Welcome to episode 422
of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded
live on 02/09/2026.
This is a show about Microsoft three sixty
five and Azure from the perspective of IT
pros and end users, where we discuss a
topic or recent news and how it relates
to you. In this episode, Scott and Ben
discuss their growing use of AI CLI tools
and their daily workflows,
particularly,
Claude Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, and Gemini CLI.
They explore how these command line interfaces offer
powerful ways to interact with local files and
MCP servers beyond traditional desktop desktop AI chat
interfaces.
They share how they are using these tools
in their day to day roles to perform
different tasks and accelerate their workflows.
Kinda funny, Scott. We're in the same city,
but we still record this remotely from our
offices. But we'll go out and hang out
for breakfast. And we had this conversation the
other day too even around AI of, like
I don't I'm curious what listeners think. Like,
if there's other stuff that listeners are seeing
that we're just missing or not talking about
that they wanna hear about.
But both you and I have had this
feeling of, like, all we talk about is
AI because that's
95%
of the news, and all the other stuff
is just like, there's
I've been struggling, and I think you have
too, of coming up with non AI topics
to talk about new features and functionality. So
I am curious. If there is stuff that
other listeners wanna hear, like, let us know
because we would love to
know what others are interested in that maybe
we haven't covered or haven't covered in a
while outside of AI. LinkedIn is the best
place to let us know, or you if
you're looking for something a little more anonymous,
we have a contact us form,
m s cloud I t pro dot com.
Re reach out and let us know what's
on your mind. To your point about, like,
the news Or I couldn't find us at
a conference. Like, we've done some interviews. We
have some coming, but this was on the
recording before it crashed, is we'll be at
MVP Summit. So if you're an MVP and
wanna talk to us about something or have
something,
find both of us at MVP Summit. I'll
be down in Orlando at the m three
sixty five
conference
in
April. So, yeah, that's another way you can
find out a find reach out to us,
talk to us, tell us what you want
us to talk about. Sorry. Now I'll let
you talk, Scott. So you had mentioned kinda
news is slow. There's not a lot of
new features, thing things like that coming. We
keep ending up on this AI thing. But
I think for me, what I'm finding is
I'm also using these tools more and more,
more and more in my day to day
life.
And That's fair. And a lot of that
is definitely a function of
my role
in running through things, but I think you
use these tools a whole bunch too.
And I've been on this path lately where
I even see lots of,
like,
sorry, the normals out there, like, big air
quotes, like, the normal people who aren't in
tech who are also using these things. Like,
I was having a conversation,
over the weekend. We went to it was
Super Bowl, so we went to a Super
Bowl party. So I was having a conversation
with somebody, and they go, oh, hey. Like,
you're at Microsoft, this Copilot,
AI stuff, blah blah blah. I use ChatGPT,
and I'm paying $20 a month for it.
Is there anything better? I've heard about I
I heard about ClaudeBot, which then
became Maultbot, which then became OpenClaw, blah blah.
Like, in the news kind of thing, should
I do that? And I was like, I'm
of the opinion at this point that if
you're
not in, like, the m three sixty five
ecosystem and, like, you're not doing, like, Microsoft
Copilot, things like that, and you're just looking
for, like, general, like, AI chat for business,
like,
man, if you're gonna spend $20 on something,
spend it on Claude.
Like, switch what you're doing with ChatGPT
and push over to Claude where you have
access to
all these tools even in, like, their $20
a month plan. So you get, like, Claude
Cowork
as part of Claude Pro. You get access
to MCP servers. Like, we still don't have,
like, broad access to, like, local MCP servers
within ChatGPT.
You cert ChatGPT desktop, I'm talking about, or,
Copilot desktop. Microsoft three sixty five. So these
things become super powerful.
But then the geek in me has also,
like, turned and I don't know how this
is going for you. So I've been on
this natural progression of
things like Claude or ChatGPT
or Copilot just through their desktop interfaces and
doing that, and then kind of moving I
started moving a bunch of stuff over,
what, the past two, three months maybe
into Versus Code where
I could have native access
to MCP servers. But then I got to
this point where and I I've been chatting
about this with a couple of people too.
I've gotten to this point where I'm opening
Versus Code, but a lot of the things
that I do are kinda aggregations
and chats that go between MCPs.
