Hire your butler properly

What you’ll do: start Butler’s setup guide in Claude Code. Claude checks what your first two minutes set up, then asks about the rest of your household.

Steps

1. Open Claude Code in your butler’s folder. In Terminal, type butler claude and press Return. (If Claude Code is already open, use it.)
2. Type this, exactly, and press Return:

3. The slash at the start makes it a command. It starts Butler’s setup guide, instructions that come with Butler. Claude now knows exactly what to ask and what to do.
4. Claude reads what Module 0 set up and repeats it back: your butler’s name, your town and the adults. Correct anything that’s wrong.
5. Then it asks a few questions, a couple at a time. Answer in your own words:
   • Everyone else whose plans matter: children, a nanny, a carer, a grandparent who stays over. First names only.
   • Nicknames. If Alexandra is “Alex” in the calendar, or Mia’s swimming is written “M swim”, say so. Your butler uses these to work out whose event is whose.
   • Celsius or Fahrenheit, if Claude asks.
6. Claude writes everything to your butler’s settings file, config/settings.yaml, and runs a quick check.

What you’ll do: tell Claude which news you want in the morning brief: your local paper first, then the wider world.

Your butler reads news from feeds, lists of headlines that newspapers publish for programs like Butler to read. Each paper has its own. Claude finds them for you.

Steps

1. In Claude Code, still in the setup guide (or say “Let’s set up my news”), tell Claude your local paper. For example:

2. Claude searches for the feed, checks it really works, and tells you how many headlines it found. If your paper has no feed, Claude suggests a nearby one.
3. Tell Claude the language you’d like summaries written in, if it’s not English. From Module 4, Claude summarises stories in that language, even when the paper is in another one.
4. Ask Claude to show you the brief again, so you can see the change:

What you’ll do: look at the brief again, now that your butler knows everyone.

Steps

1. In Claude Code, say:

2. Claude runs ./run.sh preview, and your web browser opens the brief. (Outside Claude Code, butler brief in Terminal does the same.)
3. Look for:
   • Your butler’s name at the top, and good morning to your adults.
   • Today’s weather for your town.
   • Your local news first, then the wider world.
   • The “not connected yet” note at the bottom: your calendar, your to-dos and your money. Modules 3 to 7 connect them.

What you’ll do: learn how to change anything about your butler, any time, by asking.

Your butler’s behaviour lives in settings, not in its programming. That means you can change it by saying what you want. Claude finds the right setting and changes it for you, and shows you what it did.

Try a few

Paste one or two of these into Claude Code, or say it your own way:

You can also rename your butler from Terminal: butler name "Penny".

What you’ll do: take a quick look inside the Butler folder, so it never feels mysterious.

Steps

1. In Finder, open the Butler folder in your home folder.
2. In Claude Code, ask for a tour:

What you’ll find

Folder	What’s in it
config	Your butler’s settings, including the file you just made. Yours alone.
data, out, logs	What your butler remembers, the briefs it made, and its diary of what happened. Yours alone.
src, bin, scripts	The program itself, including the butler command you used in Module 0. The same for everyone.
docs	Butler’s manual.
examples	The invented Rivera family, used until your own information exists.

Your own information never leaves this folder, except to the services you connect yourself, such as Claude in Module 4 and Gmail in Module 5. It’s never uploaded to us or to GitHub.