Most people I know got to Claude through code, which is reasonable enough considering the name. I got there because at ten in the morning I wanted somebody else to check my numbers.
I'm not an engineer. My job is getting people to use our product, which means I spend a surprising amount of time looking at numbers, looking at people, and then looking at the numbers again because I no longer trust what I saw the first time. I started with Claude Desktop, then tried Cowork, and eventually found routines. I have three now. None is particularly impressive, which is probably why I actually use them.
The serious Publora analytics live in Claude Code in VSCode. That's where the keys are, the detailed data, revenue, and all the things capable of ruining an otherwise decent morning. I can go in there and dig properly, but the problem is that I can always dig properly. There is always another cohort to check, another strange number, another question that suddenly seems urgent because I've opened the file containing it. If I do that every morning, there goes the morning.
So at 10 a.m. Claude sends me a Publora brief: tasks, analytics, meetings, anything that looks unusual. I've normally been at my desk since eight, so by then I've had coffee, answered email and acquired enough emotional stability to look at analytics. If something moved, I open VSCode and investigate. If everything looks normal, I leave it alone. Before this routine, apparently I needed two hours of analysis every now and then to discover that everything was fine.
The second routine runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It looks around my usual topics, finds two or three things worth writing about and puts them in content-backlog.md.
The file turned out to matter. At first I had Claude send me ideas, which produced a very nice list that I would read, approve of and never see again. Now the ideas accumulate in one place. By Friday there are several possible posts in there. Some are bad, some seemed good on Monday and make no sense by Friday, and usually a couple survive.
That's all I need from it. I don't want Claude writing my posts while I sleep. I want to sit down to write and not spend the first forty minutes discovering that apparently I have never had a thought in my life.
The third one is technically a scheduled task rather than a routine. It gives me a Hacker News digest twice a day. This exists because I know what happens when I tell myself I'll check the news when I have time: either I don't, or I open Hacker News to read one thing, then another, then somebody is wrong in the comments, and forty minutes later I'm extremely well informed about something I wasn't working on.
Now the digest arrives by itself. I skim it, open whatever actually looks useful and occasionally find something I want to comment on. I remain approximately aware of the world without having to visit quite so much of it.
There is one limitation: these routines are local, so my computer has to be awake and online. Claude Code also has cloud Routines that can run while the laptop is closed, which means you can wake up and the work is already there. People quite reasonably describe this as an advantage.
I understand them intellectually. Personally, I'm an anxious person, and the idea that Claude has been awake since six doing things on my behalf while I was asleep does not relax me. I'd wake up wondering what it had done. Mine start working when I do. I'm at the desk, Claude is at the desk, and nobody has been getting creative overnight. This arrangement suits me.
None of these routines does anything spectacular. One checks whether something in the numbers needs my attention, one keeps a file of things I might write about, and one reads Hacker News so I don't accidentally spend forty minutes reading Hacker News myself.
I still make the decisions, which unfortunately seems to be most of my job. What disappeared was the need to remember to go and check all this stuff myself. And I set the whole thing up in plain English, without writing code, which is mildly funny considering how long the word "Code" made me assume this wasn't for me.
Now I'm much more interested in the boring things people put on routines than the impressive ones.
I wrote this one with Claude as well: I described what the three routines actually do, it drafted, and I cut the parts that weren't true. Which is more or less the arrangement everywhere else in this post.
What's the stupid recurring thing you got tired of doing yourself?