I wanna run them in different models, things
like that, but I don't need full access
to
Versus Code. Like, I'm in this window that
has takes up a big portion of my
screen, and I'm using, like, a little slice
of the window for the agent chat, things
like that. So I've started moving from the
agent chat into the CLIs.
And I've been playing around with Cloud Code,
Gemini
code, Gemini CLI, and then you've also got
GitHub Copilot CLI that sits out there and
is
and is an option ready to go. So
I'm kinda using
GitHub Copilot CLI at work in my day
to day job, and then I I subscribe
to Cloud Pro. I think you do as
well.
So, you know, kinda Cloud Code, but then
I've also been playing around even with just
Gemini code with the free version of Gemini
and some of the like the Gemini fast
and things like that that are available out
there. So I think it'd be fun to
just kind of talk through, like, how we're
using these things and
what you're kind of finding in your day
to day. I know for me, like, I'm
actually really having fun going back to terminal
life. It reminds me of like being like
my career like twenty years ago when I
started
doing like
Raul deployments, and I was in Linux land
for customers and
having fun there. So I figured maybe we
start with, like, Cloud Code and what we're
doing, like, with that, and then I can
talk a little bit about maybe, like, GitHub
Copilot CLI and what I'm seeing there because
I don't think you've played around with that
one too much. No. I haven't done Copilot
CLI much. I've been,
if you're one of my customers,
don't hate me, but Microsoft three sixty five
Copilot has its advantages.
I'm spending way more time in Claude to
the point of I had this discussion with
somebody earlier today.
I have Microsoft three sixty five Copilot as
part of I can't remember where it came
from, but I would probably still pay $30
a month for it. I get a few
licenses for free through different partnerships and some
of that. But the other day, I actually
just upgraded beyond the $20 a month plan
for Claude to the $100 a month plan
for Claude. Oh, you've gone there. I haven't
gone there yet. I have gone there. I
have absolutely gone there. And I, like, I
legitimately have tried to get Copilot to do
some of this stuff, and
it's gonna be interesting to see how this
all plays out over the next year.
But I have found way more benefits
in Claude and even capabilities. So I'll give
you an example talking about how we're using
it. Going into
kind of the first
example was in what pushed me to the
$100 plan. I was working on a presentation,
and
I had the presentation all done. I went
into my slides and did, like, bullet points.
So it was the first two or three
slides, then I had, like, five or six
slides of just black and white bullet points.
This is what I wanna talk about, and
then, like, the outro slide. So the intro
slide had some of the theming, some of
the pictures on it, all of that. I
actually told Copilot, I'm like, go in and
make my PowerPoint
look good. Like, keep the colors from the
banner, keep the colors from the header.
Just clean up those bullet point slides to
make them kinda match the theme on the
beginning and closing slides, rearrange the text. Like,
I want it to look good. I can
come up with the content. I'm not a
designer. And the first pass, it came up
with something just completely off the wall. Didn't
match any of the colors. Just it didn't
work.
And then I tried it two or three
more times, and it actually wasn't changing anything.
I went in and did the exact same
thing with
Claude. I can't remember if I used Claude
code
and used the CLI
version of it because then I can point
it to, like, the physical PowerPoint presentation
on that was synced down via OneDrive
or if I did it in the desktop
chat, but I ran out of tokens when
it was trying to process the PowerPoint and
reformat it. So I just paid to upgrade.
I'm like, you know what? Let's just see
what this does. It did a really good
job. Like, all I had to do was
go in and adjust some font sizes. Like,
colors were different shades, matched the banner. Everything
was formatted nice. It split stuff up into
two columns where it made sense. It put
little icons in there.
Yeah. I know I should be talking about
my accessories as FabQuote, but it yeah. Claude
did way better. That PowerPoint add in, it's
in beta. They released a I can't remember.
It feels like a Yes. It might have
been a little while ago, but it is
a good one. I did not I didn't
even use the plugin. I couldn't get the
plugin to work yet, so I just did
it in native Claude, but I wanna try
the plugin because I have one for Excel
and one for PowerPoint now. It's an interesting
one. So I think that's one of the
nice things about when I think about Claude
in particular, like as a desktop experience, like
Claude desktop automatically,
you can just go flip the switch and
have desktop integrations
and things like
that. You can do similar things, yes, with,
with ChatGPT as well on on the desktop.
