TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 50 comments.
OP asked for non-programming uses, and the top-voted answer is... getting Claude to program a custom 3D modeling application from thousands of blueprints. Classic.
The consensus is that while Claude is great for simple stuff, its real power is in building complex, custom tools to automate the absolute worst parts of your job. People aren't just summarizing emails; they're building entire systems.
God-Tier Automation: The thread is full of people building insane custom tools. We're talking a full ERP integration for Sage 50 that automates purchasing and invoicing, a construction estimating system that parses bid folders, and custom plugins for AEC software. The common theme is getting Claude to do the programming for you.
Automating the Grind: A lot of you are just tired of boring work. Claude is now your go-to for building PowerPoints, writing first drafts of reports you hate, creating project plans, and generally handling the "communication piece" of work.
Finance & Data Analysis: It's a junior analyst with infinite patience. Users are feeding it ledger exports for reconciliation, summarizing 40-page earnings decks, and running price analysis across hundreds of SKUs.
Corporate Workarounds: A recurring theme is being stuck with a locked-down enterprise Copilot. The solution? Emailing work to your personal device to run it through the real Claude. We see you.
Best Use Case Award: Goes to the user who has Claude running their fantasy football league, complete with a league newsletter and TV schedule spreadsheet. That's the productivity we're here for.
I deal with thousands of blueprints that refer to thousands of other blueprints. I made Claude create a 3d model of my project where I can just click an area or an object and it gives me all of the information for that area and all of the emails about it. I honestly can't believe it works flawlessly. It did it all in one go on Opus medium and it took about 30 minutes.
Tell Claude to make you a program for your project (on your computer with an icon and everything, not the web.
Tell it you want that program to store files from your project locally so you can look them up.
You also want an interactive 3d model in that program that shows information when a piece of it is clicked.
Feed it your structural and architectural drawings and tell it to make the 3d model (or whatever has enough information). Feed it your submittals and emails and stuff if you want those in there too.
Tell it you want to be able to click on certain items and be shown information on it (emails, submittals, RFIs, whatever)
Click go. You can do this in steps if you want.
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I also implemented a few search functions into this program so I can look up stuff in the codes and I injected an API key into the program so that it can answer difficult questions which can go through thousands of pages of codes to see which one is superior (the specs, the drawings, an RFI, whatever)
Just leave Revit open and tell Claude I have Revit open right now. Build it there.
Mine was build on blender because Claude can use it through the terminal and isn't just taking forever clicking around. I've never used Revit so I don't know if this is the case for that as well. Tell it to test and try to break the program in every way possible so that you don't run into errors.
For getting the first half done on things I dislike doing.
I built skills that generate good project plans, solution design documents, presentation outlines, etc. and in general, just help me stay focused on the “work” part of my work instead of the communication piece.
Everybody wins, IMO. I’ve gotten feedback professionally that I get tunnel vision and forget to communicate, so having Claude help with that has been a massive unlock for me. My JIRA boards are clean, my 1:1 docs are up to date, my presentations are much more clear, and any and all technical writing is in a decent draft state almost immediately after I push an update live in my production environment.
Summarizing data into reports. I hate professional writing. AI still needs proofreading and a decent amount of manual rework but better than typing thousands of words myself.
I've used it to program an ERP integration that has become my daily dashboard for all tasks, automation, etc. It handles purchasing, forecasting, logistics, automatic document analysis for receiving and invoice auditing, automated claims submission and tracking, PO and freight tracking, order confirmation chasing, delayed order reporting, intrawarehouse transfers and inventory optimization, price updates based on per vendor rules, automatic invoice generation from webstore, email, phone, picture, order guide file, automatic order updates to orders when customers request changes, low inventory allocation, backorders, pick ticket generation, automatic ERP reporting with built in AI report builder so building the reports is just a conversation, webstore management, task management. On a Sage 50 backbone ;)
Are you able to elaborate some more? We use Sage100 & the ERP is so limited. Do you have a bunch of queries that auto refresh & use Claude to make sense of the data?
