Claude code this.

Claude code that.

Entire apps spun up in a prompt.

Full systems designed end-to-end by a model.

Depending on who you listen to, AI is either about to replace entire roles or it’s a gimmick that barely works outside of demos.

For me, none of that really matters.

One very simple thing AI can do has already earned its place in my workflow, and everything else it’s capable of is gravy.

Here’s the story.

An old freelance web client emailed me recently. She has a hand-coded website. No CMS. No admin panel. No fancy editor. Just static files that get updated the old-fashioned way.

She wanted to add a new team member to the site.

Not a difficult task. No problem-solving required. No ambiguity. Just taking a block of copy and wrapping it in the right structure. Paragraph tags. Headings. An unordered list. Spacing. Consistency with the rest of the page.

If you’ve done any amount of web work, you know this type of task well. It’s not hard. It’s just tedious.

And that’s exactly the kind of work that quietly drains your time.

Instead of opening my editor and doing the formatting myself, I copied her email, pasted it into Claude, and asked it to structure the content to match the existing page.

Twenty seconds later, it was done.

I proofed the changes in my browser, gave it a thumbs up and then remembered that it can’t see my thumbs up and then put my thumb away, and pushed the changes to production.

Total effort on my part: review and judgment, not execution.

That’s the part people miss when they talk about AI.

The win wasn’t that Claude “coded” anything impressive. It didn’t solve a hard problem. It didn’t design a system. It didn’t replace expertise.

It eliminated a task I already knew how to do but didn’t want to spend my attention on.

That’s the real leverage.

Most people are trying to use AI backwards.

They point it at the hardest parts of their job. The parts that require context, judgment, tradeoffs, and experience. Then they’re surprised when the output feels shallow, wrong, or untrustworthy.

Of course it does.

Those are the parts you should still be doing.

AI shines when you give it work that is:

  • Well understood
  • Repetitive
  • Low-risk
  • Mentally annoying
  • Necessary but not meaningful

Formatting content. Summarizing notes. Rewriting the same explanation for the tenth time. Turning raw input into a first draft you can react to.

Work that doesn’t make you more valuable by doing it yourself.

The takeaway is simple.

AI is best used to eliminate the parts of your work you already know how to do but don’t want to do anymore.

If you’re using AI for the hardest parts of your job, you’re probably doing it backwards.

The real value of AI isn’t what it can do.

It’s what you no longer have to.