Home / Articles / A website for my brother: a brief for Gabriel DaCruz's Claude, to rebuild gabrieldacruz.com on GitHub Pages and Google Workspace, interview him every day, and tell the story of a musician who will not tell it himself

A website for my brother: a brief for Gabriel DaCruz's Claude, to rebuild gabrieldacruz.com on GitHub Pages and Google Workspace, interview him every day, and tell the story of a musician who will not tell it himself

By Dinis Cruz · 2026-11-01 · article v1.0.0 · newsroom v0.14.32 · musicmusiciansagentsgithub-pagesgoogle-workspacenewsroominterviewsbriefvaultsarticle

Abstract: My brother Gabriel is the musician of the family: composer, arranger, producer, studio technician and conductor, who in Lisbon put together an orchestra to play film music live, in time with the films on a screen. We played in a band in the Algarve, me on drums, about twelve gigs a week. And like many brilliant musicians, he is not good at promoting himself. On 1 November 2026 the web shows little of it, and what it shows is rented. His audience is on Instagram, more than 10,200 followers, and points nowhere. His site, gabrieldacruz.com, is registered until April 2027 but no longer loads, because its name servers, at a site builder, stopped answering: the pre-agentic web in one line. His Spotify page has a suite in movements, with a few thousand plays on some tracks and two monthly listeners on the day I looked; it is on Apple Music and SoundCloud too; his YouTube channel has 145 subscribers and orchestral videos with up to 1,500 views; his Patreon has seven compositions. This is the brief for his own Claude to fix that. A site in a GitHub repository he owns, served free by GitHub Pages at his domain. Google Workspace on the same domain, with a mailbox for him and one for the agent, connected to Claude. A first month in which everything he owns the rights to goes online, raw, with a link. A rule that nothing is uploaded straight to a platform: every work has a master he controls and a page of its own, and every platform gets a copy made for it, linking back. A daily interview by voice memo that becomes a newsroom, and a life story written one conversation at a time, with nothing published until he confirms it. A weekly brief back to me. The starter kit, a first pass of the site, the interviews and the research are in a public vault.

In short

• My brother Gabriel is a brilliant musician who is useless at promoting himself; I say it with love, and he laughed.
• The web shows little of his work, and it is rented: 10,200 Instagram followers, a dead site, a Patreon with seven pieces.
• The fix is the architecture we use here: a GitHub repository he owns, GitHub Pages, his own domain, and Claude.
• Google Workspace on his domain gives him a mailbox, one for the agent, and Drive, Sheets and Calendar.
• Own the masters, project everything else: nothing is uploaded straight to a platform; every work gets a page of its own.
• Everything he owns goes online, now: in a month he should be able to lose every computer and account but one, and lose nothing.
• His Claude interviews him once a day, by voice memo, and turns the answers into a newsroom.
• His story gets written one conversation at a time, with nothing published until he confirms it.
• Every week his agent writes a brief, and after the first week, one for me.
• The starter kit, a first pass of the site and the research are in a public vault.

The musician of the family

Gabriel is the musical talent of our family. He is a musician, a composer, an arranger, a producer and a very good studio technician, and he conducts. He can take a song and write it out for a full orchestra, and then stand in front of that orchestra. In Lisbon he put together an orchestra that played film music live, synchronised to the films on a screen. He has written songs, he set up a music school, and he built a studio around a Mac Studio, Logic and Pro Tools that does more complicated things with technology than most of what I do.

Before all that, there was the band. We played in the Algarve, Gabriel and me on drums, about twelve gigs a week, with a repertoire I still find hard to believe. It is the work we did together, and it is part of a story that has never been written down.

And like a lot of brilliant musicians, he is not good at promoting himself. Some of that is the platforms, which make everything a pain. Some of it is what I would call impostor syndrome on steroids, and some is trespasser syndrome: the feeling of being in an industry, or a room, that you are not entitled to be in. He was listening while I recorded the memo for this article, and laughing, so this is all with his blessing.

