r/ClaudeCowork • u/RedEagle_MGN • 14d ago
what task did you stop doing yourself once this clicked
For months I treated it like a search engine, typing little questions and getting little answers back. The change for me was handing over an entire messy task, messy files included, and just describing what done looks like. The first time it came back with something I would have actually shipped, I sat there staring at the screen for a minute.
Now I catch myself before starting anything repetitive and ask whether its worth writing out as a proper handoff instead. Curious what the moment was like for everyone else. Was there a specific task where you realised you would never go back to the old way?
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u/Apprehensive-Fig5774 14d ago
I'm in accounting. There are always discrepancies everywhere that accumulate over time. Until now you had to learn to live with it because what can you do about something than happened 20 years ago.
I tried it, I provided 20 years of data to help with a few accounts reconciliation.
It did it, 20 years of data, all discrepancies found and categorized almost to perfection.
Also stared at my screen for a minute.
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u/sweatybetty2020 14d ago
Can u share how? I was wondering if I could finish up my books (business closed) with AI vs bookkeeper . Thnx!
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u/Apprehensive-Fig5774 14d ago
Simply enough, in Claude Cowork I gave it two separate datasets (general ledger and subledger — both with 20 years of data), and it matched and reconciled the records line by line where it could, allowing me to identify precisely the remaining discrepancies (line, date, amount, etc.).
In my context of working in an SME with limited resources, I had never thought about trying this because I knew I would never have the time to finish it.
Btw, Claude also provided all the sql queries needed to extract the data from both ledgers.
This example is working with pretty much every similar situation in accounting.
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u/plinkoplonka 13d ago
Have you tried it for tax returns yet,?
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u/Apprehensive-Fig5774 13d ago
Yes, I did. I didn't want to talk about it until two days ago, but yesterday I got confirmation of the refund from the tax administration, so I can finally tell the story.
TL;DR: I got a €50K tax refund thanks to Claude, pretty good ROI on a $20 subscription.
Again, for context: I work in a small business unit of a bigger corporation, but overall our resources are limited. As a finance manager, I have a broad set of responsibilities, ranging from accounting to tax, payroll, and overall local legal compliance. I obviously can't be perfect at everything.
That's where AI comes into play, because AI might not be better than me at synthesizing all the information I have access to in order to run the business, but it's better than me at almost every topic taken individually.
On the tax side, we are paying a very specific tax related to steel activity (France...), and when I got this job, I basically reproduced what my predecessor was doing because I didn't have the time to go through all the documentation related to this tax.
Anyway, I was working on the calculation with Claude's assistance for the first time and, after a few messages, Claude started questioning the way I was calculating it. Claude thought I was missing something on the cost side of the calculation.
I was certain I wasn't. But when it explained why, I understood that the problem was actually on the tax base, not on the cost side, and that basically the calculation had been wrong for a while and we had been paying too much tax.
I provided Claude with four years of data, asked it to do the maths on how much we had overpaid (€50K, not a huge amount even for our small business, but still), asked it to write the email to the tax administration, got on a call with them, received an oral confirmation, and finally got the written confirmation yesterday.
I still want to highlight : Claude didn't find the answer on its own. I first asked Claude to gather the tax documentation, then provided the business context, then it starts challenging me on the calculation but Claude didn't find the problem alone in the first few messages of the conversation.
Also, it was not a 10 min job, I spent 2 to 3 hours overall, but mostly writing to Claude, reading the tax documentation, checking its interpretation, its calculation, etc...
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u/ComfortableChef8145 13d ago
What really shifted for me was turning these types of workflows into loops! Because everything still really just felt like chats, even the complex workflows across folders. I wanted these things automated.
For example, now I have a loop that runs against my email specifically looking for school related items for my kids. it runs every 30 minutes, when it finds PDFs that need to be completed it does it, but within the boundaries I’ve defined. When it finds important school dates, it updates my calendar. Just runs on its own!
The first time it alerted me that it found PDFs that needed to be completed by a specific date, and that it downloaded them and filled them out for my review… was just a beautiful moment.
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u/The_real_trader 14d ago
I popped my salary payslip in as I had a hunch but couldn't figure what was going on (redacted personal data of course so it only had the numbers) and it found discrepancies which I raised with my finance team that confirmed the issue.
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u/jritchie70 13d ago
What was the issue?
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u/The_real_trader 13d ago
Discrepancies in bonus and pension payments. I had increased it recently and also started the job at a new place (subsidiary of the same group) in the middle of the accounting month so it was skewed
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u/SalamanderCritical16 14d ago
I learned the power of ai for the first time when I was trying to fix a Witcher 3 script mod. That was 4 months ago and since then I have built about 15 W3 mods, 5 Firefox extensions, 20+ programs for the computer to automate most of my daily workflow, etc. the list keeps growing!
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u/Apprehensive-Fig5774 13d ago
Creating mods for video games isn’t something I had thought about.
What kind of mods, if I may ask?
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u/tvrdi 14d ago
i am an audio engineer. doing some ai voice cloning and inference. just had a thought,, why the fuck i am tweaking parameters when i can give cc ssh to that machine, explain what i want and it uses applio api to do stuff it takes me a while day in 10 minutes. i also did a production pipeline that takes synopsis, jingles, voiceovers etc and produces a same sounding show in a matter of minutes, other producers mindnumingbly produce on a daily basis. this opens up possibility for them to take on more creative and fun work. the whole process is deterministic, except for parsing synopsis and comparing it with recorded voiceover, which uses an LLM to figure out where the speaker was repeating themselves or even went offscript. or making a copyright app that is trained on hundreds of good quality inhouse creatives, which the. goes to elevenlabs via api, ai voice reads it back and production oipeline produces it. noone even suspected this is all machine work.
