Because I believe this can be so helpful to many, I am creating this second short post from this post in another thread.
This is all true and I really did save 8-10 hours of work.
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It’s amazing isn’t it.
I created a free illustrated 120 page “kids book for adults”, as a website using Claude code. It took a lot more than 20 minutes! It took many hours actually. But I would never have done it, if I didn’t have the tools.
I wrote the book based on work from another book, and with help from Claude Opus 4.5 to structure it. I used ChatGPT to generate the images - a lot more work than it looks, but people seem to love the results. So much work, but OMG this is liberating.
It’s a 5 minute read:
P.s. The annoying thing about the images is that they transformed the book, in my head, turning into something bigger and more profound than I thought. I am now trying to figure out how to publish the paperback and hardback versions, which is new to me. I had intended publish text only versions of them first … but … well, I’ll figure it out.
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Good story. The images were delightful and added a greater “depth” to the work.
Yeah it’s unreal. We’ve been systematically going through our finance and HR processes with cowork and we’re finding one task after another that we can reduce from hours to minutes. And often unattended minutes. I’ve found myself starting five tasks, having a cup of tea, and finding them all done.
I’ve also started using Beads, which is a persistent memory and project manager for Claude that lets you break up projects into dozens of tasks, each with its own chat. This is even more remarkable tbh.
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What is Beads, I’ve never heard of it.
It’s a plugin for Claude. In a nutshell, it makes a folder that has project instructions in the form of a kanban board in it. Each task on the board can be worked on by an LLM in a separate session, or even each sub task. It then incrementally saves all the work on the project into a private GitHub directory. So it coordinates many chats on a single project over the long haul.
The problem with long term projects is that you have to reexplain the whole project to each new chat window. And without full context the LLM might not understand your long term goals. With Beads the full design document, kanban and project history is in the folder and available.
So you open a new chat, tell it you want to work on, say, task 2.2, and it finds the task and checks inside the folder for everything it needs. It knows what’s come before and what it needs to do in this session without you telling it. So you can just get started. So it helps both you and it remember where you’re to and what to do next.
And when you’ve done the task you get the LLM to wrap up the work for the day and it commits it. It handles all the stuff like critical dependencies and updates. And you can even get it to put tasks from its board into your personal task manager via MCP.
It’s text based but there’s some good visual plugins for it.
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I still don’t use LLMs very much at all, but it did help me yesterday.
We’re in yearly corporate performance assessement mode at work, and we’re all required to document our own stellar achievements for the previous cycle. CoPilot gave me ready-to-paste manager-friendly plattitudes in no time flat.
Due to the published scoring mechanism, I already know what grade I will be assigned. Management don’t even need to read it. We just need to “feed the beast” to avoid showing up on the non-compliant report - which is the only thing read by humans, AFAIK.
That’s fascinating, thanks for the explanation, much appreciated!