My agent use cases, part 1
While we're in this mode of rapidly developing agent capabilities, I want to do my part in diffusing knowledge of what agents can do. Since Claude Code IS the software, I am using it more and more for everyday office work, and rapidly discovering new things that agents can (or cannot) do. My daily driver with those is Claude Code (either through UI or CLI), though at home I often use Codex CLI as well.
Copyediting
I have a setup of several CLI "prose linting" tools that together give me basic Grammarly-like functionality: LanguageTool, Vale, and textlint. When I want something checked, I have Claude run a script, look at the output, ignore the duplicates, and give me a numbered list of issues.
From there, I usually let Claude fix the simplest grammatical errors, and propose edits for the less trivial ones like too long sentences, weasel words, etc. In addition, I can of course get Claude to review anything else about the text simply by reading it. Generally, I don't use LLMs for producing text or major rewrites, because it pushes the text towards the median, which drowns out my voice.
This is not at all a novel use of AI, but I still like it over proprietary vendor tools: I can improve things myself, I can have Claude do it, and I can make granular decisions about what things to auto-fix vs where I want to give input.
Onboarding
Last week I was on an intro call with a new-joiner at Pactum. Among other things they asked my help in identifying all relevant work that had been done so far in her area.
Since my agents have skills to access our main collaboration tools (Google Drive, Confluence, Gitbook), I quickly fed her request directly into Claude for some research. It really only took about three minutes and came back with not just links, but also a 1-sentence description of each, and a category.
Analogously, last week I was onboarding to a new code base. There was a workflow orchestration component which I did not fully understand, so I asked Claude to read all about how it works, make a summary document, and give me a tutorial with progressively more complex examples. That worked super well.
Onboarding people traditionally takes lots of work to get right because documentation is rarely kept up to date; now it can be accelerated a lot.
Expense reports
The age-old job of parsing invoices and producing documentation for reimbursing expenses. Many products have this built-in but we haven't implemented one for our Estonia-based employees yet, so I have Claude do this Excel+email task for me.
Shuffling information to and from Jira
I'm temporarily acting as a lead of a small team while we hire a full-time manager there. We recently started experimenting keeping the team knowledge base in an Obsidian vault -- essentially just Markdown files -- tracked in a Git repository. We're trying to make sure all the team-relevant context exists in that vault.
The setup is powerful: we can have permanent documentation (e.g. team purpose and KPIs) alongside plans, notes, work-in-progress analyses, etc. Since it's Markdown, Claude can easily read, search, and edit too. But we still track progress on our plans in Jira, so we need to keep that updated. Claude handles connecting commits to ticket IDs, adding relevant information to Jira comments, and more.
Other
There are many more small ways I use agents:
- Research + summarization as a category:
- reading through past 1:1 notes with people (for self-reflection),
- understanding what a team has shipped in the last quarter (through Jira and Git),
- understanding my own Chrome history for most visited sites that I need to give agents access to.
- Reviewing a document for staleness (specifically, our Engineering hiring page).
- Creating tickets in a particular format, e.g. for internal IT requests.
And of course, you can still use Claude Code to write code.