A proven, hands-on workshop that teaches founders and professionals to use AI agents for real work — marketing, research, product, and operations. Delivered across 8 sessions in 2026. Now available to bring to your organization.
The workshop was born and tested at Life Development University — a South Central LA hub for creative expression, technical training, wellness, and leadership. LDU describes itself as “more than a training center — an accelerator for social and economic justice.” It was the right home for an eight-week proof-of-concept.
Madison ran the full 8-session series free to the community, in person at the LDU-Power Building on Crenshaw. Over 25 students cycled through — entrepreneurs, working professionals, and absolute beginners. Below: the eight sessions, in order, with the skill each one unlocked and the artifact each student walked away with.
For partner organizations: this is the pilot curriculum as delivered. It is modular and ready to co-shape — sessions can be re-sequenced, deepened, or trimmed to fit your audience, sector, and time budget.
Sessions delivered
Students hosted
Cost to attend
What Claude Code actually is, why it's a different category from a chatbot, and what eight weeks of building together will produce. A live demo of an agent doing real work, the working mindset of an AI builder, and the cohort's first guided prompts.
The session nobody else teaches: actually getting Claude Code working on every laptop in the room. Mac vs. Windows, terminal basics, package managers, permissions, and the install blockers most guides skip past.
Best practices for prompting. Each student built their own original research report as a navigable HTML site — from tobacco industry deep dives to AI workforce analyses.
Taking the previous week's work and pushing it further. Editing, refactoring, and refining alongside the agent until the work is presentation-ready.
Input. Process. Output. Students designed and shipped their own small AI tools — each one solving a real problem from their own work or life.
Customizing your AI agent: tone, rules, knowledge, and memory. How to onboard Claude once so it shows up to every future session knowing exactly who you are.
Working together on real software using GitHub. Students picked roles — frontend, backend, design, PM — and contributed to a shared project repository.
Beyond single prompts: students each shipped a specialist sub-agent into a live multi-agent system, then watched the orchestrator dispatch them in parallel.
Workshop sessions, Crenshaw District · Spring 2026.
Instruction, live demos, and real work done in the room.
From never-coded entrepreneurs to 20-year engineers.
Every session ends with something the student built and can keep.
Sessions run ~75 minutes. Curriculum adapts to your audience — entrepreneurs, professionals, or mixed-background groups.
Madison Shockley III is a South Central LA entrepreneur, operator, and advocate. Over the past decade he raised millions of dollars to build businesses — and pushed tens of millions more into the small-business economy through policy advocacy.
His company Cadre is a clothing line, a cannabis product line, and (until April 2026) a retail dispensary he built from the ground up. Cadre products distributed across 35+ retail locations from San Francisco to San Diego, with apps live in both the Apple App Store and Google Play. He raised $1.3 million to launch the dispensary, spent three years acquiring the license and remodeling the space, and operated for three more years — generating over $8 million in revenue before closing the dispensary chapter last month. Along the way, Cadre was awarded a $50,000 incubator grant from Eaze's Momentum accelerator in 2023.
Alongside operating Cadre, Madison founded the Cannabis Equity Policy Council and served two years on California's Cannabis Advisory Committee. His advocacy directly shaped three programs that put $60 million into small social equity businesses — the Vendor Compensation Program, the High Road Employer Program, and the 280E tax credit program ($20M each).
Then he discovered Claude Code.
With zero coding background, Madison spent hundreds of hours learning to work with AI agents — using them to analyze legal filings, research statutes, draft briefs, and build and deploy websites. What used to take days started taking minutes.
Now he comes back to the community with a new toolkit. Fresh off six years of operating a small business, he teaches entrepreneurs the practical AI skills they need to grow — delivered across 8 sessions in 2026 in the Crenshaw District. Real work, done live, by someone who has actually built and operated.
"I built a small business from the ground up in South Central. Now I'm helping other founders use AI to do the same — without needing to learn to code."
What Madison brings to the room — from his own work as an entrepreneur, operator, and advocate.
Raised to launch his cannabis dispensary
Revenue generated operating Cadre
Directed to small business via policy advocacy
California retail locations carrying Cadre products
6 years operating a small business in California · 2 years on the state's Cannabis Advisory Committee · mobile apps live in the App Store and Google Play · built entirely from South Central LA
A practical toolkit, built around doing real work — not watching tutorials.
What Claude Code actually is and why it's fundamentally different from chatbots. How it reads files, makes plans, and executes — autonomously.
The framework for working with AI agents: base threads, parallel threads, chained workflows. Learn when to step in and when to let the agent run.
Feed Claude legal filings, contracts, reports — get structured breakdowns in minutes instead of hours. Real research with real citations.
Go from idea to live website in one session. Claude Code writes, builds, and deploys — you direct. No coding knowledge needed.
Onboard your AI agent once, and it remembers your rules, tone, and project structure forever. The secret to consistent, high-quality output.
Run multiple agents in parallel. Connect Claude to the web, databases, and external services. Build an entire AI team that works while you think.
Three very different backgrounds. One class that works for all of them.
Never written a line of code? Perfect. This workshop was built by an entrepreneur who started the same way. You'll learn to direct AI agents in plain English to do real work for your business — from marketing to research to operations.
Competitive analysis, content generation, contract review, data extraction — done by an AI agent that works at machine speed. Your team becomes a department.
Twenty years of engineering context makes Claude Code exponentially more powerful. What non-coders describe in plain English, you can direct with precision. This is a force multiplier.
Mark Cuban says AI will change everything. The former CEO of Google says AI will replace most programmers within a year. This isn't hype. It's a new way of working — and it's available to you right now.
The people who learn to work with AI agents aren't getting replaced. They're getting multiplied.
— Madison Shockley III
For incubators, EDCs, community programs, and teams who want their people building with AI — not just talking about it. Delivered as the pilot or co-developed with your team to fit your audience, sector, and timeline.
Madison will be in touch soon to learn more about your program and walk through how the workshop could fit.