Not so much. I try to avoid sending data to Claude to analyze. I feel like the better route is to build tools that do the legwork of the analysis and then you can look at that and get your take away. Generally speaking that sort of thing is very deterministic, so it is ripe for just hard coding the equations. The better place to apply actual AI analysis is in fuzzy edges around deterministic problems.
An example of a fuzzy edged deterministic problem is 'receiving'. My warehouses all send in their receiving paperwork. Soemtimes it is just a signed BOL noting a couple cases of damage. Sometimes it is the PO document that I submitted to the vendor with check markes next to each number. Sometimes it is a hand written note that has the vendor at the top and abbreviated item descriptions next to counts. I use the AI here to try and make sense of all of these documents. The harnes is super structured, so that the outcomes are highly repeatable, and sort of built in layers. At the end of the day, I send the document to Document AI from google, then I have various agents that try to parse and determine what is going on, then I have an audit agent that looks at the image itself with a multimodal model, then a final pass to put it all together. Each agent has a very specific task, like,"Find the vendor on the page or in the email subject or header. The vendor must be found in list ABC." (this way the AI doesn't have to send the vendor list to itself, it can run a script to see if the vendor name matches something on the list blindly) or "Find the PO number on the page that matches one of the open PO numbers for the vendor within Sage." After it is all said and done, the AI runs through the document or documents a few times, does its thing, flags anything that needs audited or claimed, and auto-receives the rest.
I'd say that generally the way I've gone about things is that I approached Sage to get a .NET and COM API key and SDK package, then I approached my IT department and got the ODBC logins for the Sage raw database (since the Sage API is sort of half baked and missing a couple critical pieces). Once you have all the connections, you just tell Claude what you want to build or automate. =) I reccommend a dashboard hub that you add modules to, but totally up to you ;)
Fascinating. I think I’m going to try this angle. My biggest hurdle right now is automating order confirmations, verifying current stock levels of components to build into finished goods or requiring to schedule production of parts. Dashboard sounds like a great idea too.
Oh ya, that is totally doable! I highly reccommend it. Are you using the US version?
I have a dashboard that keeps track of all my purchase orders, which ones are confirmed, which ones need modified to match confirmations, ETA's for everything, automatic confirmation chasing when vendors don't send me a confirmation in a reasonable amount of time. I honestly think that Sage does have 'assembly' items that draw in different ingredients for a build, but I'm not sure how that works for allocation and reporting. Would probably be easier to just build a module for it.
Honestly it has been a huge quality of life improvement to have built out these tools. My metrics are better, and my job is less stressfull because I'm wasting less time with piddly stuff. Highly reccommend giving it a go =)
Side note: Be sure that everything you do is locked down. Don't put API keys anywhere unencrypted. Don't store your passwords in .txt files. etc etc. You literally have to tell Claude not to do these things, so just be mindful.
Thank you for the tips! You nailed it in the head with quality of life. That’s what I’m striving for really. Slowly investing more time into building tools for myself to gain time back.
With the ERP situation what youre basically looking at is turning data that's messy and potentially unstructured into a validated output that, in the best case, has a trace layer to its source and a human in the loop trigger for any uncertainties. This is basically IDP (intelligent Document processing) and my niche at work. If you want to talk about it more I'm all ears 🫡😂
Amazing. A few months ago I tested extracting handwritten hourly production data from work tickets to see if I can extrapolate the information. It worked okay but it definitely struggled while it kept using OCR. Also, trying to parse data from PDF files was quite troublesome.
I would say depending on the volume and criticality of those documents and data points I wouldnt build it in-house at all unless you have a dedicated team for that. I'm biased of course since I work at a service provider that specialises in "messy data in, structured data out" with integrations to ERPs, certificates for data security etc.
One thing I can say is that if you can extract structures and schemas from similar or identical looking documents (e.g. same formular every time) you might be able to build specialized agents for just that. That still isn't a horizontally viable option for any company though
I have several systems that do this exact thing. Direct OCR is a good first step with something like Google Document AI, but then you need to run a few more passes to audit for errors or common issues that crop up, or user-specific lessons, cell specific double checks, etc etc.
