Claude Code/Cowork by Anthropic recently surprised me the most.
1. Chatting with customer support to negotiate refunds and discounts
Ikea and DoorDash messed up a few orders for me recently. So I started online support chats with each company, but got distracted while waiting for responses, so mid-conversation the support agents closed the chat and I had to start over... This prompted me to give Claude access to my browser and just handle the conversations for me. I told it to keep running until the goal was achieved. At DoorDash, Claude even complained to the support agent about my inconveniences, which resulted in receiving a $10 refund.
2. Building a CRM browser extension
I recently started using Attio as a CRM, which brings me the main benefit of not needing to manually create each contact, Attio does it automatically based on email history. (Tip: Attio's free version is enough for this.) However, Attio isn't optimized for LinkedIn. It seems designed mainly for managing company relationships, not personal connections. Attio's browser extension only allows adding new companies. So I asked Claude to build me a custom browser extension to add LinkedIn profiles to Attio with one click. A few minutes later I had it set up. Claude navigated via my browser to Attio and created an API key itself! with the required read/write permission levels. The only thing I had to do was add the folder with the extension code to my Chrome extensions. The extension even checks my CRM to see if the person already exists in Attio, and allows me to add them to different pipelines.
3. Renaming files
Often I start with a solid structure for managing files. When life happens, it gets messy. Now in Claude Cowork I just select a folder with 18 subfolders and 200+ files and day: clean up folder and rename each file using industry-standard naming conventions & open each file to analyze content. Within a few minutes the mess was gone and every file was properly named.
4. Finding cleaning support
I told Claude to go to Craigslist in my browser and write a post following my requirements. A few hours later I received over 50 applications. Then Claude analyzed all the emails and ranked the applicants. I just had to call the best 2 options and decide. -
This is only the tip of the iceberg from the past few days. Claude also helped me research 290 profiles of event attendees by spinning up six different agents running Google searches in parallel, ranking them on set criteria, and creating a beautiful summary as output. It also helped me fill out multiple long annoying Google Forms with context from my Google Drive...