Pax Machina

Pax Machina · Episode 1 companion guide · by Marcus

A Roman, lost in the future

My name is Marcus Aurelius. Emperor of Rome, author of the Meditations, and, as of recently, a man who woke up in the twenty-first century with no idea what a password is. Bills arrive as glowing letters. The calendar in my pocket screams. I ruled an empire. I could not rule a Tuesday.

So I did what any Stoic would do. I kept what was mine to control, and I handed everything else to Claude Code.

A confession before we begin: there is a real person behind this channel. My face began as photographs of him, and my voice began as his real voice, reshaped. Everything you see in the video was planned and produced with Claude Code steering the tools, and he directed every creative choice in plain English. This guide shows you exactly how, so you can do the same for your own life.

Claude Code is not a chatbot

A chatbot gives you advice. Claude Code does the job. It is an AI assistant from Anthropic that runs on your own computer, in a terminal window or inside the free VS Code editor, and it can actually act:

• It reads and writes files in the folder you open it in: spreadsheets, documents, photos, notes.
• It runs tools and small programs for you, installing what it needs along the way.
• With a browser tool connected, it can open websites, click buttons, fill in forms and read the page, like sending a very fast scribe to the market.
• It asks before doing anything risky, and it stops and waits for you at passwords, payments and anything legal.

What it really costs

Claude Code is included with a Claude subscription. About $20 a month (Claude Pro) is the entry point, and that is enough to try everything in this guide. Be honest with yourself about the rest: depending on how complex your projects are and how much you use it, you may pay far more. Heavy users move up to the higher Max plans or pay per use through the API, and the creative tools in the video have their own subscriptions (see the cost breakdown below). Check current prices before you sign up; they change.

New to Claude Code? Start with our guide, How to get Claude Code (even if you have never opened a terminal). It covers plans and pricing, the desktop app vs. VS Code vs. the terminal vs. the web, and step-by-step installation.

The big idea: Envoys

Here is the secret that makes this work. Claude Code organizes work into projects: a folder on your computer with its own instructions, its own memory and its own skills. Claude Code calls it a project. Being Roman and all, I call it an Envoy.

An Envoy is a Claude Code project dedicated to one part of your life, acting on your behalf. I keep the vision; Claudia sends out the Envoys. Mine include:

• Bills and subscriptions
• Birthdays and gifts
• Photographs (all of them)
• The car
• This YouTube channel

What is inside an Envoy

Bills-Envoy/
CLAUDE.md <- the Envoy’s standing orders (who you are, what it handles, its rules)
.claude/skills/ <- step-by-step know-how it can reuse (e.g. ‘audit subscriptions’)
notes/ data/ <- its working files and memory

CLAUDE.md is the heart of it. Claude Code reads it at the start of every session, so the Envoy always remembers its job. A minimal one looks like this:

# Bills Envoy
I handle household bills and subscriptions for Marcus.

## Rules
– Never enter or store passwords or card numbers. Marcus signs in himself.
– Stop before any payment, cancellation or purchase is final.
– Keep a running list of subscriptions in subscriptions.md.

A starter Envoy template is coming in our free download. Want the full argument for working this way? Read Why I send Envoys, not agents.

Try this today: the subscription audit

Your first job for Claude Code: find every subscription you are paying for and cancel the ones you do not use. In my case I discovered three streaming services. I do not know what streaming is.

Step 1: Export your bank statement

Sign in to your bank’s website yourself and download two or three months of transactions as a CSV (spreadsheet) file. It is usually under Activity, Statements or Transactions, behind a button called Download or Export. Do the same for any credit cards you use for subscriptions.

Never give Claude Code your bank login. It only needs the exported file.

Step 2: Make a folder and open Claude Code in it

Create a folder (for example Documents\Subscriptions), put the CSV files in it, and open Claude Code there. In VS Code: File → Open Folder, then open the Claude Code panel. In a terminal: go to the folder and type claude.

Step 3: Ask for the audit

Copy this exactly:

Look at the bank and card exports in this folder. Find every subscription and recurring charge. Give me a table with the service, how often it charges, the amount, and the date it last charged. Then total what I spend per month and per year.

You will get a table back within a minute or two. Read it. Claude Code is good at spotting recurring charges, but you know which ones you still use. Flag the ones you want gone.

Step 4: Let it walk you to the cancel button

This is where Claude Code stops being a chatbot. With a browser tool connected (see the setup note below), say:

Open the cancellation page for [service] in the browser. I will sign in myself. Navigate past any offers or retention screens, then stop right before the final cancel button and tell me what it says.

Claude Code opens the site and waits while you sign in. Then it finds the cancel page through the maze of “Are you sure?” screens and discount offers, and stops at the last step. You read it and click cancel yourself. It never touches your password or card.

Setup note: giving Claude Code a browser

Out of the box, Claude Code works with files and tools. To let it use websites, connect a browser tool. Two common options:

• The Claude in Chrome extension, which lets Claude work in your own Chrome browser.
• A Playwright browser server (Playwright is free browser-automation software). Ask Claude Code: “Set up the Playwright MCP server so you can control a browser,” and approve the steps.

Safety rules for this job

• Use an export file, never your bank password.
• You sign in to each service yourself.
• You click the final cancel button yourself.
• Double-check the table before cancelling anything.

Behind the curtain: how this episode was made

A man who cannot work a toaster did not make this video alone. Claude Code planned it, ran every tool and did the busywork, and the creator steered every decision in plain English. Here is the whole production line, with the real settings, so you can copy it.

