The Tack
Roomwhere the work actually happens
The building where the gear hangs ready, the workbench is, and the horse can finally be put to work. Today we go inside and fit it out.
By the end of today you will have the editor installed, you will know the three parts of the screen worth looking at, and the black panel will have stopped being frightening.
Presented by Emile du Toit
brainitconsulting.com
Last session made the argument. Today we act on it.
- The chat window has a ceiling. It cannot see your files, nothing persists, and you are the one carrying everything back and forth.
- A file is a thing with a name and contents. A folder is a box holding files.
- One folder, one job. Draw a line round the work, and that line is the boundary everything else depends on.
You were asked to make one folder with something real in it. If you did, open it now. If you didn't, make one in the next two minutes — any folder, any two files.
Contents
- The tack roomWhat an editor actually is.
- Three things you'll actually look atIgnore the rest of the screen.
- Talking to the stableThe terminal, gently.
- What can go wrong in hereAlmost nothing. And the one thing that can.
- Before the next sessionTwenty minutes at your own kitchen table.
Then the questions this always raises, the glossary so far, and the picture to photograph.
The tack room
A window onto that folder. Not a place where you type code.
The thing everyone installs at this point is called a code editor, and the name puts people off before they have seen it. Nearly all of them use one called VS Code. Free, made by Microsoft, and despite the name you are not going to be writing code in it.
What it actually is: a single window that shows you one folder, everything in it, and gives the assistant somewhere to stand. That is why it is the tack room. It is not where the work is done — the horse does the work. It is where you can see all the gear at once, reach any of it, and watch what is being taken off the wall.
You could do all of this without ever opening it. People do. But then you are trusting the assistant's account of what it did, instead of looking. Opening the tack room means you can see the shelf it just changed.
You will not be typing code. You will be typing sentences, in English, in a panel — the same as you typed into the chat window last session. The difference is that the sentences now land in a room where the horse can reach the gear.
Three things you'll actually look at
The screen has about forty things on it. You need three, and a fourth you'll barely touch.
The first time you open it, the window looks busy in a way that makes people close it again. Almost all of it is for professional programmers and you can ignore it permanently. Here are the three regions that matter, and what each one is for.
Number three is where the work gets asked for, and it should look familiar — it is the same back-and-forth you had in a browser last session, moved into the room with your files. That dark strip along the bottom is the part that frightens people, so it gets its own chapter.
Talking to the stable
The black box with the blinking cursor. It's a doorway, not a test.
The dark panel along the bottom is called the terminal, and it has an unearned reputation. If you have ever seen a film where somebody types furiously into a black screen, this is that, and it is nothing like that.
Notice what happened this morning: I did the entire job in the assistant panel on the right and never touched the black one. That is normal. You could work this way for months. So it is worth being straight about what the terminal is actually for, rather than leaving it as the scary part of the screen.
It is a place where you type an instruction and press enter. That is all it is. Where the panel on the right talks to the horse, the terminal talks to the stable itself — the computer, directly, without any buttons in the way. Installing things, checking things, starting things: that is its job, and it is a job you will need perhaps once a month.
Worth getting straight, because we use all three. The stable is your computer — the whole building. The tack room is one room inside it: the folder you are working in, with your gear in it. The horse lives in neither. It lives down the road at the company that built it, and comes when you call.
That last part is the one worth remembering. Nothing you own is inside the model, which is why the folder you choose is the boundary that matters.
These are the ones I use in front of you, and they are a fair sample of what the terminal is for — asking the computer about the software you have, rather than doing the work itself.
claude --version — tells you which version of the assistant you have. Useful when something behaves oddly, or when instructions you read online assume a newer one.
claude --update — checks whether there is a newer version and installs it if there is. If you are already current it says so and does nothing.
Those two are a fair sample of what the terminal is for. You are not commanding the machine to do your work; you are asking after its health.
Why that pair, out of everything? Because this software changes every week or two, and almost every "it worked yesterday and not today" turns out to be a version behind. Knowing how to check and how to update is most of keeping the thing healthy, and it takes ten seconds.
Two things that help enormously and nobody mentions. It cannot read your mind, so it will complain about a typo rather than guess — that is not you failing, that is it being careful. And you can paste into it, so nobody is expecting you to type long things accurately.
You are not being tested by the black box. You are opening a door and calling the horse in.
What can go wrong in here
Much less than you fear. And one thing worth respecting.
People move slowly at this point because it feels like a room where you could break something expensive. Mostly you cannot. A folder is a folder. Opening one, looking in it, closing it again is about as dangerous as opening a filing cabinet.
Things that are not the risk
- Typing the wrong thing in the terminal. Almost always it just says it doesn't understand and waits.
- Clicking the wrong part of the editor. The worst case is a panel you didn't want, which closes.
- Looking at a file. Looking changes nothing.
- Not understanding most of the screen. Nobody understands most of that screen.
The one that is
The assistant can change and delete files, inside the folder you opened it in. That is what it is for — and it is also the only genuine hazard in this room. If it edits your rate card and gets it wrong, the old rate card is gone, in the same way it would be gone if you overwrote it yourself.
There is a proper answer to this, and we get to it in session seven: a way of keeping every previous version of everything, forever, so any mistake becomes a matter of stepping back rather than starting again. Until then, the boring version below works fine.
- Work on copies. Copy the rate card into the project folder. Leave the original where it lives.
- Never open an assistant in your whole Documents folder. One job, one folder. That is what last session was for.
- Read what it says before you say yes. It tells you what it is about to change. That sentence is not decoration.
- Nothing irreplaceable, not yet. Not the only copy of anything.
