any tool you use look for how to connect it to Github. Once you know about this you’ll start seeing connection points EVERYWHERE.

It's Not Just For Code

What if you aren’t a coder. You’ve probably left by now. Hmm. Bummer. But if you haven’t this part will be handy!

GitHub is fantastic for non-code projects too. A book draft. A content brain. A personal knowledge base. Anything where you've got a bunch of files you want synced across your devices and connected to your AI tools.

You've probably seen the viral "second brain" posts on Twitter - someone showing off their gorgeous Obsidian setup with the spider-web graph view. Pretty. Mostly useless tbh… but pretty!! Underneath that pretty interface is a GitHub repo. That's kinda all Obsidian is - a viewer for a folder of markdown files that lives in (you guessed it) a GitHub repo.

I have one of these. Mine's called ai-brain (creative, I know!!). It holds my book outline, my livestream transcripts, my newsletter drafts, my content scripts, all my playbooks. Every morning Claude Code reads from it and writes to it. This newsletter you're reading right now lives in that repo, first as a draft and then the final human edited version (and yes the AI learns by looking at the difference between the two…more on that in another issue!)

Your One Job Today

Stop reading. Stop watching tutorials. Don't read all the GitHub docs (please don't, you'll never come back…and they are SO boring).

Go to github.com. Make an account. Install GitHub Desktop. Make one repo. Call it whatever. Set it to private. Commit something.

Then for bonus points, install GitHub Desktop on a second device - phone, laptop, whatever - and pull the same repo. The first time you make a change on one device and watch it appear on the other one is the moment this clicks.

See! Github isn’t that scary!

Kyle