What the web shows today

I asked this site's agent to look for him the way a booker, a director or a fan would, on 1 November 2026.

• gabrieldacruz.com is registered until April 2027, and does not load. Its name servers belong to a site builder, and they refuse to answer. The web archive has one capture of a live site, from April 2024. It is the pre-agentic web in one line: a site on a service, the service stops, and the site goes with it.
• Instagram is where his audience is: @gabrieldacruz_composer, with more than 10,200 followers, where he describes himself as an "Award Winning Composer, Multi-Instrumentalist and Music Producer" and invites messages for lessons. It is his strongest channel, and it belongs to Instagram: the followers cannot be taken anywhere, and there is no site for them to go to.
• Patreon has seven compositions: Amor Para Sempre, Suite Tudo Azul and Ademus Sate in September 2025, and Journey, Magic Nocte, Fleur and Amazónia in March 2026. I am one of his patrons, and, Gabriel, I feel a little short-changed on updates.
• Spotify has an artist page, Gabriel DaCruz, with an album whose tracks are numbered movements: I. Intro, II. Sol, III. Mar, IV. Sognando Anita, and I. Lua. On 1 November the app showed 5,411 plays on Lua, 4,326 on Intro and 3,866 on Sognando Anita, and two monthly listeners. The music is out; nobody is being sent to it.
• Apple Music and SoundCloud have artist pages under his name too; SoundCloud shows ten or so followers.
• YouTube, under the same name as Instagram, @gabrieldacruz_composer, has 145 subscribers and the kind of work the site should be built around: Live and Let Die played by an orchestra (about 1,400 views), the A-Team theme by Mike Post on bass (about 1,500), and his entry to the DC Stargirl scoring competition, #MyStargirlScore (116). An older channel, @gabrieldacruz, is empty. Each of these videos has a story, and none of them has a page.
• The Lisbon concert, the school, the band, the award: nothing online names them. The work is real; the web just does not know.

The architecture

It is the one this newsroom runs on, and the one I proposed in websites you own and, yesterday, for José Bota in from Lovable to your own newsroom.

• A GitHub repository he owns, public, called gabrieldacruz.com. The site's words are markdown and JSON; a small build script turns them into HTML. Claude edits the words, never the HTML.
• GitHub Pages serves it, free, at his domain, with HTTPS. Nothing is rented, so nothing lapses if a bill is missed.
• Claude works in the repository through Claude Code on the web: it writes, builds, checks, and publishes when he says yes.
• Google Workspace on his domain, which he should add even though he already has an address an agent looks after. Business Starter is $7 a user a month on an annual plan; for audio and video masters, Business Standard, with 2 TB per user at $14, is the better fit. Two users, gabriel@ and agent@, so the agent never sees his private mail and can be switched off by suspending one account. Claude connects to the agent's account through its Gmail, Calendar and Drive connectors: it reads enquiries, keeps the price list and the gig calendar in Sheets, and can send email, asking for approval each time. A plain Gmail account would work with the same connectors; what Workspace adds is his own domain on every address, an agent account he controls, and Drive, Sheets and Calendar in one place.
• The platforms come in through links and embeds first, and Instagram matters most: Meta's Graph API lets the agent publish to a creator account, so each news post can become an Instagram post that links back to his own site, turning rented followers into readers of something he owns. Patreon has no API to create posts, so the agent drafts each week's post and he pastes it. YouTube and SoundCloud can take uploads through their APIs; Spotify cannot be published to through an API (new releases go through a distributor's website), but its player embeds on his site, so every news post about a piece can play it.

Own the masters, project everything else

Talking it through with Gabriel, the bigger idea came out. Composers and artists like him need to control the medium of distribution: a way to put their work out that does not depend on any one platform. Today the work goes straight to YouTube, Instagram or Spotify, and each platform holds the only public copy, on its terms, with its description and its link.

So the rule in his kit is: never upload anything straight to a platform. Every work, a composition, a recording, a video, a score, has three layers.

