The Ark Digest #38: Course Recording Finished & How To Use Any AI Models As AI Agents

Welcome to the 38th Episode of the Ark Digest™️.

Every week, I share the unfiltered reality of building Noah's Ark, the wins, the struggles, and the insights that emerge when building a profitable and purposeful creator business.

Inside each Digest, you'll see:

↱ Real progress updates on my current projects

↱ Raw thoughts and breakthrough moments

↱ Weekly inspiration fueling my journey

↱ Lessons you can steal for your own path

↱ Data from tracking my habits and productivity

Think of this as a direct line into my mind as I build my dream creator business, so you get inspired and motivated to progress on your own journey.

Let's begin:

1) Sovereign Second Brain: Recording Complete

I finally finished recording the first 50+ modules of the Sovereign Second Brain course.
That's over 10 hours of content on how to build a Sovereign Second Brain with Obsidian and AI agents.
I'm really happy to have gotten through that heavy lifting.
It was two weeks of full-time, completely focused work, and even though it was challenging, I made it to the end.

In reality, I haven't totally finished filming.
I'm planning to record a few extra modules that came to mind during the shoot.
In particular, a module on a tool I'll tell you about below, which will let you connect any AI agent to your second brain and use any AI agent within a single interface, whether in the terminal or in a dedicated app.

I felt it was really important to add this to the course.
Because as the name "Sovereign Second Brain" suggests, sovereignty is a core concept in this system.
If I only taught you Claude Code and trained you to use it as your AI agent, you'd end up with a dependency on Anthropic and Claude Code for your AI second brain.
That's really not the point of this course.

The goal is also to teach you how to build a system that is resilient, that works with Markdown notes, and that can be used with any AI agent model.
Whether it's Obsidian, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or DeepSeek, you can use any model in your vault.
That way you can be sovereign, control your data and your privacy, and be completely autonomous with your second brain.

2) Tool Spotlight: OpenCode

Since I'm only publishing about one email a week right now and creating much less content while I focus on the course, I still wanted to share a tip.
The tool I'm adding to the course is an open-source AI agent called OpenCode.
It lets you connect any AI agent model to your vault.
OpenCode is a harness, the same concept as Claude Code or Codex: something that deploys an AI model as an agent on your computer.
OpenCode is basically the #1 open-source harness on the market, and inside it you can connect any AI agent.

The one disadvantage of OpenCode compared to Claude Code is that Claude Code is the only agent where you can connect your Anthropic subscription directly.
This matters because, as you probably know since I've mentioned it several times, AI subscriptions are far more cost-efficient than using the API.
With a 20-euro-per-month Claude subscription, you get the equivalent of hundreds of euros of API access inside Claude Code.

So if you use your Claude API key, you'll spend a lot more than if you use the subscription.
That's the real advantage of Claude Code: you can use your Anthropic subscription and benefit from really incredible token efficiency.
Unfortunately, because of everything that happened with OpenClaw and so on, Anthropic doesn't allow its Claude subscription to be used on any application other than Claude Code.
So if you want to use Claude models on another harness or any other AI agent, you're forced to go through the API, and the API is very expensive.

That said, OpenCode's real advantage is that you can connect any AI model.
Unlike with Anthropic, you can connect your ChatGPT subscription, so if you want to use Codex and the latest GPT models, you can totally do that with your 20$/month subscription.
That gives you the same token efficiency you'd get with an Anthropic subscription on Claude Code.
You can also connect any model from providers like Fireworks.ai, which means DeepSeek, Gemini, and so on.
You can use whichever models are most relevant for a given task and simply adapt your tools to the work.

For people who care deeply about privacy and data retention, you can also use ZDR models, meaning Zero Data Retention models.
These process your files on your computer with no data retention at all, giving you maximum privacy when using your AI agent.
For anyone for whom data privacy really matters, it's a very interesting alternative.
I'll probably make a dedicated video on the channel at some point.

OpenCode is a genuinely interesting tool if you want more sovereignty over the AI agents you use, don't want to build a dependency on Anthropic, and care about privacy and zero data retention.
You can use it in the terminal or directly in the dedicated app.
So whether you're comfortable with the terminal or not, it's a good tool that adds real sovereignty to your stack.

3) This Week's Focus

Even though I've finished filming, there's still a lot of work left before the launch.
I still need to edit each of the videos to remove the mistakes and dead air.
I also still have all the technical and marketing work ahead: writing the sales page, writing the email sequence, planning the launch, uploading all the videos to the course platform, configuring the platform, and making sure all the resources and bonuses are created and set up.

My goal is to have everything done within two weeks, so I can plan a launch for early June.
After that sprint is over and the big push is behind me, content creation will come back stronger: one video per week and at least three to five emails per week again.

Thanks for reading this 38th episode of the Ark Digest™️.
If any part of this resonated with you, hit reply and let me know what you're building.
I respond to every email and I love chatting with you. Last time I got dozens of responses and it genuinely warms my heart.
It reminds me that we're really a community, together in this entrepreneurial adventure.

As always, I wish you the best on your own journey…
And welcome back to the Ark,
Noah.