# Your AI tools will use GitHub more than you do Source: https://aaronmakelky.com/blog/github-for-marketers Last updated: 2026-10-16 Ryan Doser and I talked GitHub for marketers on AI Rabbit Holes. Why I keep my work in GitHub instead of Google Drive, how I back up my Grok Bot setup, and the chief of staff repo I check out like a binder. October 16, 2026 · 12 min read AI Rabbit Holes · GitHub · AI for Marketers · Claude Code · AI Agents · HyperFrames [All my AI Rabbit Holes episodes](/ai-rabbit-holes) ![](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SxjvrqgL1DU/hqdefault.jpg) Ryan Doser and me on AI Rabbit Holes, talking about GitHub for non-coders. Your AI tools are probably going to end up using GitHub more than you, the human, do. I don't go into GitHub files and folders very often and read stuff. I talked through GitHub for marketers and other non-technical people with [Ryan Doser](https://ryandoser.com/) on [AI Rabbit Holes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxjvrqgL1DU), recorded October 13, 2026, and streamed live on LinkedIn and X. Our episodes go up on [Ryan's YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@RyanDoserAI), including [AI video editing with Claude](/blog/ai-video-editing-with-claude), [open source AI models](/blog/open-source-ai-models), and [picking a daily driver model](/blog/claude-opus-5-5-best-ai-model). ## I barely touched GitHub until Christmas break I started dabbling in it in 2024 and 2025, a few commits a month, maybe. Then at the end of 2025, on Christmas break, I was like, I know I need to learn this and connect it to more things, and I'm barely using it to its potential. All of 2026, my commit chart and my usage have just skyrocketed, because I keep finding new ways to use it. Once you build your systems, you interface with it twenty, fifty, a hundred times a day. [![Aaron Makelky's GitHub contribution graph showing 3,610 contributions in the last year, mostly empty squares in October and November and darker green squares through the spring and summer of 2026](/images/blog/github-for-marketers/github-contributions.jpg)](/images/blog/github-for-marketers/github-contributions.jpg) My GitHub contribution graph: 3,610 contributions in the last year. Ryan was in the same boat. He didn't touch GitHub for years, and when someone finally told him to, his brain went off: I'm not technical, I'm not a coder, why do I need to learn GitHub? ## Google Drive on steroids Ryan thinks of GitHub as Google Drive on steroids. A repo is a Google Drive folder. A commit is version history in Google Docs. A push is like uploading to Dropbox. A pull request is suggesting mode in Google Docs. He says you only really need to know a repository, a commit, and a push. For anything past that, ask Claude or ChatGPT what it means, or send it a screenshot and have it walk you through it. [![Table of GitHub words and what to think of them like: repository is a Google Drive folder, commit is version history in Google Docs, push is uploading to Dropbox, pull request is suggesting mode in Google Docs, and fork is duplicating someone's project so you can change your copy. Repository, commit, and push are marked learn this one.](/images/blog/github-for-marketers/github-words.png)](/images/blog/github-for-marketers/github-words.png) The GitHub words Ryan says to learn, next to the tools you already use. The Google Drive and Dropbox analogy is accurate, because most of us have used some kind of cloud storage for our files. The difference is your AI tools are probably going to use it more than you do. I think of it like a backpack or a briefcase you carry around with your important files in it, and then ChatGPT can use it, Claude can use it, Grok Bot, whatever thing. Your agent is also trained on GitHub, because it's the basis of all coding projects, apps, and websites. So ChatGPT or Claude is going to be really good at using it, which is another reason you don't have to be too deep in the weeds on how it works. ## What happens if you cancel Lovable? A lot of people have tried vibe coding, and they go, look, I have my own website. I always ask what happens if you cancel the subscription to the tool you used. The classic example is [Lovable](https://lovable.dev/). If you cancel Lovable, there goes your website, and you're paying a monthly subscription just to host it, or just to save your files and keep it deployed on the internet. You always want to put that stuff in GitHub. I'm not saying Lovable's a bad tool, but once you realize what you can do with this other stuff, you'll find you probably don't need it, as long as you can connect what you're coding with to GitHub and you have that code. All of Ryan's websites deploy from GitHub now, seven of them. Claude Code and Codex write the content and the code, GitHub stores everything, and [Cloudflare](https://www.cloudflare.com/) deploys it. He's moved 98 posts for ryandoser.com off WordPress since July, and it's one to two minutes from push to live site. If he wants every article's date changed from September 2026 to October 2026, agents do it in the background while he works on something else. You realize how unnecessary a lot of that stuff is in the age of AI agents. You can just say, Claude, do this for me and make sure it's saved in GitHub. You don't even have to know what