Before the next session
Twenty minutes at your own table, at your own pace.
Next time the lids come up and we all work along together. That goes well if everyone arrives with the room already built, and badly if we spend the first hour installing things on twelve different laptops. So here is the homework, and it is genuinely twenty minutes.
- Install VS Code. Search for "VS Code download", take the one from Microsoft, and accept every default it offers you.
- Make a folder called
tack-roomsomewhere you can find it again. Your desktop is a perfectly good place. - Open that folder in VS Code. File, then Open Folder, then pick it. The window will look empty, because it is.
- Find the three regions from chapter two. Files on the left, the big pane, and the dark strip along the bottom. If you can point at all three, you are ready.
- Put one real file in it. Drag in a copy of something from your own business — a price list, a standard reply, anything you would not mind an assistant reading.
- Stop there. That is all you need to do. Do not install anything else, and do not go looking for the assistant yet.
Everything from every session lives in a public folder on the internet, with a marker for the start and end of each workshop. If step three defeats you at half past nine on a Tuesday, you can go and look at exactly what your screen was supposed to look like, and pick it up from there. It is at github.com/brainit-consulting/ai-workshops — pick end-of-004 from the dropdown, then the green Code button and Download ZIP. Nobody is counting who uses it.
Questions people actually ask
The ones that come up once the software is on the screen.
I already tried this and closed it because it looked terrifying.
Everybody does. The screen is built for somebody else.
That first screen is designed for professional programmers and shows you everything it can do, which is the opposite of helpful. Chapter two is the antidote: three regions, ignore the rest. Open it again with that page next to you and it shrinks to a manageable size.
Mac or Windows?
Both stables have the same gear in them.
Either. Everything in this session works on both, and the buttons are in slightly different places, which is the only complication. If you have a choice, bring whichever machine you actually use for the business — the point is to end up with your real work in the room.
What does this cost?
The tack room is free. The horse still eats.
VS Code is free. The folder is free. The assistant that works in it is the same subscription we talked about last time, around twenty dollars a month, and it still eats sugar cubes by the token. Nothing in today's homework costs anything at all.
Plain words
Everything the series has named so far. Today's are marked.
This list grows every session and always shows the lot, so you never need last week's handout to read this week's.
- Large language model (LLM) 001
- The engine that predicts the next word. The horse.
- GPT 001
- Generative — it makes new text rather than looking up a stored answer. Pre-trained — all its learning happened in advance. Transformer — the design of the machinery underneath. A breed name, not a job title.
- Knowledge cutoff 001
- The date its training stopped. It knows nothing after it, and doesn't know that it doesn't. The last day the horse was out in the world.
- Prompt 001
- What you type. A pull on the reins.
- Chatbot 001
- A model you can talk to, turn by turn. Horse plus bridle.
- System prompt / instructions 001
- Standing orders sent with every message, whether you type them or not. The saddle.
- Context window 001
- How much of the conversation it can hold at once. How far it can see on this ride.
- Token 001
- A chunk of a word — how length is counted, and how you're billed. Sugar cubes.
- Hallucination 001
- Making something up and sounding certain. Shying at a shed snakeskin.
- Tool 002
- A specific action it's allowed to take in the real world. A saddlebag.
- MCP 002
- An agreed standard for plugging tools into a model. Standard-size buckles.
- Agent 002
- A model given a goal, tools, and permission to keep going. A working horse, not a show pony.
- Agentic loop 002
- Look, decide, act, check, repeat. The ride itself.
- Human in the loop 002
- A person approves before something real happens. A hand on the reins.
- Automation 002
- The same work happening without you starting it each time. The horse knows the route.
- File 003
- A thing with a name and contents. A single piece of gear.
- Folder (directory) 003
- A box holding files, and sometimes other folders. A shelf.
- Project 003
- One folder holding one job's worth of everything. The room, with the door shut.
- Path 003
- The written address of a file — which boxes it sits inside. Directions to the shelf.
- Editor (VS Code) 004
- A window showing you one folder and everything in it. The tack room.
- Terminal 004
- A panel where you type an instruction to the computer directly. Talking to the stable itself.
- Install 004
- Putting a program on your own machine, once. Building the room.
Everything on one page
Photograph this before you go.
1 · One folder, one job
From last session. The line round the work.
2 · The tack room
Files left, work in the middle, where you talk to it beside.
3 · The terminal
A door, not a test. Two commands and you are done.
4 · The working horse
It comes into the room and starts opening gates.
And you still hold the reins. The room does not make the horse cleverer — it just means you stop being the one carrying buckets.
#005 — The Horse That Opens Gates
You have the room. Next time the horse walks into it and starts picking things up — reading your files, writing new ones, running things. The important half of that session is what it does before every single change: it stops at the gate and waits for you.
Before you come: finish the twenty-minute setup above. Next session assumes the editor opens.
I do this for a living, and love to help people.
Thirty-plus years in enterprise software and a computer science degree — which mostly means I have watched a great many horses bolt, and I can usually tell you which ones are worth saddling before you spend money on the saddle.
In person
Your team, your room, your actual work on the whiteboard instead of somebody else's examples.
Over video
The same session, at your desks, with fewer chairs to stack afterwards.
Built for real
When the idea survives the workshop and somebody has to go and build the thing — that part I do too.
Fun fact — I rode to school on horseback as a kid in South Africa. So the metaphor isn't borrowed. I've done the falling off in person.
Emile du Toit brainitconsulting.com
Workshop #004 · Inside the Tack Room
© 2026 Emile du Toit, BrainIT Consulting
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