Source Nate Herk: AIOS course

Ch 8: First connection: ClickUp via API, not MCP

Collection: Nate Herk: AIOS course · Creator: Nate Herk (@nateherk)

Original: raw source · demo-lab/research/nate-herk-course/transcript.txt @ 0:36:00 · 2,747 words · 8 sections

Content by Nate Herk (@nateherk). Chapter starts at 0:36:00. Auto-transcribed; names may be misheard.

Summary

But once we start to connect it to all of these things that we kind of sketched out earlier, once we connected to these, it won't have to keep asking us questions because the default will be, instead of asking Nate for answers, I will just go look in school or I will just go pull the data from QuickBooks or I will just use my GWS tool.
It would probably be helpful for you to set up a reference guide, a markdown file inside of this project that has all of the endpoints stored, so that later if you need to use a different one, you don't have to go do research again, you can just reference that file.
The way that you can enable bypass permissions is if you go to the settings down here and you click on settings and you type in Claude and then you can see right here, allow dangerously skip permissions.
Or if you were, if this was running a skill right now, like let's say we ran a skill called team check-in, I would say, okay, can you go update the skill with the issue that you just ran into, how you fixed it, and to make sure that you never, ever run into that issue ever again.
Okay, put endpoints X, Y, and Z in the skill file So you don't have to look at the full API documentation whenever you want to do that specific skill.

But once we start to connect it to all of these things that we kind of sketched out earlier, once we connected to these, it won't have to keep asking us questions because the default will be, instead of asking Nate for answers, I will just go look in school or I will just go pull the data from QuickBooks or I will just use my GWS tool.
I'm gonna go ahead and do a slash clear, which basically just clears the conversation, and I'm gonna pretend it's the next day, okay?
You can ask it what it thinks and you can start to, you know, just kind of layer on top of each other, the different connections.
So what this came back and said, good morning, day two, this is the exact right move I looked at your connections doc and I can see your priority order.
Topic: Topic: connect · routines

Click up for tasks, ownerships and deadlines and DMS and channels, fireflies for all of your meetings and then slack to get communication from other vendors.
All right, so one other thing that you can think about when it comes to ClickUp or Gmail or Slack or whatever it is that you're giving your agent access to is that you don't have to give it access as you because your account probably has full permissions.
It can see every space, it can download all the data, they can write whatever. it wants.
Maybe you want to get a separate API key inside of QuickBooks, and you only want to give it read access, you know, you can do certain things like that to restrict the ability of the AI to make sure you don't have a situation like I forget which company it was, but I just saw some news article where an AI deleted like a really big database and you just want
Topic: Topic: api key · repo · github

What I would do here is I would go to, um, up here in the settings, I would click on settings, I would go to the ClickUp API, and now I would just copy this token and this is what I need to be able to give to Claude Code.
Now, obviously before that, it's going to say, Hey, can we connect the ClickUp MCP?
I don't like using MCP servers because basically what happens when you do that is it gives you access to every single function and every single endpoints that's possible, but you always don't need all of them.
I want to use ClickUp's API because it's more token efficient than having the MCP server.
Topic: Topic: connect · routines

It would probably be helpful for you to set up a reference guide, a markdown file inside of this project that has all of the endpoints stored, so that later if you need to use a different one, you don't have to go do research again, you can just reference that file.
But anyways, go do research about that, and then create me a .env file, and I will give you my ClickUp API key in that file.
But instead, if we just let it research all of this once and then save it as a Markdown file, Markdown is really easy for AIs to read.
So now we have our own sort of database of every single possible ClickUp function and we have that stored locally.
Topic: Topic: project · step

And if you ever get confused about where you find your API key or how any of this works, just ask Claude Code to do the research and it will figure it out for you 99% of the time.
Also guys, I realized that I switched over this mode to bypass permissions.
But if you're on edit automatically and you're trying to do something like research like you just saw, it might stop constantly and say, hey, can I do this web fetch?
Or you can also switch to bypass permissions.
Topic: Topic: api key · repo · github

I have never had an issue with bypass permissions.
The way that you can enable bypass permissions is if you go to the settings down here and you click on settings and you type in Claude and then you can see right here, allow dangerously skip permissions.
But you could always just use auto if you're scared and then eventually if you feel more confident, you could switch to bypass.
So if I come into the references, we have a ClickUp API markdown file.
Topic: Topic: api key · repo · github

Or if you were, if this was running a skill right now, like let's say we ran a skill called team check-in, I would say, okay, can you go update the skill with the issue that you just ran into, how you fixed it, and to make sure that you never, ever run into that issue ever again.
I'm gonna go ahead and just do a slash clear.
ClickUp and just say, hey YouTube, making sure that this is working.
It's reading the connections doc and then it's reading the ClickUp reference doc and then it is going to shoot me off a message.
Topic: Topic: operating system · think · business

So for example, we don't want it to read every single time that entire doc because that could just waste tokens.
Okay, put endpoints X, Y, and Z in the skill file So you don't have to look at the full API documentation whenever you want to do that specific skill.
So I hope you guys are starting to understand here why it's a little bit difficult to give you like a step-by-step playbook for setting up your own AIS because everyone runs their business differently, everyone has different connections.
So in my ClickUp, my real Nate ClickUp, not the Up at AI version, I got a task here and the task says, hey YouTube, making sure this is working, and it assigned the task to me.
Topic: Topic: operating system · think · business