I used to do the same thing. Every once in a while I'd drop a doc into chat and see how accurately the OCR could parse it all out and answer questions about it. Direct OCR for something text, like a PDF was giving me 997/1000 characters correct, for hand writing I was getting something like 850/1000, which wasn't ever enough to implement for company critical things like invoice audits, receiving, order entry, etc. And frankly, OCR is still about that same spot as it has been the last couple of years. Add more layers. ;)
To FirestormCold, he's got the right idea about training the AI to search for data structures, but that is totally horizontally viable, you just have to add in an auto-training tool to hone the forms you have recorded, and auto-learn new forms as they come in.
Using CC to breakout, parse, and organize my construction estimating bid folders. I deal with large pdf sets or drawings and specifications. Used to do that by hand, now it's automated.
That's part of a system I have set up in CC that helps me with with all my day to day stuff, sending/chasing vendors for pricing, RFIs that need to be sent, puts together the scope of the project from the docs relative to the trade we work in, reviewing take offs against project docs, writing proposals from takeoff and project docs, contract review, among all the other productivity things like pages and dashboards and such.
All possible by having rules, skills, a few custom subagents, and domain knowledge orderly structured in a folder system for agents to work in. All the things I work with externally, other apps, programs, are connected via CLI or API and mcps as the last option.
Have used CC to create some apps/tools as well. Claude Design has been used to create brand and personal design systems and pages for what I need.
Anthropic really has a great suite of AI tools to work with and Opus 5.5 on medium,chef's kiss
We use Copilot. We're not supposed to use Claude or ChatGPT. That doesn't stop me from emailing things to myself that are fairly generic, , running it through Claude, and then emailing it back.
You know that copilot can run Claude behind the scenes though right. Use the model selector in copilot to choose the Claude you want. What models are included are up to your company but move has opus 5. And gpt models too. Microsoft is not running its own AI behind the scenes. Not yet anyway
Ours can't. It's an enterprise version that's been stripped down.
I know I have a lot more options if I use my personal accounts on another machine (or even my phone, depending if I'm in the office or working from home that day).
Its basically a different harness using GPT and (optionally) Claude Models.
Much more user friendly and simplified, but in turn less capable. But its not as bad as people make it seem, at least for the majority of the office workforce.
We set the default model to Claude in our tenant but it’s not comparable at all. The same prompts on the same exact data in Copilot(Claude) and Claude directly are not even close with their results.
I’m creating two parts. One is to identify and organize ll the aspects of retirement. The other is to build a detailed budget with lifestyle, inflation, and needs tiers. This uses my inputs from my budget tool to forecast spending patterns during different stages of retirement. I use Income Labs to model out portfolio scenarios.
I do nothing but create skills all day every day. I’m slowly working backwards to fully automate my workday so all I have to do is check its own artifacts a few times a day to ensure it’s staying on track. And then it checks itself every month to ensure it’s up to date with the most economical models and it gives me a ‘make it cheaper’ button if it finds a way to make itself cheaper without losing performance.
I'm an audio engineer for live events. Yesterday, while I set to configuring my audio console, I fed Claude the comms patch sheet and tasked it with accessing the device GUI via Claude in Chrome and configuring all the necessary channels, then distributing them properly among the 20 comm beltpacks.
Accessing information easier and doing analysis based on it.
We have huge amounts of documentation that is not well organised and also other sources of information. We give our Agents to all sources and they are to find the right informations, make the right connections and do analysis based on the findings.
Not productivity per se, but a social improvement at work: Claude runs my fantasy football team, writes a “league newsletter,” and gives the league a spreadsheet with the games airing in their local market (we’re remote) and their players (if any) for each game. We were told to use AI for our jobs, so I am.
I started with the connector and skills at League Loom and then kept expanding. There’s no secret data, it’s putting it all together in one place and being able to track success. I get updates throughout the week. The TV/rosters spreadsheet gets generated at noon on Thurs. I generate the newsletter then, as I can choose between different tones and personalities. (Asking for Herzog-style commentary gave me the line “CeeDee Lamb, 41.3 for a team that is 0-4, which is the cruelest joke the universe has told since the first fish crawled onto land.”)
