I watched a film while an AI did a boring job for me

The other night I watched a film while an AI did a boring job on my computer for me. It's called Claude in Chrome, and it can use your web browser the way you would, clicking and typing. It got through the whole job in about an hour and a half. All I did was send it a dozen or so quick replies.

The boring job

I build demos for businesses I'm talking to. They're small working versions of the tool the business wants, so the owner can click around and see if it's what they had in mind.

The catch is that I make them on someone else's app, so they had that app's name on them. When I send a link to a business owner, I want it to look like it came from me, on my own website. So each one had to be moved over and tidied up.

The first one took over an hour

That afternoon I did the first one with Claude, one step at a time. A few things went wrong along the way, the way they always do the first time. Each time, we wrote down what fixed it. By the evening we had a list of every step, and every snag we'd hit.

The other five ran while I watched a film

That evening I asked it to do the rest using the list, and I watched my film. It went through them one by one.

It only came back to me when there was something I had to decide. Which demos to put on my website, for one. I only show work for businesses that have actually paid me, and it checked my bank records for that rather than asking me to remember. It asked which version to use where I'd made two, and what to call them.

At one point the app ran out of credits. It didn't buy more. It just told me, and I said leave it there for now. And where something looked like real people's details, it swapped them for made-up ones before anything went live.

By the end of the evening, five demos were up on my own website.

If you want to try it

Plenty of businesses have a job like this. Setting up a new customer, say, or sending the same report every month. Somebody does it the same way every time, and the steps only live in their head.

Next time you do yours, write it down step by step, including anything that went wrong and how you got round it. It takes a bit longer that once. After that, someone else can do it from your list, or an AI can.

Just decide up front what it has to check with you first. For me that's spending money, people's real details, anything that goes public, and which clients get named. Everything else can get done while you do something better with your evening.