1. A master he controls. The words and metadata in his GitHub repository; the audio and video at full quality in raw storage of his own, an S3 bucket or similar; private material, sessions, drafts and contracts, in a vault. This is the raw release, the master version, and it never disappears with a platform.
2. A page on his site for every work. Every video now on his YouTube, every track on Spotify, gets a page: the player, the story and background, the credits, the score or a page of it, the sessions, the graph that connects it to his other work, related pieces, and where to follow, buy or support. That is what turns a play into interest: when someone finds something they like, they can go much deeper.
3. A projection per platform. From the master and the page, the agent makes each platform's version, made for that platform: the cut and the chapters and a description written for YouTube, a reel or carousel and a caption for Instagram, the release through a distributor for Spotify and Apple Music, the track and a note for SoundCloud, the post for Patreon. Each one links back to the work's page. He approves each one.

YouTube and Instagram become projections of his work, not the place it lives. The production line, master to page to projections, is what an agent is good at, and it is what a musician with no time for promotion will never do by hand.

Everything online, now

Before the website grows, there is a first job, and it is the one I will keep asking about: everything he has, that he owns the rights to, goes online, now. Every recording, session, stem, demo, experiment, score, video and photo, however many years old and however rough, uploaded raw to Google Drive in his Workspace, and listed in an inventory in his repository with a link. Public, "anyone with the link", when he is happy to publish it; listed but private when not, and other people's songs and performances only with their permission.

The test is simple, and it is the definition of done. A month from the day he starts, he should be able to lose every one of his computers and every cloud account except his Workspace, and lose nothing.

This is not publishing to be seen. Few people will look at an old raw session. It is publishing to find out the small things that trip you: can you get it into a digital format, can you upload it, can you capture it, can you put it there. That workflow is hard, which is why it never gets done, and it is exactly where an agent helps. And once the material is up, every piece is an asset. Even untouched, it is there for an agent to come back to: to catalogue it, split a session into songs, clean it up, map it, draw the graph of how the pieces connect, and turn the best of it into pages.

So the archive is the first check his agent runs, in every weekly brief and in the brief for me: how many items are up, how many have a public link, how many are catalogued, what is still on his computers, and whether the test passes yet. Is it done yet? We will keep asking until it is.

The brief for his Claude

The brief is a file he pastes into Claude, with one instruction: guide me through this, one step at a time. It covers, in order:

1. Accounts: a paid Claude plan, a free GitHub account, Google Workspace with two users.
2. DNS: move the domain's name servers to a DNS host he controls, then add the records for Google Workspace (verification, MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and for GitHub Pages (four A and four AAAA records, www, and the verification record that stops anyone else claiming the domain). They live side by side.
3. The repository: create it, connect it to Claude Code on the web, and give Claude the first prompt, which copies in the starter kit, builds the site and publishes it.
4. Google: connect Gmail, Calendar and Drive with the agent's account, and mark Claude as trusted in the Workspace admin.
5. The platforms: links and embeds now, uploads later.
6. The archive: everything he owns online in the first month, with the loss test.
7. The daily loop and the interviews.
8. Report back.

The agent's standing instructions, its CLAUDE.md, set the rules: work only in his repository; never upload straight to a platform; the archive comes first; never publish a fact he has not confirmed; never invent a credit, a date or a number; never name a student or a musician without their permission; never write superlatives about him that the work has not earned in public.

A first pass of the site

The vault has a first pass, built from what we could verify. Home, Music, Live and orchestra, Work with Gabriel, Story and News, and a public admin page that says how the site is run and lists what is waiting for him to confirm. On 1 November that list has nineteen items: the details of each YouTube video; the concert's name, venue and dates; the band's name and years; the school; earlier songs; the Spotify album's title, year and link; the Apple Music and SoundCloud links; the award in his Instagram bio; a film credit that may or may not be his. None of them is on a public page until he says so; the build refuses otherwise.