But some things like m three sixty five
Copilot, like, they're very much built around, like,
hey, use my files that are already stored
up in SharePoint or in OneDrive,
things like that. So it's a little bit
of, like, a disaggregated experience
there. So one of the cool things you
do with, like, Claude or, like, particularly on
Claude
code on the desktop side is just go
fire up a terminal, and you can do
things like say, hey, create maybe you've got
like a bunch of markdown
or a bunch of other like artifacts that
you're gonna build into something, you can just
point it at those. It can enumerate your
file system, pick those back up,
get you into a good starting space. The
other cool thing you can do with Claude,
particularly with the these things, I guess, we
get into talking about the CLIs, is you
have these concepts of things around, like,
agents and sub agents and skills and different
plugins and different MCPs that you can bring
in. But you could potentially, like, go and
create like, if you're doing this all the
time, hey. I'm creating PowerPoint presentations
for
maybe customers around the same things, things like
that, you could go and create yourself an
agent where an agent is just a markdown
file that just describes the set of functionality
that I want this thing to do. Hey,
go create an agent for
maybe PowerPoint presentations on the value of IntelliJunk,
and then you can go and spin that
for customer by customer or have agents compete
with each other. Like, it it it's really
cool stuff. My my only limitation, I'm a
little jealous that I've created, is the $100
plan, is burning through the tokens very fast.
And it does
burn through the tokens. So I just did
something
kinda where we were getting ready for this.
And this is one of the nice things
I like about the CLI
is you can go see your context usage,
how many tokens you're using. So I have
some MCP servers. So I popped open
Cloud Code, CLI,
and just ran,
like, two or three,
just asked two or three questions, like, overdue
tasks and it goes and pulls them from
Asana using the Asana MCP server. It goes
in and I asked for, like, emails that
I got in the last week, and it
used the WorkIQ MCP server. And I asked
it about meeting notes and Notion, and it
used the Notion MCP server. I have content
in all three of those.
That alone between
the
prompts, loading the MCP tools,
I do have some custom skills that I've
created in the CLI that we can talk
about. And the prompts, like, I ran it
went ran, like, the slash context to see
just how much those three questions, all the
MCP servers, and everything took up. And I'm
already at 63,000
of my 2,000 token or 200,000.
63,000
of the 200,000 tokens,
for that particular
context window before it needs to go in
and do things like starting to auto compact
the buffer and compact the conversations and do
some of that to make additional rooms. So
I do like that about the CLI too
that I can
get some of that and even see it
tells me how much of my context window
am I using for system prompts, for system
tools, for MCP tools, for skills, for messages,
save some for the compaction, and then how
much free space I have left. I've noticed
it starts to drive me in different directions
for some of these things, like token compaction.
Like, hey. Let me save off this session
or a specific subset of what was done
in this session to, like, just just a
markdown file. Like, hey. Just spit this out
to a directory and have it come over
for me, and then be able to reuse
those sessions, save yourself tokens
on spinning up the next one,
things like that. So so I'm kinda interested.
You said
you're using MCPs,
it sounds like, and kinda wrangling things together.
Folks definitely go check out the WorkIQ MCP
if they haven't done that yet and you're
in the m three sixty five ecosystem. But
you're using MCPs
and kinda maybe wrangling that between various
various models that are out there. Have you
started playing around with, like, agents and skills
or plug ins,
any of that stuff? I've done some stuff
with plug ins and skills. Agents are kinda
next up on my list.
But I would say from the plugins and
skills perspective,
I actually
went in, and this is another
cool thing. And I think you can do
this with Visual Studio Copilot too. But I
actually created
my own
custom plugins. So I created, like, Ben Stedjink's
Claude plugins Yep. And published it out to
GitHub repo. It's a private GitHub repo. And
then in that plugin,
I created
a, like, a Ben Stedjink
core plugin,
just an overall core plug in, and then
an intelligent core plug in or skill. So
or no. Those are those are technically plug
ins. And then inside of those different plug
ins, I put skills. So, like, inside of
the Ben Stedjink plug in, I have a
skill for my voice and my tone and
different things I wanna do or things I
want to do. Like, I never use em
dashes or frankly any dashes in any of
my responses or anything I type ever. So
in that skill, I'm like, just don't ever
use em dashes. I don't use em dashes
and dashes. It shouldn't be in anything that
I ask you to generate for me. Like
my core one, I went in and I
created a whole,
like, dictionary
of Microsoft three sixty five terms. So m
three sixty five is also Microsoft three sixty
five. Office o three sixty five is Office
three sixty five. AIP is equivalent to whatever
they're calling it today.
