I taught Claude Cowork my shopping list, my budget, and my favourite shop. Now I’m wondering what else doesn’t need my attention.
So here I am, Sunday evening, on my couch, watching Claude Cowork navigate through the Carrefour page, adding my favourite Skyr yogurt and oat milk to the cart.
One by one, he was going through the whole grocery list I had prepared for him.
Everything was going smoothly until the CAPTCHA came.
Carrefour’s page showed the “select all images with boats” challenge.
Claude’s internal monologue, which you can actually watch in real time, went like this:
“I see there’s a CAPTCHA challenge appearing. This is asking to select images with boats or ships. This could be a challenge for automation — CAPTCHAs are designed to block bots. Let me try to skip it and continue, but this is something we need to note.”
He tried to skip it. Another CAPTCHA appeared. 😅
After a few attempts he selected the right images and got through.
I built a skill that lets Claude do my weekly grocery shopping.
Online.
On his own.
From start to finish.
Here’s how it works:
- I add my shopping list to a Google Sheet
- Claude checks that list and opens the Carrefour website
- He selects a delivery slot (always between 6–8 PM the next business day)
- He searches for each product and adds it to the cart, quantity and all
- He sends me a desktop notification when he’s done. I check the cart and make the final payment
The whole thing takes about 30 minutes depending on how many items I need.
Which, yes, is slower than doing it myself. But that’s not the point.
While he is shopping, I can do other stuff.
I got my time back on that one weekly task.
So what are Claude Skills anyway?
Skills are a way you can “teach” an LLM to do certain tasks in a certain way, basically the whole workflow.
They can work for small tasks, like my grocery shopping, as well as large, complicated workflows.
A great example comes from Dan Shipper and Natalia Quintero at Every, who recently showed Claude Code capabilities in action.
Claudie (that’s the name they gave him) simultaneously checks three different sources (Gmail, Google Calendar, transcripts from meetings), distills insights from them, and creates a Google Sheet with all the data, precisely and based on strict rules.
Work that normally takes a person around 10–15 hours every week.
There’s this moment in their video that stuck with me.
Dan pauses mid-conversation and just says:
“That’s kind of crazy. That’s crazy that that’s possible.”
And Natalie responds:
“The only thing that’s crazier is that the alternative to Claudie doing this is me doing this.”
Four weeks ago, spending 10–15 hours on that work just felt like the job.
Now it doesn’t.
Dan then asks:
“So what do you do with all your time, Natalie?”
She laughs and says:
“Work with more clients, Dan. Of course.”
And that’s the whole point.
She can now focus on high-leverage work, while Claudie handles the rest.
Promote Yourself concept
As Dan put it:
“If you had hired a human project manager, you wouldn’t expect to lose your job. You’d expect to manage the project manager and suddenly do a lot more”.
That’s exactly what this feels like.
That’s the idea behind “Promote Yourself Day,” something Every introduced during their Panama offsite.
The idea was simple: figure out how to promote yourself so you’re not doing the hands-on work anymore. You’re one level above.
I started my own doc where I’m tracking all the processes I’m teaching Claude Code, and I will be sharing that in the future.
For me, this is exactly what Marc Andreessen recently talked about at Lenny’s Podcast, that jobs aren’t going away, but tasks are.
How to create your own Claude skill?
Anthropic shared a meta-skill, one that helps you create any other skill
It’s really easy to start.
You can just ask Claude to help you:
“Let’s create a skill together using your skill-creator skill. First ask me what the skill should do.”
He will then ask you a few questions and distill all the information into one file.
Now every time you have that repeated process, he will just use that skill.
Remember that it’s an iterative process, and once you catch him doing something off, you can update the skill file to include that use case.
Think about it as onboarding a new teammate and showing him how you do stuff.
There is some “teaching period” but after some time he’ll know how to act.
If you are interested in exploring that deeper, here are a few links from Anthropic:
The paradigm change
Right now, Claude is doing my grocery shopping.
Natalie got her 10–15 hours back.
And I think this is just the beginning.
So, the real question is:
If you moved yourself one level up, what would you do with all that extra time?
Originally published on Substack 👉 https://readwhitespace.substack.com/p/i-taught-claude-cowork-to-order-my
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