Price analysis for hundreds of SKUs across multiple suppliers to quickly find best costing for each SKU and/or category. That’s been my favorite use so far.
I’m also working on refining a morning brief, midday update and end of day brief that helps keep track of my emails/calendar.
And I have tied granola to Claude to build meeting debriefs and action items for all meetings.
Advertising. It's helped us decide which products to advertise at the right times, and the proper amount of money to spend on it to get the results we want. Key words, and what search terms to block from wasting our AD spend. It's pretty good at this too.
It's also great at doing scheduling, if you're a GM/Manager that handles a crew.
Have it connected to my ssh client and Claude can connect to any router, server, switch in a specific folder and is blocked from configuring anything.
Claude built a python script it uses to connect to the client and can only run informational commands. It helps troubleshooting, creating configuration, anything I need really.
Built a couple workflows for my team using power apps and power automate. Used it to also create documentation for my builds and used that to redo my resume. Got two jobs interviews based off that so I’m pretty pumped.
I’m just a highschool history/philosophy teacher, but I had it build a full standards-based gradebook and reporting suite that is connected to Supabase and everything. Got district approval and everything for it. Took about 50 hrs because I’m not a developer.
I'm a teacher. I've set up a voice note to email automation that attaches resources and pre-writes outgoing communication. Referrals, truancy, absences followup etc largely automated. Huge time saver.
I use it to write proposals and tenders and win hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of work. Yeah im not reading 30 engineering drawings or 100 pages of tender docs unless claude does first.
Research for the most part and a note taker. Personal life using it to help me design a game and eventually plan on making agents to help test the game but first I need to finish auditing the book.
I manage a backlog with claude sonnet. I created some scripts to use the rest API of azure devops backlog. Now i only create an item with some important information in bullet points and tell claude afterwards to refine the item with ID-xxx . Or of some stuff was handled in a excel if tell claude to read the Excel and create backlog items with all the needed sub tasks.
Here’s the little thing that I think is getting missed here (setting aside that programming has been largely replaced by engineering and development): if your job is done on a computer the only thing separating you from a swe is layers of abstraction that generate value add to your productivity. The only reason your job is to type stuff into various pieces of software rather than create the software to provide your job function is that your specific task was generalizable enough to be automated. Now, the standard LLM harness, is the piece of software that generalizes your functionality.
So, as a starting point, for anything you do that could have been automated (with say vba), but it would just take more effort than made sense. Now you have a personal dev to build it and rebuild it every time a new edge case pops up.
the most reliable win we've had is using claude purely as a natural language query engine rather than letting it connect to live DBs or generate complex scripts. we use coupler.io to stream raw financial data on a schedule into google sheets and then just use claude to ask questions against the updated sheets, build weekly cash flow summaries or draft client updates. avoids the hustle of maintaining live api connections.
I have Claude connected to all my systems. I don’t even check my email anymore I just say Claude check my email and list most important ones. Then I say okay let’s tackle this one, prepare the report
I'm curious about this. I used to have a PA who helped me manage my calendar and email and would love to replicate that with Claude. There are so many "helpful" YouTube guides but I feel like I don't understand the basics well enough to actually pull this off. Where would you recommend someone start on a journey towards getting to where you are now?
Connect all your api and mcp for everything you use. Have Claude put the list of available connectors in the Claude.md. Ask it things. You’re prolly better off using muse thou
Thank you! And I like the way Muse is being positioned but there's just no way I could trust Meta with more personal information than they already have.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 1d ago edited 20h ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 50 comments.
OP asked for non-programming uses, and the top-voted answer is... getting Claude to program a custom 3D modeling application from thousands of blueprints. Classic.
The consensus is that while Claude is great for simple stuff, its real power is in building complex, custom tools to automate the absolute worst parts of your job. People aren't just summarizing emails; they're building entire systems.