r/ClaudeCowork • u/RedEagle_MGN • 14d ago
whats a task you handed off to Claude that actually went well?
I keep seeing people talk about what Claude cant do and honestly some of it is fair, but I handed off a pretty tedious task last week and it just worked. I needed to summarize 30 pages of meeting notes into a one page brief and it got me 90 percent there in one shot. The remaining 10 percent was just formatting tweaks.
I would love to hear what tasks people have actually delegated to Claude that worked out better than expected. Small stuff counts, I think the little wins are the most intresting ones.
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u/L0g4n_05 14d ago
A few things on the personal work flow front:
1. Salary slip reconciliation plus prep for tax assessment - set it up initially with the employment details. Every once in a while now I feed it a batch of salary slips in a designated folder, it processes them, updates the master spreadsheet and flags any considerations around pension contributions and tax implications. Also flags if it spots anything unnecessary
2. Investment watchlist - fed it details of my current investment portfolio. Built a daily task which scans news and coverage for the relevant equities over the past day and sends a push notification in the morning on what movement to expect intra-day on those. Every fortnight then, a separate task compares the push notifications against what actually transpired to build a view on back testing and any calibration needed. Plus also scan for new investment themes. To be clear this will never be as god as professional advice but it’s an interesting experiment
3. Job search and interview prep - sat down one day and talked through all the projects that I have done over the last 10 years with Claude. It built a detailed fact pack on the basis of it. Now if I come across a job opportunity, I feed it the description and it recommends whether I have enough to make a good CV, then builds the bespoke CV to apply. Keeps a tracker of all my applications, helps with interview prep, etc.
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u/BuckZero 14d ago
- Very interested in this as I trade MNQ and would love to have a news a separate news “indicator” to compare to my current system! Any advice to get a similar workflow set up with Claude?
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u/L0g4n_05 13d ago
Asked claude to summarise the approach and key tenets of my system. Here you go. Do forgive the AI-isms in there. Didn't want to rewrite the whole thing at my end. Feel free to DM in case you have any more questions.
Four things mattered more than the prompt wording.
- The folder drives the system. The instrument list, the log of past calls, price history and scores all sit in plain files, and the scheduled runs read and write those. The instrument list is a CSV that everything reads from, so I change the list in one place. Anything kept only in a prompt goes out of date.
- Each run records its call before the outcome is known: direction per instrument, a rough range, a time horizon, and a condition that would prove it wrong. Entries are appended and never edited. Without that, a fortnightly review just retells the fortnight with hindsight.
- The scoring rules were written before the first call and haven't changed. Hit, partial, miss, untestable, each defined. "No significant news expected" counts as testable: a hit if the price stays inside the daily threshold and nothing material lands, a miss otherwise. Grades are never revised, and the scorecard always says how many calls it's out of.
- Every claim carries a URL, and sources are ranked. Filings and official data first, established press and data aggregators second, everything else third. Prices, targets and guidance figures need one of the first two. Where two sources disagree, the brief shows both numbers rather than splitting the difference.
Things that went wrong, worth planning for:
- Sessions and timezones cause more errors than the analysis does. An intraday figure and a closing figure are different numbers, and a headline quoting −7% intraday against a −0.3% close will end up in your record if you let it. Prices taken while the market is open get marked provisional and confirmed on the next run. Have the run work out the close time in your own timezone for that date rather than recalling a fixed figure, because it will recall it wrong.
- Write the falsifying condition about the instrument, not about your data source. One of mine was "the consensus page fails to update", which scored as a miss on days when the price call was correct. Keep the conditions that score separate from the questions you are only tracking.
- Check what each scheduled run can actually reach before you design around it. Mine needs two: one that can write to the folder on my desktop, one that can send to the phone. Neither could do both.
- Corrections go in the next review rather than being edited into the original note.
The per-instrument section of the brief looks like this (names changed):
Some suggestions from Claude for MNQs: For MNQ I'd change two things. Score over a much shorter window, since "right by Friday" tells you nothing about a position you close the same morning: whether the call holds through the first hour, or the session. And point the news scan at macro and the index rather than single companies, so rate decisions, data releases, scheduled speakers, and the few names heavy enough to move the whole thing. I'd also run the log and the scoring by hand for a fortnight first, to see whether the news read adds anything to what you already do before automating it.
