One Account Setting Shut Down His Whole Agency

My client's agency stopped operating last week because he set up an account wrong.

He'd burned through his claude credits, and every automation he built stopped running until he had more to use.

He spent the whole evening refreshing that page, anxious, with nothing to do but wait — because everything he'd built lived inside a tool he doesn't control.

Moving him to a max plan that charges on usage was a ten-minute fix. The insight took longer:

He was structurally set up for failure. You probably are too.

If you already know how to host your skills in the cloud and work out of a temrinal, skip this one.

If your team doesn't know what a terminal is or where your skills actually live, forward this to them.

Step 1: Get out of the app and into a terminal

The rest of what I told him takes longer, starting with this: he shouldn't be operating out of Claude.

He should be working out of a terminal — either the one built into VS Code or the native terminal on his Mac or Windows.

A terminal is a text window where you type commands straight to your computer instead of clicking through someone else's interface.

Mac ships with Terminal. Windows ships with PowerShell and Windows Terminal. VS Code has one built in.

It's the layer underneath every AI tool you've been using, and it doesn't belong to any vendor.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Anthropic and OpenAI can change pricing, limits, features, or their names. The terminal doesn't change.

Step 2: Host your skills, workflows, and agents in the cloud

Your skills and workflows should live in the cloud.

They should not live in Claude. They should not live in Codex.

Over the next 24 months a lot is going to change, and my strongest recommendation is to stay AI fluid.

You need to be able to pick up your stuff and move it to another model if the landscape shifts. If you can't, you're paying an opportunity cost every month you stay put.

When your skills, workflows, and agents are hosted in the cloud, three things become true at once:

• You can call on them from anywhere.

• You can call on them from any model.

• Your entire team can call on them too.

That last one is what matters most for an agency owner. Your team stops depending on your account, your login, and your credits.

Want help implementing this in your agency? Book time here to learn more

Step 3: Watch what's coming next

Over the next six to twelve months, a wave of Silicon Valley startups is going to ship credible, vetted solutions for exactly this.

Store your skills, agents, and workflows in the cloud, then call them into whatever model you're using.

The side benefit: you stop stuffing your whole knowledge base into a chat every time you want to do work.

You call the one piece you need.

Step 4: Work from the terminal, call from the cloud

This is where the two halves connect.

Once your knowledge base is hosted and you're operating from a terminal, you can:

• Prompt a skill.

• Prompt an agent.

• Prompt a workflow in your cloud knowledge base.

Same commands, any model, any machine, any team member.

Final Thought

What we're using right now

My team and I use GitHub for our own skills and for our clients' skills. It's the best available answer today. When a SaaS tool comes out that we fully vet and trust to host these things, we'll migrate.

That's the whole point of building this way. When something better shows up, moving is a decision, not a rebuild.

If you want us to set this up for your agency — terminal workflow, cloud skill library, the whole stack — book a call here.

👋🏼 Whenever you are ready, we can help you:

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The systems we build protect retention, lift margins, and get you out of the day-to-day.

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