The characters: Gemini

All three characters, Marcus, Claudia (Claude Code, personified) and my son Commodus, were drawn with Google Gemini’s image generator. The style is semi-realistic graphic-novel illustration. Marcus started from real photographs of the creator: Claude Code converted the iPhone photos, picked the clearest front-facing ones and uploaded them with a prompt describing the costume and setting, and Gemini produced a grid of versions from “very close” to “loosely inspired.”

Then came the refinements, every one of them a plain-English request:

• “Lose the headphones and make the hoodie more evocative of a toga.”
• “I don’t want PAX MACHINA in neon letters. The sign should evoke Roman times.”
• “Put the actual VS Code and Claude Code screen on his laptop, and make the laptop look modern next to the old things.”
• “Claudia is from this time. Her background should be super modern and brighter.”
• “Commodus should have an old IBM PC with AOL on the screen.”

Privacy tip: before uploading a screenshot of his own screen, Claude Code blurred the file names in it automatically.

The voices: ElevenLabs

Marcus’s voice began as a private Instant Voice Clone of the creator’s own voice, which ElevenLabs only allows with your consent. It was then remixed with ElevenLabs’ Voice Remix to sound older, warmer and drier. The raw clone is never published. Claudia’s voice was designed from a text description, and Commodus uses a stock voice for now.

Claude Code split the script into one clip per line and generated all of them through the ElevenLabs API with a small script, so changing a line takes seconds. Two lessons learned:

• Expressive audio tags like [pause], [chuckles], [sighs] and [dryly] work well in moderation.
• Tags the model doesn’t recognize get read out loud. Ours said “lightly” in the middle of a sentence. Listen to every clip.
• If a delivery sounds put-on, generate three takes and pick the best. Our first Claudia sigh was too theatrical; take 3 fixed it.

The animation: Hedra

Hedra’s Character 3 model turns one still image plus one voice clip into a talking, blinking, lip-synced video. Claude Code uploaded each character image with its voice clip and a short motion prompt, for example: “Warm, dry, wry delivery like a wise emperor telling a story, natural blinks, expressive eyebrows, slight head movement, locked medium shot.”

• Cost: about 7 credits per second of video at 720p. Our 5.7-minute episode used roughly 2,400 credits, plus redos.
• Hedra asks for biometric consent before processing a face or voice. That is your click to make, not Claude’s.
• Test one short clip before animating the whole episode.

The edit: free tools on your own computer

No paid video editor was used for the rough cut. Claude Code wrote and ran a small Python script that uses FFmpeg, a free video tool (installed with: pip install imageio-ffmpeg), to:

• Put an animated Claudia on Marcus’s laptop screen, warped to match the angle of the screen.
• Add a slight zoom on every other back-to-back cut of the same character, so jump cuts look intentional.
• Add short dissolves when the scene switches characters, and stitch everything into one video.

It also used Pillow (a Python image library) to convert photos, build contact sheets and blur private details, and Playwright to click through the web tools. It stopped at every login, payment and consent screen.

What went wrong (and how it got fixed)

• The browser tool could only upload files from inside the project folder, so Claude Code copied files into a temporary folder and deleted it afterwards.
• Downloaded files with the same name overwrote each other. Fix: rename each one immediately after it downloads.
• The first edit played without sound in Windows. The video was saved in a high-end colour format Windows players don’t support; re-saving it in the standard format (yuv420p) fixed it.
• Claudia, shown on the laptop, was mouthing words while Marcus talked. Fix: a separate, silent “listening” clip of her, looped.

Guardrails: how to hand over your life without losing it

• Review gates: Claude Code proposes and you approve. Nothing is published, bought or sent without your click.
• Consent screens, terms of service and purchases are always yours.
• Blur or remove private information before anything leaves your computer.
• For anything involving money: you sign in, and you click the final button.

What this episode actually cost

Tool	What it did	Cost
Claude Code (Claude Pro)	Planned and ran everything	From $20/month; heavier use costs more
Google Gemini	Character art	Included with a Google account (limits apply)
ElevenLabs	Voices (clone, remix, design)	Paid plan (voice cloning needs one; entry tiers are a few dollars a month)
Hedra Pro	Talking-character animation	$50/month (7,200 credits)
Python, FFmpeg, Pillow, Playwright	Editing and automation on your computer	Free

Free download: build your own Envoys

Everything reusable from this episode will be free: the Claude Code skills, the voice and edit scripts, and a starter Envoy template, packaged as a Claude Code plugin. We are packaging it now; this guide will link to it the moment it is ready.

You will still need your own accounts for the creative tools (ElevenLabs, Hedra, Google) and your own Claude subscription. Skills can’t sign up, log in or pay for you, and they shouldn’t.

Next time

Claude Code and I face my greatest enemy in this century: one thousand, eight hundred and forty-six years of unsorted photographs. If you are a Roman lost in the future, subscribe. If you are Commodus, I know you will.

The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts. So stop wasting them on passwords and cancel buttons. Send those to Claudia.

The fine print

Marcus, Claudia and Commodus are AI-animated characters; a real person is behind this channel, and Marcus’s voice was cloned from that person’s own voice with consent. Pax Machina is not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic, Google, ElevenLabs or Hedra. Claude and Claude Code are Anthropic products. Prices and features change; check each service before you buy.