# The Connector & Automation Cheat-Sheet

*Print this. Keep it by your keyboard. It's the whole approach to connecting and automating on one
page.*

## You are the architect. Claude is the team.
You own the goal, decide what connects, grant the access, and hold the standards. Claude does the
hands-on wiring. You keep your hand on the switch — nothing connects without your say-so, and
nothing acts on the world without a checkpoint where you approve it.

## One path in: MCP, the universal adapter
Every connection to an outside service — a documents source, a calendar, mail, a business app —
runs through **MCP (the universal adapter)**. There's one integration path, not a maze. You add a
connection one of three ways: through Claude Code's command line, through the visual Connectors
area in the desktop app, or by editing a small `.mcp.json` settings file. You confirm and sign in
when prompted. *The exact screens change often — the current walkthrough with screenshots is in the
Companion Pack download.*

## Weigh before you wire
Before any connection, ask: *Is the value high enough, and the blast radius small enough, that I'd
do this with my eyes open?* The **blast radius** is how far the damage would reach in the worst
case. Small radius + high value + low sensitivity → yes. Large radius + sensitive data for a thin
convenience → no, or not yet.

## The connect-safely order
1. **Read-only first.** Connect so Claude can *see* but not change or send. It's the one move that
   shrinks almost any connection's worst case while you learn to trust it.
2. **Least privilege.** Grant the smallest key that works — one folder, not the whole drive; read,
   not read-and-act. *The scope you grant is the blast radius you accept.*
3. **Approve on first use.** The first time a connection is used, Claude asks. Read the request;
   approve deliberately.
4. **Watch it behave, then widen.** Only after a connection has proven itself do you consider
   letting it do more.

## Where secrets live (a secret is a house key — never tape it to the door)
Any key, password, or credential goes in the connection's **settings/config** — never typed into a
prompt or a chat message. Tell Claude, in plain words, to put the key in config and never ask you
to paste one. If a step ever wants you to paste a secret into the conversation, stop.

## The automation ladder (honest — there's no one-click native scheduler)
Climb only as high as the job needs. Each rung draws from your usage pool (see claude.com/pricing).

1. **In-session, multi-step.** Claude already does many steps in one go when you ask. The simplest
   automation is a good, complete request.
2. **A Skill (a saved recipe).** Turn a routine you repeat into a re-runnable recipe you invoke by
   name. The durable "make it repeatable" move.
3. **A scheduled run.** Genuinely unattended runs are set up through the mechanisms that actually
   exist — some cloud-based, some on your own computer, some event-driven (for example: cloud
   Routines, a desktop scheduled task, your computer's own scheduler, or GitHub Actions). *The
   current setup for each is in the Companion Pack.* Start with the smallest interval that works,
   supervised, and do a dry run first.

## The send-safely gate
Anything with an outward effect — a message, a file, a post, a change to a record — is *prepared*
automatically and then **stops for your approval before it acts**. Prepare by machine; act by hand.
Send it to yourself first. A wrong thing *prepared* is harmless; a wrong thing *sent* is the case
to design against.

## Keep it safe and cheap
Give every automation a **kill switch** you know how to reach, keep an eye on cost, and read the
run log now and then. Something running on its own deserves a switch you can find fast — because
knowing you can stop everything is what makes it safe to let anything run at all.

## When it misbehaves
Ask **"what changed?"** before "how do I fix it?" **Pause the automation first.** Diagnose calmly —
usually it's a connection that quietly expired, a schedule set in two places, or an input that
shifted. Restore from a save point if a fix gets tangled. You always have the restore.

## The Book 4 boundary
Everything here stays **simple and supervised** — one connection, one automation, a human in the
loop. Larger orchestrated systems and specialist helpers that run bigger jobs on their own are
Book 4, *Advanced Systems* — not something to bolt on here. *Buttons change; principles don't.*