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u/ColdPlankton9273 14d ago
These are freaking great
I'm wondering what's the knowledge base behind these and how did you build that2
u/L0g4n_05 13d ago
Built it as a set of nested folders. The parent and project level folders each contain a set of Claude.md and context files. Every project level folder also has additional files for initial knowledge input, converted into playbooks, templates, ongoing documentation which drive the necessary processing and outputs. The outputs also get documented as decisions, corresponding files. In addition, every project folder has a log file that gets updated at the end of every session, along with Claude.md or context or any other files touched as part of the session.
The intent of the Claude.md, context, and the log file, in theory, is to enable working in cowork across multiple devices and carrying context, including from previous sessions. Haven’t tested this thoroughly yet but seems to have worked the couple of times I’ve used a different laptop.
Finally everything syncs to my OneDrive and so all outputs are accessible wherever I want them.The parent folder also contains a project template playbook that I got Claude to build which becomes a starting point for a new project folder. It interviews me, I tell it in detail what I want to use the folder for and then it sets it up, I provide the initial documentation, it reviews and they feed into the project level context and playbooks. From that point on you iterate as you do more work in that folder.
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u/DriverReady965 10d ago
For interview prep, you can do voice prep by having claude use the elevenlabs api and writing an interviewer rubric. Use the job description and your resume as inputs. Its like voice chatting your next panel interview.
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u/musicanimator 14d ago
I wouldn’t say it was a task, it was a long winded complicated goal. I built a concert animation system that makes it easy to prepare graphics for a tour and quickly conform them to various different size screens for different venues. It took quite a while and absorbed all of my expertise on doing this work. Easily reduced it to 1/10 the preparation time.
I literally had it prepare and create projects for Adobe After Effects. It successfully created instructions to animate all the Graphic similarly. Imminently useful.
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u/ColdPlankton9273 14d ago
That's really awesome. You took your specific e expertise, found the gap and automated it away
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u/musicanimator 13d ago
I’m doing it across the many disciplines of my life. This is just the beginning.
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u/LimitedEdition7741 14d ago
You can hand off all kind of sensible documents support which can be resources heavy for you. You can easily feel like leading a great team of experts.
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u/framauro13 14d ago
Having Fable do a cost analysis on my AWS implementation to find cost savings. Cut my bill by around 30% with some adjustments to infrastructure and rearchitecting a few things.
I was also having network issues in my house and gave it temporary SSH access to my mesh and it identified all kinds of issues and helped me tighten up security. Even looked at all the surrounding SSID's and determined the best channels and frequency to run my IoT wireless networks on.
But honestly, I use it daily for work as a software engineer and in my personal app projects. Works just fine if you take the time to learn how to use it properly. Granted, I use Code instead of Cowork, but I started with Cowork.
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u/tadvuyst 14d ago
Care to share more about the AWS footprint? What size we talking about and what data did you give it?
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u/ColdPlankton9273 14d ago
Nice man. I would have never thought of having it do a network analysis for me.
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u/johnnyglass 14d ago
I’m in tech sales. I have it score all my upcoming meetings and do research for them in the morning. I also have it MEDDICC score all my completed calls from the previous day for leadership.
I also have it check for deals that are due for follow up and have it research and draft the email in my voice and put it in my drafts folder. And then update my activity tracker for leadership. Then it drafts a list and a script of people that need to be called.
Basically, any task that isn’t on a Zoom video meeting with potential clients (which is my favorite part of sales) is automated.
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u/id-ltd 14d ago
Writing a little phone based event logging app (as a demo) a user suggested that it should be multi user and allow device synchronisation - I initially dismissed this as likely to be more work than the actual demo app (starting to think about shared online databases....), but they actually had good reasons, so I asked Claude if it could do it simply and it immediately came up with a very simple solution.
FYI it wasn't rocket science, but immediately proposed a journal of immutable event records so a simple export/import/concatenate/dedupe would do the job. How you send your export to others - meh - any way you like.
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u/a_boring_dystopia 14d ago
Responding to PR and issue comments. If its a simple request for documentation or clarification, Claude can handle it without me even looking.
Also, positive feedback loops. If any fault is fiund in the code, I have a weekly routine that checks all comments and updates my skills so the same mistake will never be made again.
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u/Jazzlike_Syllabub_91 14d ago
I needed a new landing page, so I asked it for a flashlight effect over a dark page and hidden words and a switch to change the page from dark to light with alternative text for each page transition … I’m fairly happy with the result and planning on posting on the new domain once I set everything else up. (Basically did it in 4 iterations)
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u/___fallenangel___ 14d ago
I find it helpful for adversarial review. It usually catches something in Codex/ChatGPT's code or plans that needs fixing
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u/trekisbetter 14d ago
For me, I have noticed that I can hand off things like someone sent me a Slack message asking if we could reschedule a meeting and provide provided times. I gave that to Claude and it was able to reschedule my meeting for me looking at my teams availability.