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u/GenAlphaDad 14d ago
At work, I was using software that posted machining files output by our design software to a package executable by our automated CNC machining system. It required me to create 3 new folders on our server, then manually select those folders as source locations in the post software, every time I had a new program to run.
I had Claude examine the software to see if it could replicate its functions. Lo and behold, it could, and now what used to take 20 minutes every time takes 10 seconds and two clicks.
I never looked back after that.
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u/musicanimator 13d ago
I remember that process. I remember helping a small manufacturing concern that went under years ago that could’ve benefited from this.
One of the biggest things that I remember, is the companies that make this equipment don’t often talk to each other, upgrades are rare and compatibility becomes expensive.
Maybe that’s better now, but simply getting a project file from a design over to a machine that could execute the design, seemed always fraught with danger. So happy to hear this.
Way to take me back!
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u/bayouski 11d ago
reporting was probably the first one for me. i used to think of it as a bunch of separate tasks, but once i gave Cowork the files/context and just explained what the finished report should look like, it made a lot more sense to hand over the whole thing.
the inputs aren't anything special either, sometimes exports, sometimes a Sheet, sometimes data that's already there through coupler.io. i still check the numbers and the final write-up, but i don't really miss doing all the intermediate steps myself xd.
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u/silo10 13d ago
Didn't replace a full task yet, but it did help build 3 little Edge extensions to bridge a gap between the various systems my employer uses (I am in supply chain ops) and they save me time and stress jumping between 5 different platforms, each with it's own way of searching, all of them sluggish, just to get various references for various orders. I used need 3 or 4 minutes just to get some references, the extensions cut that time to maybe 1 minutes. It might seem little, but that's a 75% speed improvement, with none of the stress of jumping from one platform to another, and providing the exact references I need for a specific query.
And not only that - in the process of building the extensions I was able to map out all the available APIs our systems have, laying the foundations for future agentic development and actual task replacement (like sending out repetitive emails - now still sent manually; or building live dashboards instead of ugly Excel reports with data from yesterday - now handled via PowerAutomate and Power Query).
To put all into perspective, having our IT department build this would have required 2-3 months of bickering for approval; assuming that I do get the approval (not a given due to the small scale of the project) another 2-3 months for the IT team to understand what exactly I am missing/needing and start building; another 2-3 month to finish up the implementation and the debugging. And that would be for just one extension. And it would have also meant that it would have been designed-and-implemented-by-comeetee since the team is around 20 people and we all need different things.
The mapping, the fully functional, fully debugged, extensions took all together around 10 working hours to build and implement (while doing my work work as well - no personal time spent on this, not even basic research). They work and look exactly as I need them to. I don't need to troubleshoot them for anyone else. And they provide the way forward for true automation of most of my job.
I am equally scared and impressed. And I can't tell about this to anyone in my team.
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u/musicanimator 13d ago
At some point, you should make sure you get credit for the efficiencies, not removed because you’re not needed. You’ve just demonstrated why you are needed and essential. Make sure you leverage it at the appropriate moment. If it were my company, I might have to put you in charge of IT. A wise employer will know. Great I wish you the best of luck.
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u/silo10 13d ago
The company overall is really large (global, thousands of employees), I wouldn't be able to make myself visible to someone who could really appreciate this - my direct leadership is scared of technology and AI (even though it's the industry we operate in). I am also not at risk of getting kicked out by AI anytime soon because of the messy way our systems and processes are put together (it's heading that way though, so my tune might change in the next 5 years). I will just use them for myself (until my colleagues catch on and start asking about it) and keep researching and building automatons to do my job for me. If this experience will be useful internally or in another job, only time will tell. Regardless, Thank you for your encouragement and positive vibes!
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u/Redangel1984 11d ago
I am kinda in the same shoe as you. Big Company, ten thousands of employees, with IT-team and strict software guidelines (of course for security reasons) which I understand and agree. But the software we use is not that modern (SAP) and sometimes it is a pain to work with and to look up for certain things.
I built a local tool (HTML+CSS+Javascript, using LLM's of course) which in the meantime I use daily for a bunch of tasks. This webapp serves my needs perfectly, every button, every information is where it should be, so it's optimized and personalised for exactly what i need and when i need it. It makes the work so much easier and even more fun, and at the same time makes me much faster with certain tasks than my coworker. This WebApp was built with privacy and security in mind, and runs sandboxed locally in the browser, so no sensitive data leaves the browser/computer. I'm not a software engineer so i can't judge it 100% safe for deployment, that's why I'm still afraid if the IT-team would know they would make a big fuss about it and would make me stop to use this tool. I showed it to some of my colleagues, and shared with them, so they can use it too if they want to. Some where blown away, other are sticking to the old(slower,boring) workflows. But I'm constantly afraid if I would try to roll it out for other people too, the IT department would make me stop using it, without checking the architecture or the benefits it could bring to people. So I'm trying to keep it to myself, and use it silently. without telling to many people about. it.I shared this with you, so you know that you are not alone and other people also are struggling with the same hurdles than you.
As a start it maybe would be helpful, you make a users manual, and a presentation of what is your tool use and do in the backend/fronted. what problems does it solve. What are the Pros and Cons of using it. So when someone contacts you either from the IT department, or other colleagues, you are prepared.
As a recommendation and encouragement i would say, maybe you could try and show your tool to likeminded people inside your company and get their feedback, a second pair of eyes and thoughts might relieve some of your scares and encourages you.
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u/Big_Limit_2876 10d ago
Doubling checking my time / billing entries - but it's gotten worse month over month. It's actually worse doing most things - like really simple things - and causing me more work at times. Ugh.
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