The Missing Manual Show

In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas teach you how to build an AI workflow for any repetitive task by working through a real example in real time. They use their own podcast production process as the case study, but the framework they walk through applies to almost anything clunky and manual that drains hours from your week. The three moves are simple: follow the friction, map the process, reverse engineer it with AI and automation.

Julia and JCK make the case that the real skill in working with AI is not picking one perfect tool, it's knowing when to use best-in-class for a specific gap and when good-enough all-in-one is the smarter call. Julia brings the operator's lens from her work in talent acquisition leadership, where she's evaluated this exact tradeoff with talent technology. JCK reframes the conversation around systems thinking, pushing listeners to zoom out from the specific use case and look at the underlying pattern they can copy.

A through-line of the episode is keeping the human in the loop on purpose. AI tools still produce odd outputs, hands with extra fingers, faces that drift across ethnicities, so the hosts are designing their workflow to let AI generate a slate of options while a human makes the final call. It's a practical model for anyone who wants to use AI without handing over judgment.

This is the kickoff of a multi-part series on The Missing Manual where Julia and JCK build the workflow live, including the stumbles. If you have a repetitive task at work or at home that is ripe for automation, this episode gives you the framework to start on it today.

Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.

"Hope is not a strategy."

If your desktop is a sea of icons and your Downloads folder is a graveyard of unnamed PDFs, this episode is for you. Julia and JCK dive into a practical, day-to-day use case for AI that goes beyond the hype: digital organization.

In this episode, we document the process of turning digital chaos into a streamlined system. We discuss the shift from "manual" organization to "agentic" workflows, where the AI doesn't just give you a template, it co-creates a methodology with you.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

Why "mowing the grass" is the best metaphor for digital maintenance.

How to use Claude Co-work to audit your hard drive and flag duplicates.

The difference between "chasing best practices" and building a system that fits your specific brain (The "One Size Fits One" approach).

How to stop wasting mental calories on file management and start "capacity enabling" your work week.

Resources Mentioned:

Claude Co-work

The "Grass Mowing" Prompt (Check our YouTube for the screen share!)

Connect with us: Follow Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas on LinkedIn for more "Strategy, Not Hacks" and AI-driven insights. Don’t forget to subscribe to The Missing Manual on YouTube to see the live demos!

In this episode of The Missing Manual, JCK and Julia Levy go "under the hood" of their own AI experiments to discuss what happens when the tech fails to meet your standards. From Julia’s frustrating experience cloning her voice to JCK’s "agentic design" approach, they break down why AI is a "one-size-fits-one" solution.

They explore the "Step Zero" of process mapping, the power of handoff documents, and why you should treat different LLMs (Claude vs. ChatGPT vs. Gemini) like specialized team members rather than a single source of truth.

THE BREAKDOWN:

[00:00] Intro: The Missing Manual for TA leaders and practitioners.

[01:06] Julia’s Use Case: Building a Talent Intelligence web app and the frustration of "bad" AI voice clones.

[02:15] Defining "Good": Why AI reverse-engineers the wrong results without established guardrails.

[03:15] The Golden Rule: Don’t use AI to automate a broken process (Stop making "better bad processes").

[04:36] Model Switching: When to use Gemini vs. Claude vs. ChatGPT for specific tasks.

[09:31] The "Learning Out Loud" Community: Curating your own AI news pulse.

[11:18] Beyond Business: How Julia used AI to plan a multi-generational family trip to Moab, Utah.

[15:54] The "Challenge Me" Prompt: How to stop your AI from being a "Yes-Man."

[19:39] Final Summary: The critical role of Handoff Documents in grounding your AI.

Tired of your AI losing the plot mid-conversation? Learn why Agentic AI requires Handoff Documents to prevent hallucinations and maximize your token usage in Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT.

As we move further into the era of Agentic AI, the biggest hurdle isn't the AI's capability, it's its memory. In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and JCK (Jenny Cotie Kangas) break down the "handoff" workflow. We explore how AI weights the end of long conversations more heavily than the initial guardrails, often leading to "side quests" and errors.

Whether you are building custom agents for home improvement or managing complex HTML coding projects, a Handoff Document acts as a strategic SOP for AI. It captures model numbers, root causes, and version history, allowing you to "collect the dots" and restart fresh without losing progress.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

• The technical "hockey stick" effect of AI credit usage.

00:00 Intro: The Missing Manual Part 3

01:15 What is a Handoff Document in Agentic AI?