So that as I'm going in and maybe
using different
acronyms in my typing, it Claude can go
in and kinda translate that to maybe the
official definition or if I'm using the official
one, it knows what the acronyms are for
it. And then IntelliJinx, something similar to the
Ben Stedjink one is
maybe I wanna use IntelliJinx tends to be
a little bit more professional, where Ben Stedjink
tends to be a little bit more casual
and conversational
so that as I'm using
Claude code,
clogged in the CLI,
to generate all this different stuff, because at
this point in time, it's it is clogged
code, but I use it for way more
than coding. I just use it for all
kinds of stuff in the CLI.
It can
know
those different characteristics, those different traits, how I
want it to behave
using those different skills, writing styles.
Oh, I put, like, background in there, professional
background of IntelliJinc,
my personal professional background,
all those different things in these various
skills. They're all bundled up in this plugin.
And then
for me, the nice thing about this and
I did not come up with all of
this to be fair. Andrew Connell and I
were sitting down and talking about all this
the other day, and he kinda got me,
hooked on this too, was because I publish
them up to GitHub,
I can have all these plugins and skills
come down to whatever computer. If I'm sitting
at my desk, if I'm on my laptop,
if I have to format my computer and
wanna bring them all down. And there's even
an update in there to automatically
update these plugins and skills. So whenever I
boot up Claude, it goes and looks at
my private GitHub repo
and will automatically
update
these skills and plugins from my GitHub repo
without me even having to do anything.
So it's super interesting once you start to
kinda get in there, I think, get into
the
ecosystem a little bit of
some of the plugins, the agents,
the the skills, things like that. I I
was really surprised at how
approachable it was. I think maybe I was
a little scared or tentative in the beginning
to go in and go like, oh my
gosh. Like, I have to build something. Like,
I'm so far gone from the days of,
like, coding things myself that, like, I would
need the help of this thing to do
it. But you can go in and you
can do things. Like, yeah, you'll burn some
context and some tokens to get it done,
but you can do things like go in
and say, like, hey.
I want to build a new skill that
does
this and this. Help me stub it out.
And then it'll actually go and create the
skill markdown file for you. It'll generally put
things together, and then you can go and
fill in the details, or you can iterate
on that. Because again, these things have access
to your local desktop, so it's just writing
out to markdown files and or
whatever kind of artifact that you have it
pushing out,
PowerPoint, for example, and having that
get to where it needs to be. So
it's very powerful,
and you can kind of walk this chain.
So when I started,
because I was coming over from Versus Code
land where I was living so much in
GitHub Copilot and kind of the agent chat
mode in Versus Code, I actually started by
bringing things over like my Copilot instructions.
Those were just directly translatable
to bringing them over as kind of like
a subset of instructions
and either a global set or like a
per project kind of set like you were
talking about
in Claude. And then the nice thing is,
if you start to get into some of
the other CLI ecosystems that are out there,
like let's say you are a GitHub Copilot
subscriber or using GitHub Copilot for free, there's
a GitHub Copilot CLI.
Works
very similar to the
Cloud Code CLI to the point where you
get an agents.md,
and you get skills, and you get plugins,
and you get MCP integrations.
It turns out Gemini is the same way.
So Gemini has a Gemini CLI as well.
So if you're a Gemini subscriber and you're
using that, or even if you're not a
subscriber and you're just using kinda like the
free versions of these, you can still tie
them in and get going with them. So
the funny thing is like Gemini CLI, like
it does a Gemini. Md
or Claude does like Claude. Md, things like
that when you're in Cloud Code. But if
you go into this ecosystem, like if you
go into something like GitHub Copilot CLI, GitHub
Copilot CLI respects claw. Md and gemini. Md
because it knows that you might be using
these things in, like, another ecosystem.
So it's super nifty, like, in in regard
to that and kind of being able to
tie this stuff together. So
if you are out there,
the other thing that's happened, like I said,
is like there's kind of portability between these
things, so you're not locked into one. Like,
you could start, like and I would encourage
somebody, like, if you haven't been hands on
in the terminal with one of these things
today,
go fire up probably Gemini CLI,
a nice easy one to get started with.
You can use Gemini fast,
the one that you get access to for
free. You don't have to pay anything. Kind
of play around with it a little bit,
set it up, see how far you get.
