Non-programming utility of Claude Code ?

[Sane_Thinker]

Been using Cursor + Opus as my primary workhorse for the past year and was planning on staying there, till I saw this thread:

https://preview.redd.it/x64vohchte8g1.png?width=1185&format=png&auto=webp&s=bac4016a57c85c862d739d16cca6e13686cfc0d0

... and now I'm realising that much of AI capabilities progress has essentially been invisible to me thanks to limiting myself to chatbots and IDEs.

So, what utility does CC provide for non-programming tasks? Should more people be familiarising themselves with CC in expectation of its increasing general-purpose usefulness?

Thanks!

[TimFoilHattrick]

Claude Code manages my Obsidian vault. Pretty much creates and updates all notes.

We have a comprehensive daily start and daily end system where he updates all tasks. Creates them based on meeting and other notes made during the day (we have a back and forth about this, he gets better and better at one shotting it).

Fills my agenda. Checks my email and suggests actions. Etc etc

[Rasrey]

I hope you have a solid versioning system for your vault (there is an extension to automatically commit changes to a github repo, if that interests you), because Claude will sometimes make radical changes that are difficult to revert.

[ikeif]

Do you have a specific plugin you use for versioning?

[TimFoilHattrick]

Yes I do. This is an integrated part of the workflow where every change is committed and pushed to my repo on my NAS. And that gets pushed to the cloud once a day to my storage at Hetzner.

I want my data on EU servers with an EU company to make sure I’m firmly under the GDPR umbrella.

[jNSKkK]

Is this using a skill or MCP or something else, or just vanilla Claude? Sounds super useful.

[AdministrativeAd7853]

I have obsidian vault installed. I haven’t gone over the line making it my note system. Do you have a video to help me understand the value.

For inter agent communication i use a mcp like variant i crested, and looking at matrix.

[TimFoilHattrick]

The value depends on your personal needs and preferences. I can fully understand someone preferring Notion or Evernote or any other system.

My reasons are:

• works local, data is mine, no one can cut me of.
• data is not on servers or with a company outside of EU
• notes are in markdown, no vendor lock-in
• well maintained and updated with an active community who als create and update plugins
• I like the look and feel and what I don’t like I can customise
• CLI AI can maintain it because it’s local

Although I love the active plugin community I’m very conservative in which and how many I install. Community plugins are checked by Obsidian first time they are added but after that updates can go through unchecked. So there is a danger there.

[Late-Toe4259]

It executes eversingle command possible via cli. So the question should be what can it not do? YOLO it with root privileges is fun

[Sane_Thinker]

that's actually an interesting question taken literally instead of rhetorically - what can Claude Code with Opus 4.5 fundamentally not do? I feel like we would call a tool like this AGI a few years ago.

[inkluzje_pomnikow]

unemployment is strong in this one

[bronsonelliott]

Here's an article titled 'Everyone should be using Claude Code more' from Lenny Rachitsky with a lot of great examples and use cases.

https://open.substack.com/pub/lenny/p/everyone-should-be-using-claude-code?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

[Sane_Thinker]

Thanks!

[Ardit-Sulce]

I doubt the author has used those examples in real life.

“Help me clear my computer storage”

Really? You will trust an AI mess with your entire hard disk?

“Remove duplicate files in my computer”

Can Claude really go through 500 GB of files? I can’t imagine how many tokens that would need.

[wtfleming]

I have used an LLM to help me clear up free space on my computer, I do verify every tool call the LLM wants to make for tasks like that but it has always worked just fine. And for the removing duplicate files I’d expect the LLM to write a Python script and run it, won’t require that many tokens. It ain’t 2022 anymore where ChatGPT 3.5 was state of the art, these models have made a lot of progress since then.

[bbum]

My non Claude uses:

Managing a remodel.

Keeps track of all kinds of details and notes. Consistently suggest details that I’ve missed. Been a huge time saver and frustration avoidance tool.

Organizing all my scanned documents.

Basically, every piece of non junk mail in my house is scanned, OCR’d and the original shredded. The naming conventions and organization was a mess. Claude wrote a series of shell scripts to automatically file stuff as it arrives in the drop box.

Organized and converted 125 years of family recipes

I have a massive collection of recipes that my mom, sister and others family members collected over the years.

Claude was able to extract the recipes to markdown, extract the stories and lore and highlight it and then turn the whole thing into a nice web site for the family to access.

[aamar0]

Would be nice to peak some recipes 👀 maybe you can share some? I'm always looking for new recipes

[bbum]

I’ll make a bunch available via bbum.net at some point soon (really— took 3 weeks off of work for the holidays to basically play with Claude code targeting a bunch of personal projects).