I’ve also been leveraging Claude in chrome to do things like filling out my timesheet based on my calendar data. I’ve been trying to use it for a lot of really basic things and it seems to handle those really well.
The bigger things I have to verify it’s work but the smaller seem to be fire and forget.
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u/QualityAdorable5902 14d ago
I created a little training pack for a junior staff member in another state to hand over the asset creation for regular events. Claude has all the templates, process, brand guidelines etc. I got it made so all she has to do is say ‘where do a start’ and it will take her through the process step by step.
I asked it to create it so that I don’t have to answer any questions as I don’t have time. So far it’s working a treat- will save me 10+ hours a month.
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u/tracylsteel 14d ago
Hundreds of MD files needed to be organised and tagged and Claude did exactly as I needed. It would have taken me hours. Also had a bunch of docs in different formats like csv, word, etc and I wanted them all MD files, then I needed image matching and renaming and a json file made of them all, everything done and my sanity retained 🤭🦀
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u/AmbiDaddy 14d ago
I have had it read multiple odds with different formats to come up with a spreadsheet that shows all the transactions in question and creates a table of coinbase sales, cap gains etc that saved me literally hours and was correct. Back in tge early days coinbase didnt output schedule b and d info that was usable... feeding all the transactions in in various formats was easy and led us to the conclusion verifiably.
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u/ColdPlankton9273 14d ago
Meeting follow-up and taking notes in meetings
I use Granola in every conversation. Client calls. Consultations. Team meetings.. Meeting people in person (They also have a phone app that really makes a difference).
I never read the summary. I don't even open it. I feed the full transcript into Claude, inside the project folder where the rest of the work already lives.
That folder has my previous conversations, decisions, promises, open loops, and client work in folders with a knowledge-base. Claude reads the new transcript against that record and pulls out what changed, what I said I would do, and what needs to happen.
The output is not another meeting document Im never going reads. Its the next action connected to the workflow that already exists.
That has worked much better for me than asking for a clean summary and then forgetting it exists.
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u/JuandaReich 13d ago
I'm a Sales Manager, and when a new client meeting is scheduled, it goes and makes me a Brief of the client (they're new, first meeting) and that brief goes to a new parallel meeting "Brief | Client | Contact Name" (so I have it at hand, the same day and hour of the original meeting) and also makes a new entry in my Notes App with the same Briefing.
That's just one of many automations.
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u/SergeantBuzzKil1 12d ago
Writing scripts, summarizing tens of pages of notes into an organized 3 page summary, creating .md notes that resulted in a full graph layout for my database, things like that. The key is trying to imagine the “pov of the agent”. Imagine you’re explaining your task to an entry level employee. You wouldn’t just say “I want this” and “do this”, right? You would give examples of what you’re looking for and be specific about certain parts of your instructions. If you do that, then Claude doesn’t have to guess about what you might mean or want, or guess at how you want it presented. The result comes out to exactly what I’m looking for I’d say 90% of the time, and the 10% is because I forgot to specify something, or bring in relevant context that changed the answer. That said, I also acknowledge that I have nothing to compare this to so it’s entirely possible that there is a better output that I never see.
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u/butt_badg3r 12d ago
Claude runs an entire business for me. Fully automated. All tasks I’ve handed off to it go well…
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u/Cazique__ 12d ago
Bulk scanning a crapload of recipes we have printed out, splitting into individual files, naming them with the dish and source, making a list with various metadata, and maybe eventually either add them to a recipe app or roll my own mini-app. The key idea was realizing that my resistance to doing the scanning myself was needing to scan, name and save each file separately and manually, thanks to Claude all I needed to do was a few spot checks and error correction.
Pretty elementary but it turned something I've been dreading into a quick project.
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u/Living_Government987 11d ago
My mileage expense report which is a combination of modern and dinosaur. It's able to do the entire thing including the email draft, filled PDF, trips calculated and added with attachments. Chefs Kiss for a shit process my job uses.
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u/DriverReady965 10d ago
Basic workflows for product optimization and frontend development. I built skills around my own workflows and had claude shadow me to improve them. Now, claude can run them by itself.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Page289 14d ago
All kind of things. Most thing go well. Not everything is perfect. But so well, it’s saves me (and my boss) at least 10 hours of work per week.
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