And if you get to the point where
you're like, oh, I wanna go try it
in Claude now, or you're a GitHub Copilot
subscriber, like I said, you can just kind
of bring it over and carry that context
and all these things with you. It's turned
out to be a very kind of powerful
ecosystem. And I find myself like this is
the weird thing to me, is I find
myself living in the CLI now
more than any of the other desktop experiences
that are out there. Like I
don't even open like M365
Copilot anymore, unless I really need to. Like,
I just try and do everything from, like,
in in my case, like, my work stuff,
like GitHub Copilot CLI,
or my personal stuff. It's a mix of
Gemini and Claw depending on what's going on.
It's interesting. I'm curious to see how
where Microsoft
goes with this because
the CLI, like you, I spend way more
time in the CLI. I have a lot
more flexibility
there with loading in different MCP servers.
And like you said, doing stuff with files
on my file system.
I would love to be able to do
some of the same stuff with Microsoft three
sixty five Copilot. Again, especially if it can
save me a $100 a month.
Indeed.
But right now, this it feels like a
huge gap and it's a huge limitation.
And because I'm in one or in the
CLI, I tend to just stay there. The
one thing I would say, like,
from a
Microsoft three sixty five Copilot comparing them, there's
still the security thing I think about too.
Right? Like,
working with client data or, in your case,
working with internal company data,
you do wanna be careful about pulling a
bunch of that out, throwing it up into
Quad or Gemini.
Your company may have restrictions around it. So
I think that's where I would love to
see Microsoft come out with some type of
alternative for this for
the m three sixty five Copilot version of
it, hopefully, before, in my opinion, they fall
too far behind on this particular aspect of
it. We can always talk about other aspects
of it too, but I'm with you. I
would at this point in time, I'd much
rather load a bunch of MCPs into my
CLI than just hang out in the CLI
all day. I've spent more time in the
terminal lately than ever before. Yeah. It's interesting.
I feel like I'm only a throwback to,
like, previous parts of my career, things like
that along the way.
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So I'm curious. Like, these tools are out
there. I think, like, they're they are very
accessible for folks. Like, if you're on a
Mac, you can use Homebrew, you can do
Winget installs. Like, they make it super easy
to to get this stuff spun up. So
if you are like, you wanna play with
it, I think that's easy enough to do.
You mentioned things like PowerPoint.
Is there, like, one business process or, like,
one thing that you've solved that's been
really,
like, really good for you? Like, I can
certainly describe one of my one of mine
in, like, my day to day, but I'm
curious,
like, what's the one thing that's out there
that you've done where it's like, oh, like,
this is a
real accelerator for me,
or it's, like, genuinely, like, augmenting
something else that was a lot of toil
and friction before. One is gonna be just
kind of a bucket. Writing PowerShell scripts, especially
commenting, error checking,
making them
complete rather than, like Making them pretty.
Yeah. Making them pretty and just making them,
I would say, much more functional and that
I can take it from client to client
because it's a whole lot easier to build
it out with a whole bunch of different
parameters and error checking and all of that
versus making them specific to a client and
then having to alter it every time I
go to another client.
That process has
gotten better.
The other one that I did this the
other day and
super nice.
I've I did some I've done some work
for clients where I go in and look
at their preparation for Copilot. I think we've
talked about this. That PowerShell script, it'll generate
like a CSV
for every single site that contains
URLs, sharing links, all of that. I was
doing a presentation at it down in Miami
this last weekend, and I'm like, damn, this
would be really nice to
show in the presentation,
but I can't share all of my client
data, usernames, UPNs,
potential
sensitive information where it's like, oh, this has
the site, any of that. Anyways, again, it
was a thousand CSVs.
I actually went into Cloud Code, again, because
it has access to the file system and
said, go look at this folder with all
these CSVs in it. Look for anything with
this client name, this client abbreviation,
anything that looks like it could potentially be
sensitive.
Go find all the usernames
and create a company. Make up a company
and change the company name to a fake
company name. Change all of the usernames to
fake usernames,
change all of
the FQDNs and all the usernames
to match the company you made up in
the URLs. And
it
what it ended up doing watching in the
CLI, it went in and created, like, five
or six different Python scripts
to go through and analyze all of these
files and update all of them. So it
essentially
anonymized
a thousand different CSV files
so that I felt comfortable using them in
a presentation.