02:30 Why Claude and GPT-4o "forget" your instructions

04:00 Julia’s secret to stopping Gemini hallucinations

06:15 LIVE DEMO: Building a Handoff Doc for home repairs

09:45 The "How would you improve this?" power-prompt

12:30 Organizing your AI Handoffs: Folders vs. Trackers

15:00 Why your business needs AI SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures)

20:00 How to share AI context with your team

21:00 Final Tips: When to hit the "restart" button

In Part 2 of our Agentic AI series, we get tactical. Julia and JCK discuss the Brand Voice Artifact—a project designed to ensure AI never misses your tone, style, or specific "guardrails" again.

We explore how Julia used her book, transcripts, and frameworks to create a custom "Gem" in Gemini that acts as her professional voice clone, and how JCK uses "Usage Guardrails" to push back on the AI when it gets too generic.

What you’ll learn today:

• How to collect 'The Dots' (transcripts, writing samples) for your AI.

Are you just putting AI on top of a broken process? In the premiere of our 3-part Agentic AI series, Julia and JCK pull back the curtain on Agentic AI—the move from "generative" (creating text) to "agentic" (taking action).

JCK shares her journey from a Johns Hopkins AI program to building "Action-Engineered" agents, while Julia discusses how to balance innovation with enterprise risk and PII concerns.

In this episode:

• The "See One, Do One, Teach One" framework for mastering AI.

SERIES SCHEDULE: > * Part 1 (Today): The Foundation.

• Part 2 (Tuesday, April 21): The Brand Voice Artifact.

We all know the secret: the resume was never a perfect tool, but now it’s becoming a liability. From candidates using AI to "game" the ATS to the struggle of identifying true potential in a sea of rear-facing data, the "Builder" community in HR is facing a systemic crisis.

In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas (JCK) sit down for a candid "bits and bytes" session on the state of Talent Acquisition. We aren't just asking if the resume is dead—we’re asking if our current infrastructure is capable of evolving fast enough to keep up with the humans we’re trying to hire.

• The AI Arms Race: How generative AI has turned resume screening into a battle of bots, and why this "optimization" is actually erasing human signal.

Built for the builders. This isn't a "how-to" for job seekers—it’s a deep dive for the people in the trenches of HR and Corporate functions who are ready to reimagine how we connect talent to toil.

[00:00] The Hook: Is the resume dead or just outdated? Julia and JCK kick off the "Bits and Bytes" session.

[01:54] Systemic Bottlenecks: Why TA systems are "baked into" the resume at the core level and the high cost of a "rip and replace" strategy.

[02:40] The AI Arms Race: How conversational AI is shifting the way we collect candidate data and the potential for a "resume-less" application process.

[03:38] The Signal vs. Noise Crisis: Why AI-optimized resumes are making it harder for HR to find the actual human "builder."

[04:12] The Legal Reality: The "Hot Take" on why resumes aren't going away—the necessity of legal justification and data points in large-scale hiring.

[05:40] Brochure vs. Blueprint: Rethinking LinkedIn. Why it should be a conversation starter, not a carbon copy of a CV. [06:30] The Problem with Rear-Facing Data: Why the current infrastructure fails to identify potential and "skills adjacencies" in seasoned leaders.

[07:44] Predicting the Shift: The rise of upfront assessments and the technology sitting on top of the ATS to reduce the noise.

[08:38] The Verdict: Our "Hot Take" on the future of the resume and the ever-evolving human.

The conversation introduces the 'Hell Yes' mantra and explores its application in decision-making, reframing negative experiences, and identifying content gaps. It emphasizes the subjectivity of 'good' and the journey of starting something new.

Takeaways

• 'Hell Yes' mantra for decision-making

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction to Mantra

The $0 Strategy: How to execute when the "Tools" don't exist.

"Fix it, but don't spend anything." It’s the most common directive in the corporate machine, yet the one least documented in the training manuals.

In this session of The Missing Manual, Jenny Cotie Kangas and Julia Levy deconstruct the mechanics of building in an under-resourced vacuum. This isn't about "visionary leadership"; it’s about the raw tradecraft of making something out of nothing.

Jenny and Julia cover:

• Resource Scavenging: Identifying "hidden" assets and underutilized tech already sitting in your stack that can solve your problem for free.

This is documentation for the practitioners who don't wait for a purchase order to start solving the problem.

No budget. No scripts. Just the work.

The conversation delves into the concept of friction in talent acquisition processes, exploring the distinction between good and bad friction. It also highlights the impact of automating bad processes and introduces 'The Friction Project' as a resource for understanding and addressing friction in organizational processes.

Takeaways

• Friction in talent acquisition

Chapters

• 00:00 Friction in Talent Acquisition