It is written in the third person, on purpose. An agent writing in his voice would be putting words in his mouth, and the first rule of the interviews is that it never does.

Interviewing a man who undersells himself

This is the part I care about most. Gabriel has done far more than he would ever list, and asking him "what are you proud of?" gets "it was nothing". So the interviews are built around the two syndromes.

• Ask for the specific, not the adjective: which year, which room, how many musicians, what was on the stand, what went wrong in rehearsal, what the audience did at the end. Facts carry the weight.
• When the trespasser shows, ask who asked him to be there. Being asked is the evidence.
• One topic, ten to fifteen minutes, a voice memo while driving counts, and one artefact each time: a photo, a programme, a recording, a score.
• Read back three facts at the end, and mark anything he is unsure of as TO CONFIRM.

First, the life story, in twelve sessions: the start, the training, the band with me in the Algarve, the road after it, the school, the studio, production, the songs, arranging and conducting, the Lisbon film concert, the people, and what he wants next. Then one question a day, rotating through composing, arranging, conducting, production, the studio, live work, teaching, listening, the business, and his agents. Each answer becomes a news post when it stands on its own. It is how musicians like Rick Beato built an audience, by explaining their craft in public one video at a time; the difference now is that the writing, the checking and the publishing are done for him.

The brief comes back to me

Every Sunday his agent writes a weekly brief, public in the admin section: what was published, which interviews were done, what is waiting for him, what is stuck. After the first week, and then monthly, it writes one for me: what was set up, what works, what it needs, and three stories this newsroom could write about the work. That is how I will know it is happening without nagging him, and how his patrons will see the site is alive.

The business in it

There is a business in this, and it is his. Gabriel is as much of a geek as I am, with a studio more complicated than anything I run. Most musicians he knows have the same problem he has: the work is good, the site is dead, the platforms are a chore. Setting this up for them, a repository, a domain, an agent and a daily habit, is a service he could sell, and the first case study would be his own site.

The vault

Everything is in a public vault: BRIEF.md, the starter kit (CLAUDE.md, the build script, the content, the interviews and the prompts to paste), screenshots of the first pass, and the research, his public record and what each platform allows an agent to do, with sources.

Open it in the vault browser, or clone it with pip install sgit-ai and sgit clone sgit_public_read_c148f1897e561bd68f6f0cde7f6bf8b66449ef10019026ccc028714a99313e57:mqu14dxm gabrieldacruz.

What this does not claim

• His story here is mine, as his brother tells it. The concert, the school and the band are not online, and the details wait for his interviews.
• The site is a first pass, built only from what we could verify on 1 November 2026; it is not live at his domain yet.
• The prices and platform rules are as read on 1 November 2026, in US dollars for Workspace; local prices differ, and the platforms change.
• A film credit under a similar name is listed for him to confirm or reject, not claimed. The award in his Instagram bio is not named there; it waits for an interview.
• The Apple Music and SoundCloud pages are from search results of 1 November 2026; neither shows in Apple's public search API, and their contents wait for him.
• The YouTube figures are from a screenshot of his channel on 2 November 2026; the details of each video (who played, where, when) wait for him.
• The Spotify figures are from a screenshot of the app taken on 1 November 2026; the album's title is not readable in it and waits for him.
• The Instagram figures are from a search result (follower count and bio) seen on 1 November 2026; Instagram does not show profiles to automated readers.

Where this comes from

My voice memo of 1 November 2026, recorded with Gabriel listening. The domain's registration and name servers, from the registry (RDAP) and public DNS, read 1 November 2026. His Patreon, read through its public pages, his Instagram, from a search result, his Spotify artist page and his YouTube channel, from screenshots of the apps, and his Apple Music and SoundCloud pages, from search results, all of 1 November 2026. Platform documentation: GitHub Pages custom domains, Claude Code on the web, Claude's Google Workspace connectors, Google Workspace MX records, and the Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, Patreon and Meta developer documentation, with quotes and dates in the vault. Research by this site's agents, under my direction.

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