And while there were, like, some site titles
that were specific to the company,
there was gonna be no way to tie
them back to who this company actually was.
So I was able to give real company
data, real data from real projects
that was completely anonymized,
I never would have spent the time to
go update a thousand CSVs even doing find
and replace Never.
Before this. So that was one of mine
the other day that was like, this was
it was awesome. It took maybe thirty or
forty minutes to generate everything, and I went
through a few iterations of, okay. Now go
review it again. Let's go make sure. Let's
go
look for these the spellings. And then I
just ask it, do you see anything else
in there that looks potentially sensitive? And it
would maybe come back with a couple other
things. So it was a conversation,
and it still took an hour, but doing
that manually would have taken, like, a day
Yeah. At least. You mentioned there was another
one as well? Well and then the PowerShell
scripts. Gotcha. Gotcha. It was those two. Alright.
PowerShell scripts and then anonymizing
data have been two of the big ones.
Probably two of the bigger ones, bigger time
savings. Let me talk a little bit maybe
about, like, some of the ones I'm doing,
which are helping me augment business process.
So
the nice thing about LLMs
is
they're very tuned around passing in text, like
things like markdown.
So
I do a lot of
Kusto queries in my day to day job,
and I'm working with various databases.
So one thing is, like, what's the schema
of that database and its tables? Like, what's
the actual schema of the tables, and what
does those represent?
So we
we document those things as we build them
out. We document them in markdown. They go
in a they they go in one of
our internal wikis. So I just went into
that wiki, which is all markdown at the
end of the day. I pulled out that
subset of markdown files that said, here's the
documented schema
for table x, table y, table zed, right,
to, like, walking down the thing. And then
I built a custom agent around that understands
the schema of those things. So when I'm
talking to the Kusto MCP,
the fabric MCP that integrates with Kusto and
all that,
it knows
that when it's talking to this database and
it's interacting with this database, here's the schema
of all these things that are out there.
So that's super powerful. It knows that this
column is this name, and this is a
string. This one's a GUID. Here's what the
GUID represents. Here's the relationship of this GUID,
this identifier maybe to, like, another table so
we can do joins and things the right
way. So that's super cool. Kusto, if you
go out and you just read the documentation,
there's a public Microsoft doc out there that
says, here's all the best practices for Kusto.
Again, Microsoft documentation for learn is just a
markdown file. So if you go out to
the GitHub repo, which is public, you just
grab that markdown file, bring it over, pull
it into your agent. Oh, hey. Now my
agent knows not only the schema, but it
knows the public best practices.
Well, let me augment that with my best
practices. So when I'm doing things like converting,
a summary of bytes to
gibibytes
to megibytes to pebibytes, whatever it happens to
be, I always want that conversion to be
done in this way, not this way kind
of thing. Or when you're doing joins, always
make sure you're including, like, hint dot strategy
equals shuffle. So I've got this whole set
of things that are out there now where
before, like, going in and writing Kusto queries
sometimes was, like, a lot of ways of,
like, just friction because I would have to
go pull up, like, oh, what's the scheme
of that table? How do I do the
join? What's going on? So now I've got
this just little agent out there that I
can go and fire up quickly in Copilot
CLI, and I can say, hey,
agent
at blah blah blah,
go run,
this query for me. Go find me the
top whatever by petabytes in region x y
z. So that that's super cool and super
powerful.
The other one that's out there that I've
done is there's an MCP server for Azure
DevOps. Ops. So you mentioned things like Asana
and kinda work item management, Notion, things like
that. So I live in ADO for a
lot of my work item management.
I've got epics and features and tasks and
all sorts of things out there. Same thing.
We publish a set of guidance internally, like,
for our PMs to say, hey. Here's the
way your epics should be structured. Here's how
they should be named. Here's, like, the set
of best practices.
So I can take the ADOMCP,
and I can take that markdown file that
already exists as, like, internal documentation. Like, hey.
So let me plunk this down and and
plunk it down and create an agent around
this that is now my ADO agent, which
knows my best practices. It knows my business
process. Hey. Go through and grab all my
epics that are in this iteration path or
this area path that are assigned to me
or where I'm the PM owner for them,
and make sure that they adhere to the
best practices. Flag the ones that don't. What
do you think? Like, what are some suggestions
that I can improve and and make those
better? And those are two things that
I could absolutely do on my own, but
they're so much better just having a thing
there that can kinda constantly check them for
me. It's almost like having a set of,
like, unit tests that I can run on
top of everything every time, but I'm not
running unit tests against code that I've written.