push or pull or clone means. Ryan also pointed out it's free to set all of this up. He hasn't even looked at the paid plans. [![GitHub's plans page: the Free plan at 0 dollars per user per month with unlimited public and private repositories, next to the Team plan at 4 dollars and the Enterprise plan starting at 21 dollars](/images/blog/github-for-marketers/github-free-plan.jpg)](/images/blog/github-for-marketers/github-free-plan.jpg) [GitHub's Free plan](https://github.com/pricing) includes unlimited public and private repositories. ## Back up your AI assistant to GitHub Ryan uses a GitHub repo as the memory for his ChatGPT Dots assistant, which he named Bodhi. Every day Bodhi adds a markdown log of what it worked on, what it learned, and what it needs to think about tomorrow. Ryan built that repo from VS Code, which already knows his workflows and skills, instead of telling Dots who he is from scratch. If you are using Dots, Muse, or Grok Bot, I strongly encourage you to use an automation. Your main computer has a backup, like Time Machine, so if something goes wrong you can restore it to Sunday night at 2 a.m. In Grok Bot, I have a bot that backs up my whole [Grok Bot system](/blog/how-i-set-up-grok-bot), which bots I have and every automation they have, and maps it in a GitHub repo. One, if I break it, it's easy to fix. Two, if I cancel Grok Bot and want to recreate it in [Hermes](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/) or somewhere else, I can connect it to that repo and say, this is how I used to use Grok Bot, set yourself up just like this. It gets updated once a week on an automation. I never have to touch it. Ryan does the same for his local setup. A Claude Code cron job backs up his whole VS Code setup, his systems, files, and workflows, to a GitHub repo every afternoon. If his computer crashed, he could fire it up on a new one and pick up where he left off. The backup skips API keys and NDA folders. [![List of what gets backed up to a private GitHub repo: Aaron's Grok Bot setup weekly, Ryan's VS Code setup daily, and Ryan's ChatGPT Dots assistant logs daily. The backup skips API keys and NDA folders. From the repo it can go to Hermes, Grok Bot, the next assistant, or a new computer.](/images/blog/github-for-marketers/backup-anywhere.png)](/images/blog/github-for-marketers/backup-anywhere.png) What Ryan and I back up to GitHub, and where it can go next. ## Why not Google Drive or Dropbox? I asked Ryan why do this on GitHub instead of something you might already use as a marketer, like Google Drive or Dropbox. He used to use Google Drive for it, but every backup took three or four hours, and you pay for more cloud storage the more you stack up. For me, it's the connectors, the tools you get when you connect things to Google Drive. They're very limited. I try to download videos from it, and my AI tools are not very good at using Google Drive. It's a Google issue, not a Claude or ChatGPT issue. GitHub is designed for AI tools to interface with it: putting your info in, pulling it out, syncing it. Google Drive isn't designed to have folders full of markdown files. You couldn't even open and edit markdown files in Google Drive until last week. ## Fork it, then make it your own When I find repos other people are using, I rarely copy them word for word. The GitHub term is fork, if it's a public repo. If Ryan shares one and I fork it, I go through and see how it works, and I always end up tweaking it for my own use cases. Or I'll give a link to the repo to my AI tool and say, I like this, based on the principles, let's build our own version of it. Plug and play with other people's stuff is never going to work, unless you're just desperate for ideas. They're usually inspiration more than something I'm going to use raw. The biggest one is skills. People have amazing skills repos, but there might be 200 skills in there and I only want three of them. So figure out ways to connect those to your tools, use them, tweak them, make them your own, and then save them in your own GitHub account. Ryan's warning: be careful pulling from public repos, because some of them carry malicious prompt injections that can scrape your computer and steal your API keys. [![The anthropics/skills repository on GitHub, a public repository for Agent Skills with 181k stars and 21.4k forks, its folder list, and a README explaining that skills are folders of instructions, scripts, and resources Claude loads to do specialized tasks](/images/blog/github-for-marketers/anthropic-skills-repo.jpg)](/images/blog/github-for-marketers/anthropic-skills-repo.jpg) Anthropic's public [skills repo](https://github.com/anthropics/skills) on GitHub. The first public repo Ryan dug into was [Anthropic's skills repo](https://github.com/anthropics/skills). He likes its skill creator skill, which helps you write skills the right way, and its front-end design skill for websites. ## My chief of staff repo People have all had this problem. Every day you're in Claude chats, Claude Code, and Claude projects, and then your boss says we're canceling your Claude account. Or you want to try ChatGPT because you heard Codex and Dots are cool. Then you realize all your work is in Claude. How do you get it out? If you've ever been burned by that, I wrote [an article for non-technical