> Scheduled tasks that run locally ( https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13854387-schedule-rec... ) importantly different from Claude Code routines
What do people do with these? I don't use Claude but when I did I couldn't think of anything useful to do with the routines. I'm probably not being imaginative enough.
At work, I have my Claude set up to go through the issue tracker, source control, dashboards, team Slack channels, calendar appointments, and have it look for things like upcoming scheduling issues and deadlines that might get tough. A lot of those services need a corporate VPN or access to my local machine for the LLM to get the information right.
Nothing I can't do myself (and generally I do keep an eye on that sort of thing), but it did catch a holiday for my foreign team members that seemed to have gone unnoticed, and remarked about a status mismatch between Jira and source control that made the dashboard misrepresent progress. It's not much, but it's an extra little check that works quite well.
Another trick I'm experimenting with is having Claude rebase my open PRs waiting for review every day, and auto-solving conflicts when they arise. I don't trust it enough to let it push code to the repository, but I think I have the prompt set up in such a way that I might soon start using it.
Cowork is pretty useful for non-technical folk for things you'd traditionally just write a quick little bash or python script for (which really, is what Cowork is doing behind the scenes anyway).
I've gotten good results using it at work for keeping track of expense receipts. I dump them into an "Inbox" folder and Claude will OCR them, convert any images to PDF, rename, and move them into year/month/date folders and classify them (cost centers, based on a mapping and examples I gave it). This runs daily, checking the Inbox directory for new items.
My next step is getting it to pull them from my email automatically for me as well, or from a specific alias so when I take a pic of a receipt on the go I can just email it and have Claude rename and organize it for me, then it all gets sent off to AP at the end of the month.
Non technical knowledge workers have all kinds of little admin tasks like that which Cowork can do for them, where previously they lacked the skills or will to just learn some python and script it themselves.
I’d like the thing to read my mail twice a day and tell me if I missed something important.
Haven’t set it up because I’m horrified by the thought of it reading my mail. Doubly so if it decides to do anything other than telling me if I missed something important.
Some good ideas here: https://posthog.com/blog/making-claude-cowork-actually-usefu...