I'm running unit tests against business process or
or other things that are out there. That's
been just a,
a super cool one
to go through and have come together.
And then you can start to combine these
things. Like, I can take the ADO MCP
and the WorkIQ MCP
plus that agent or plus that skill or
that plug in or whatever I've written out
and have it come together and do what
it needs to do. So you can get
started with this stuff, like, super quick. Like
I said, if you work with maybe like
a Microsoft technology, be it something in Azure
or m three sixty five, maybe what you
can do is go out to GitHub, pull
the markdown for, like, maybe like a feature
area that you're interested, things like that, bring
that markdown locally for you, put it in
a directory,
and then go and fire up one of
these tools. Go fire up Cloud Code, go
fire up Copilot CLI, go fire up Gemini
CLI, go into that directory,
and they all work the same. So once
you've got like a bunch of context in
there or artifacts, you can fire off a
slash init,
and slash init will go ahead and initialize
effectively like a project in that directory for
you, where then it can start to contextualize,
and you can start to, like, build out
those agents or skills or plugins
or whatever you need to do
just rapidly.
So it's been really cool on that side,
and maybe one of the other things that
I've been doing I don't know if you've
done this at all. I've been playing around
more with
the dictation engines that are out there and
just being able to, like, dictate straight in.
So even rather than me typing a lot
of this stuff, I can just hit a
set of hot keys on my keyboard, and
all of a sudden, I can just start
talking into the terminal and have it figure
out my gibberish
and come back the other way.
It's starting to get really weird and wonky
out there. I've thought about the voice. I
haven't done it a ton yet.
I should play with it more. I won't
lie. Part of the problem is I also
have family at home, and as soon as
they hear me talking to my computer or
Siri, all of a sudden, well, I'm crazy
or I hear them from the background start
yelling a bunch of gibberish to try to
mess me up. And I'm like, come on,
guys. Like, stop.
My work Siri just started going. So I
haven't done that. I wanna do that. I
would say when you were talking about that,
the other example I had just super quick,
I had a client the other day that
wanted to know some about
a particular event that happened in their tenant,
their Microsoft three sixty five tenant. They didn't
have Sentinel, so all we had was, Microsoft
three sixty five, like, the audit log, the
unified audit log. You can go in and
export that, but have you ever do you
remember looking at an export of the unified
audit log? It's just column after column of
It's not even that. It's five columns of
usable information
or say four or five followed by a
last column that's, like, data, and it's a
massive
JSON string because all of these different events,
to your point earlier about schemas, have different
schemas.
So I went in and downloaded one around
this event, like, four hour block. This user
exported
a 8,000 line CSV
with all this gibberish. I said, go take
the CSV,
parse the JSON and the last end, and
recreate
a adequately formatted CSV.
It turned six columns into a 197
columns in the CSV.
Then I had to go in and duplicate
it because I also found out in this
some of the schemas don't use the same
headers. One of them will use IP address,
one will use client IP address. Stupid stuff
like that. Claude actually separated stuff out based
on case sensitivity, so I had to combine
some where the case was
cases were different.
But then I was able to go in
once I had all that done. I was
able to have a whole conversation with Claude
about, okay, find IP addresses that are uncommon
in here, find
activities where a bunch of files were downloaded
that maybe look suspicious, or go look and
see if there were any mail rules created
in here.
And instead of
writing KQL
or going through and
analyzing this manually,
I let Claude code
have the first pass or maybe I didn't
regular Claude. I can't remember. I let AI
have the first pass at it to help
me
drill down to what information I might be
looking for, things I wanna go look at
a little bit closer. I find Claude in
particular is very good at
even if you ask it a basic question,
it always comes back with a little bit
of more, but not in
the chat GPT way, which is very, I
think, just over the top, sometimes,
like, sycophantic, right, where it's, like, it's gotta,
like, bleed in and say, like, oh, hey.
Like, great job.
We're all ready to go. Like, I can
do things, like, any for example, with, like,
the Cousteau stuff that I do, very similar.