people](https://forthuman.substack.com/p/your-ai-app-should-not-own-your-work). I'm not a developer. I was a marketer when I wrote it, and I kind of wrote it for my colleagues. It walks you through building a chief of staff repo: your to-do list, all your projects, and the things you're working on. I thought of it like a binder. Every day I'd check it out from GitHub, have my AI tool working alongside me, then check it back in every night and push it. So every day I'm updating what I'm working on, my priorities, what's tomorrow. It had some skills in it. And you can take that and plug it into Grok Bot, or Meta, or anything. You own it, and your AI tools can interface with it. There's even a prompt to help you set it up in GitHub. [![Aaron's AI Binder Method page, headlined How to keep your AI work when you switch apps, with buttons to open the setup gist and copy the setup prompt, a note that it works across ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and Codex, and his video How to not lose all your AI work in ChatGPT](/images/blog/github-for-marketers/ai-binder-method.jpg)](/images/blog/github-for-marketers/ai-binder-method.jpg) The [AI binder method](/tools/ai-binder-method), with the setup prompt. It was transformative to how I did my work, and I still use a very similar version of it to this day. Lately the biggest thing for me is [systems where all my tools can talk and work together](/blog/linear-multi-agent-workspace), so a task gets assigned to the right place and the right model. Opus does the thinking and the planning, and Claude Haiku 5.5 does a lot of the work. ## HyperFrames and personalized SaaS Ryan's next free repo was [HyperFrames](https://github.com/heygen-com/hyperframes) from HeyGen, which we both use for motion graphics and [editing videos](/blog/codex-hyperframes-video-editing-workflow). They even came out with a free desktop app. Instead of just talking to Claude in a terminal, you can actually see what it's doing. You get a timeline and a graphical user interface like a normal video editing app, but it's built to co-work with your AI tool. HyperFrames is great, and it's the future. People are going to make free products and then sell you their models, because they have voice models and video models that power them. When you have solid to good software that's free, why wouldn't you use that? [![The HyperFrames Studio home page: The video editor built for agents, with a download button and the install command npx skills add heygen-com/hyperframes](/images/blog/github-for-marketers/hyperframes-studio.jpg)](/images/blog/github-for-marketers/hyperframes-studio.jpg) [HyperFrames Studio](https://hyperframes.heygen.com/), HeyGen's free video editor for agents. Ryan brought up Open SEO, a $10 a month take on Ahrefs and Semrush that its maker vibe coded and put largely on GitHub. He thinks open source versions of big SaaS products will get 75 to 85 percent of the way there. Maybe the best part is when you fork that open source repo. For our marketer friends, that's like duplicating the project. Now you have the blueprints, the guts of it, and you can tweak it. All the features you wish that software had, a new button, a different overlay, a new menu, you can just say, hey Claude, add this. You can build a hyper-personalized version that maybe only you would find useful. People call it personalized SaaS. I could make a Notion that's 90 percent as good, but it works exactly how I want it to, and it's free. That's amazing. ## Good luck vibe coding synchronous recording Ryan asked what I think about people using a "reverse engineer anything" repo and a jailbroken model to clone software like Descript. I think you can already do 90 percent of what people are cloning with free, pre-existing tools. We talked about this on our [video editing with AI episode](/blog/ai-video-editing-with-claude). The Riversides and Descripts of the world are not going to die anytime soon. I do think they'll be forced to change and adapt, or they'll go away. But recording synchronously? Good luck vibe coding that, bro. I've seen the inside of these companies, and that is not something Claude can figure out with a few dollars of tokens in a weekend. Recording and editing on a timeline, you can vibe code that. But HyperFrames already put out their studio app, it's free, and you're not going to make something better than that. You might want to tweak it, and I'm all for that as a side project, for fun, to learn. That's totally legit. But are you going to get background removal into your vibe coded Descript? I guarantee you won't be able to figure out how to make that work. Their engineers and product people have spent years on little features that don't sound like a big deal. Let's pick on one we haven't yet: Adobe. People have been cloning the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Adobe has been coasting off subscriptions for like ten years: you need Photoshop, you need Premiere, you need After Effects. Now some free tools output the same file types as After Effects, so animations you used to pay a sixty or seventy dollar a month subscription for can come out of a free tool in the same file type. They're going to have to adapt or die. Ryan agreed Adobe still has a moat at the very top, million dollar ad budgets and Hollywood-level productions, but