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A note before we begin: This is the eighth lesson in a 16-lesson experiment. I am doing every lesson alongside you, on the same tools, with the same constraints. Some lessons will land cleanly. Some will lead to dead ends and need rework. We’ll figure out what works, together.
If you are catching up, here’s what came before today’s lesson:
Intro: Build Your Own Investment Idea Engine
Lesson 1: How LLMs Work, and How to Defend Against Hallucinations
Lesson 2: Prompt Patterns That Outperform Casual Prompting
Lesson 3: Tools, Agents, and Structured Output
Lesson 4: SEC EDGAR, the Primary Source
Lesson 5: FRED Macro and Sector Data, the Free Read
Lesson 6: FMP API Key and the First Checked Data Pull
Lesson 7: Other Data Sources, and Idea Engine Formats
Why This Matters for Investors
Until now we have been working in disposable chats. A question goes in, an answer comes back, the window closes, and any context we built (the system prompt, the uploaded filings, the source rules, the small examples we trained the model on) leaves with it. That is fine for one-off lookups. It is the wrong shape for an idea engine that has to run all week, every week, on the same philosophy.
Spaces and Projects are the fix. A Space inside Perplexity, and a Project inside Claude, are persistent rooms where the system prompt, the connected files, the source rules, and the previous threads stay in place between sessions. We open the room, ask the question, get an answer that is already aware of how we think, and close the room without losing anything. The room is the unit of investment work. The thread inside it is the unit of conversation. That distinction is what lets us build a research operation that does not start over every morning.
Connectors are the third leg. They are the controlled bridges between these rooms and the rest of our stack: Google Drive, Google Sheets, GitHub, calendars, sometimes email. A connector turns “find the doc I wrote about company X six months ago” from a manual hunt into a one-sentence ask. The point of today is not to connect everything. The point is to connect deliberately, with a clear purpose for each link and a list of what we will not connect yet.
Let’s launch into today’s lesson.