Like, I'm just querying off, trying to figure
out, like, hey. Give me give me, like,
a table back, and give me some columns
that are summarized and things like that. But
it's also, like, good at just saying and
it because it's so enterprise oriented, I think,
over things
like Copilot,
where it comes back and it just kinda
says, oh, hey. Here's the data you wanted,
and here's some insights about that data. Can
I tell you more, or would you like
to dig in more? Which is very different
than, you know, I think my experiences in
Copilot or things where, like, yeah, it'll come
back and it'll say, like, do you want
more? But usually, do you want more is
something that's gonna, like, break down horribly or
not generally work as part of the process.
Yeah. I would agree. I feel like
interactions
in Claude,
from my experience,
tend to feel more, I would say, conversational
in terms of that back and forth to
get to where you wanna be. So I
think TLDR. If you are somebody who's out
there and you're using the
desktop versions of
Claude, ChatGPT,
whatever it happens to be, there are these
CLI experiences,
and the CLIs, I think, tie together a
set of capabilities. Like, if you are working
with local files, local folders,
you have
just kind of
you wanna publish, like, hard guidance through instructions,
things like that.
Build a custom agent, which has like I
said, it's a markdown file. It's not like
it's not like you're going in there and
writing code. It's a markdown file with header
one, header two, header three, just formatted in
a way that shows, hey. Here's how you
can do things, or here's how I want
you to execute this piece of code. Like,
you can go into an agent or a
skill, and you can actually define, like, code
blocks. You can say, like, oh, this is
PowerShell, or this is Bash, and it'll go
ahead. It'll figure it out. It'll run it
and do what it needs to do. So
I would encourage folks, like, if you haven't,
get hands on with this. And then back
to your earlier call out, like, if you
are using this stuff and you found an
interesting way to use it, we'd love to
hear it and hear more about,
what you're all doing with it. I found
it to be,
like, genuinely one of those things about AI
that is
helpful in my day to day job. I've
been struggling there a little bit with Copilot
lately, where this is M365
Copilot rather. So this has kind of reignited
a bunch of things for me, and it's
helpful in my world. You mentioned the things
about, like, boundaries and internal versus external data.
Like, if I'm doing something like iterating
on
writing PowerShell scripts or bash scripts or KQL,
things like that, There's all this public documentation.
Just go out and pull that stuff down.
Like, that's all it's all you're doing is
saying, like, hey. I wanna teach this thing
to help me be better
through the use of public artifacts and things
like that. It's it's super cool. I'm having
a ton of fun doing it, and it's
not like, oh, this is just, like, geeking
out. Like, it's genuinely helping me in my
day to day job. Yeah. And don't let
the I would say following up with that,
don't let the code I'm putting it in
their codes. The code part of all these
scare you away because
that kept me away for a little bit
because it was Claude code or it was
Visual Studio GitHub or it's Gemini code or
it's all of these. It's like,
no. I use this for way more than
code and just because it says code, you
don't need to use it for code and
you don't have to be a developer or
a coder to use the CLI version. It's
just another way
to leverage these AI engines.
And from my perspective, they it's easier to
access files on your file system through the
CLI too versus the,
desktop
UI client based ones. So don't let the
code label on these scare you away from
trying them out and using them. They are
super approachable
at the end of the day. I've actually
been impressed with things like just copy paste
from, like, like, raw text into the terminal,
things like that. Like, they they all of
these CLI tools have done a very good
job,
with being able to wrap this stuff together
and that experience. So,
yeah, I think super cool stuff. Probably, as
say, let's revisit it in a couple months
and see what else is out there. The
AI train continues to March,
and,
we'll continue to use it in our day
to day roles here. Yeah. It'll be different
a month from now. So Probably. I am.
I'm curious to see where it goes over
this course of 2026.
So with that, I should probably go to
a meeting that I just told everybody I'd
be right there for.
There you go. Back to work. Yeah. Right.
It never stops. Alright. Well, thanks, Scott. Appreciate
it. That was a fun conversation.
I back to terminal days. Let's just get
rid of the UI. Let's just go back
to pure terminal days. Yeah. Everything's gonna be
ASCII art. We're gonna love it. Absolutely. Oh,
I haven't asked Claude to create ASCII art.
Have you tried that? I have not. But
maybe next time we chat, you can let
me know how your experiment goes. Yep. Takeaway,
test. See what we can create with ASCII
art between this podcast and the next. Alright.
Perfect. Thanks, Ben. Have fun. Thanks, Scott. Talk
to you later.
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