for people running a YouTube channel or making content themselves, that moat is getting eaten away. ## Where Ryan says to start Ryan's advice is to create a free GitHub account and back up your existing setup first, just to figure out how GitHub works. Then build a landing page with GitHub storing the content. Once that feels comfortable, move to his website stack: Claude Code and Codex, GitHub for storage, the [Astro](https://astro.build/) web framework, and Cloudflare to deploy. When you don't know something, ask Claude Code, Codex, Claude, or ChatGPT how to do it. He pointed out that [GitLab](https://about.gitlab.com/) is the top competitor, and that GitHub now has official integrations with Claude and ChatGPT, so it's not a third-party workaround anymore. If you're still stuck, Ryan said to paste the transcript of this episode into your AI tool and ask it what we said. ## Don't be intimidated My biggest one is don't be intimidated. One, if you don't know how it's working, just ask. Your AI tool can explain: hey, what did you just do? Where is that? What's that word mean? Two, it connects across all of your work, so you're eventually going to have to start using it. Maybe there's a GitHub competitor, but some sort of tool to save and version your code and text is becoming more and more necessary for non-developers. Developers have used this in a terminal with manual control for decades. But it's coming for marketers and salespeople and ops people, even parenting projects. My kids vibe code websites. I use GitHub every day. It'll become like water. It'll just be around you, and all of your workflows will eventually connect to it. My website is just my name, aaronmakelky.com. If you need a first GitHub project, go buy a domain for your personal work or your blog and connect it to GitHub. That's one of the first ways I used it. So the sooner you dive in and say, okay, I'm a little scared, but I'll figure it out... just ask Claude: look across all my projects, how should I use GitHub? Help me set this up, go. And it'll pretty much do it for you. If you want help setting this up for your business or team, [book a 30-minute call with me](https://cal.com/aaron-makelky/intro). I'm also [@theaaron on X](https://x.com/theaaron), where I post multiple times a day. ## Related pages - [All field notes](/blog) - [The AI binder method, with a setup prompt](/tools/ai-binder-method) - [How I organize Grok Bot as an org system](/blog/how-i-set-up-grok-bot) - [I gave every AI agent its own Linear account](/blog/linear-multi-agent-workspace) - [Our AI video editing episode](/blog/ai-video-editing-with-claude) - [All AI Rabbit Holes episodes](/ai-rabbit-holes) ## Sources and references - [Ryan Doser](https://ryandoser.com/) - [Ryan Doser on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@RyanDoserAI) - [Watch the episode on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxjvrqgL1DU) - [AI Marketing Insiders community](https://www.skool.com/ai-marketing-insiders) - [Your AI app should not own your work](https://forthuman.substack.com/p/your-ai-app-should-not-own-your-work) - [GitHub plans](https://github.com/pricing) - [Anthropic's skills repo](https://github.com/anthropics/skills) - [HyperFrames Studio](https://hyperframes.heygen.com/) - [Hermes Agent by Nous Research](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/) - [Aaron on X (@theaaron)](https://x.com/theaaron) ## Common questions ### Do marketers really need to learn GitHub? Aaron says it's going to become like water for non-developers, so you'll end up using it eventually, and you don't need to be deep in the weeds. Ryan Doser says you only need three words: repository, commit, and push. For anything else, Aaron asks his AI tool what it just did, where it put something, or what a word means. ### Why use GitHub instead of Google Drive or Dropbox? Aaron's AI tools aren't very good at using Google Drive, and its connectors are limited. He couldn't even get them to download videos from it. GitHub is built for AI tools to put files in, pull them out, and sync them. Ryan used to back up to Google Drive, but each backup took three or four hours and the storage kept costing more. ### How does Aaron back up his Grok Bot setup? One of his bots maps every bot and every automation he has in Grok Bot into a GitHub repo, once a week, on an automation he never touches. If he breaks something, it's easy to fix. If he cancels Grok Bot, he can point Hermes or another assistant at the repo and say this is how I used to use Grok Bot, set yourself up just like this. ### What is a chief of staff repo? A GitHub repo with your to-do list, your projects, what you're working on, and some skills. Aaron checked it out every morning like a binder, worked in it with his AI tool, and pushed it back every night. Because he owns it, he can plug it into Claude, ChatGPT, Grok Bot, or Meta's assistant. His AI binder method page walks through the setup with a prompt. ### Should you use public GitHub repos as they are? Aaron rarely does. He forks a repo, sees how it works, and tweaks it, or gives the link to his AI tool and has it build his own version from the same principles. A skills repo might have 200 skills when he wants three. Ryan Doser warns that some public repos carry prompt injections that can steal your API keys.