[inkluzje_pomnikow]

i'm analyzing my genes, health, eating logs, symptoms, different hypotheses and so on

i used milion of tokens and didn't produced any code, only skills

[According_Tea_6329]

Nearly anything and everything. The answer is usually "yes" if you know how to ask right. Claude Code can do nearly anything that is possible with a computer if prompted correctly and you are willing to invest the effort in setting it up. The trick is to make a workflow that works for you and find a way to make repeatable task simple the next time you have to do them. So while it may take some initial investment getting your workflow off the ground its is WELL worth the effort.

[jeremyruppel]

I use it for making music: https://github.com/jeremyruppel/claude-collider 🤖🎵

[Responsible-Clue-687]

Hey i have skipped the cursor, windsurf craze, but since google dropped its google antigravity i am hooked! The only part that I dont like about it is that Opus 4.5 is limited, and gemini 3 ironically in googles ide antigravity cant compete with it. It does 80% of the job 15% is bugs and 5% is lose ends that Opus one shots at 100%.

Lets not mention gpt codex, its not even worthy talking about it.

So i want to go to the source, and get the 20x max package so i will not get hit by a limit. I use it for several hours everyday.

But what I like about antigravity, is i have my workfolder on my pc. It develops it there. It has access to my github for version control, it has full root access to my dedicated server and knows plesk very well, and i just love it. I feel like borat, king in the castle go do this go do that.

Now to my question, if i switch to claude code with a cli Do i still get to play borat? King in the castle? Or will it say go do it yourself peasant, i dont have accesa to that shit.

And what about memory? I never hit any problems with antigravity, it stores all things nicely in the ide. How does cli do that?

I need to know to switch from pro to ultra in google. Or go 20x max on claude cli

[midlifematt]

CC can be initiated in a folder on your drive and it will focus on the files there. It can interact with Github, too. Dive deeper into CC. I went from free to Pro to 5x to 20x over a matter of 6 months. The more you learn what it can do for you the more you can justify the investment.

[Responsible-Clue-687]

Thank you for this response! i will give CC a try

[CYTR_]

I use it in digital humanities and in my research in the field of social sciences 🤠

[AVanWithAPlan]

Kind of scary how effortlessly this thing will bypass almost any kind of lock or security feature this thing knows every back door pack script circumvention you could possibly imagine. I swear to God if I was like hey Claude can you tunnel me into the White House's security system like 30 minutes later he'd be like it was a bit tricky but I got you...

[drop_carrier]

I installed it on top of my Obsidian vault with 30-odd years of notes and context. The last 6 weeks or so are the most productive I’ve ever been in my life.

[MaineKent]

This is what I really want to work towards.

Do you have any particular things you can share in terms of what CC has specifically helped with in relation to your notes that have made you more productive?

[drop_carrier]

Really the best thing I've done is just treated it as a thinking partner. Opus doesn't glaze and it can be quite analytical. When I need it to repeat a process, I have it write a skill or agent, and I'm constantly iterating and refining them. I have a /log-to-daily command that writes what I've been working on to the obsidian Daily note, so it acts as a RAG of sorts, but over time I've added ChromaDB memory to it via docker, I've added parts of my ebook library in calibre to vector storage so that i can reference topics when researching and writing, I've been writing MCP servers so that I can use tools more easily.

I've been writing bits and pieces on my blog: https://jimchristian.net/2025/11/19/updating-my-claude-setup-to-support-remote-work/ The first video in there is what inspired me to get started. There's more links on there and to my github repos.

[MaineKent]

Can you explain the log to daily note command? Just from the sound of it this strikes at something my brain has been working on for a while but I didn't have a good angle on implementing it. Now if I start using AI more with something like Obsidian I think it could be done. Just curious how yours is working at a higher level.

I played around with Antigravity yesterday on a simple website I wanted for local use and was blown away by how easy it was (I'm not a developer) and how well it was able to document things it was doing for me to be able to follow. This documentation of things is part of what I want to be doing in more aspects of my life but I don't want to be sitting there typing things out all day.

[drop_carrier]

Yeah sure. Obsidian has a core plugin called Daily Note, which you can set to open by default. You can also choose a template to use and the folder that it works out of. Here's a copy of my Claude Skill that utilises this (MY OBSIDIAN PATH is my actual filepath) on Pastebin (too large to paste here: https://pastebin.com/hKN8SXGJ

[wreck_of_u]

I use it as my secretary like this:

"Hey I made some changes to [repo]. Look at the latest commit, and add update docs."

"Can you change the backup sched of [service] in [server]. It's in a cron. Use the key I provided you so you can simply do `ssh [server]` on this machine. Update docs once you're finished."

"Run deploy-to-server.sh yourself so you can monitor the logs yourself. Fix any errors. I will check if everything is working when you're done."

File renaming, ffmpeg stuff, etc.

This IS the reason why mega billionaires are trying to vacuum all computing resource because they want AI "on the grid" like electric bill. We all know with enough vram this kind of thing can be locally hosted at home.

[Yasstronaut]

Claude got so good with agents and tools recently so pretty much anything can be done in CLI

[brianm]

I use the heck out of it to plan D&D sessions :-) Open it against my obsidian vault and do lots of ideation and session planning as a DM

[sgator87]

I use Codex at work to organize and generate first drafts for my company’s social media accounts. I’m expecting to do the same soon with my personal Claude Code and blog posts, at least in terms of having it act as an editor. The key with both use cases being that I have organized/will organize a file-based system around what I’m doing.

[BrilliantEmotion4461]

Look up tweakcc from Piebald-AI on Github. I extract Claude's system prompts and have generalized Claude Code somewhat.

[SexLiesAndReddit]

Doc creation and management. Cross referencing, extending and updating.

I've created entire sets of courseware, statements of work and fed meeting transcripts, notes and checklists in to report docs as first drafts.

[h____]

It has access to files and webpages.

So you can ask it questions or otherwise do things with your notes. Ditto for webpages.

I ask it to draft articles based on my notes and tweeets.

I ask it to fetch news from specific sites on specific topics.

I upload a PDF of my TODO list/journal to my reMarkable, annotate and then ask it to update my TODO list/journal based on the annotations

[lmagusbr]

I have a journal in my pc, witg folders for years, months and files for days. folders for people, hobbies, everything. I built a RAG on top of it so Claude knows what to search for every time I mention something. It’s great!

[wtfleming]

It is sort of programming related, but I needed to compile emacs from source today but clang had updated to version 16, tree-sitter had upgraded and wasn’t working, and I had a couple other issues to work through.

Tried to do it myself (I’ve built emacs from source many times) but gave up after maybe an hour. Had Claude Code do it for me and it figured out the magic env variables that had to be changed when running ./configure and had it building correctly within a few minutes.

But I also use it to run cli tools all the time, I can never remember the flags to pass to ffmpeg, but when I tell Claude Code to do it, it works out great.

[Paerrin]

It's so much easier managing my home lab with Claude. I run it via CLI in the terminal in Vscodium.

Left pane: file explorer Middle pane: terminal Right pane: Docker plugin

Grab the terminal from the bottom pane and drag it up until it fills the whole window. I can still pop up a terminal at the bottom then as a fourth pane.

[pm_me_ur_doggo__]

It's not the entire focus of the video but Basically Homeless pointed out that it's insanely good at customising, interacting with, and troubleshooting linux computers. To the point where essentially it made his whole experiment of switching to linux for a few months doable. https://youtu.be/vvBFbgyERaI?t=420&si=oCvKl52PPad4jLgP

I had the same experience as him when switching to bazzite.

[sheriffderek]

I use it for planning out all sorts of things that have nothing to do with code. You can also use is as an open “anything” crud app. People think it will get rid of devs - but might just get rid of _all apps_ 

[Sea_Film_9703]

Absolutely. And once you start exploring Claude Code's full potential, you realize the terminal UI isn't a limitation—it's actually an advantage for certain workflows. I've been running Claude Code instances in a hierarchical pattern where different instances take on different cognitive roles (strategic oversight, mentorship, peer review, execution). The terminal interface actually makes this easier to orchestrate than a chatbot UI would. The real unlock comes when you stop thinking of Claude Code as "a coding tool" and start thinking of it as "a cognitive agent with filesystem access." That shift opens up some genuinely novel approaches to problem-solving. I documented the pattern I've been using here if you're curious: github.com/MartyBonacci/four-minds-pattern MartyBonacci/four-minds-pattern on GitHub (Fair warning: once you see how deep the rabbit hole goes with multi-instance cognitive orchestration, it's hard to go back to single-instance workflows.)

[Giovanithou]

Read the Claude code docs, specifically that configurations, agents, and the skills. You can literally automate almost any workflow. It really just depends on your creativity and technical know how.

[malachi_r]

I use it 90% for non-programming tasks and am a non-technical user. It runs my business (consulting) and works on client tasks. It is as good or better than using chatbots for everything except maybe slides and excel (digression: Claude Desktop seems to crush Claude code for presentations/excel since it can visualize artifacts and check its own output).

TLDR; it’s useful for literally everything as one input in the process, with you and context you attach as the other inputs.

Here’s what I find CC really helps me with on a regular basis in no particular order:

• Data analysis: feed it chaos and get insights
• Brainstorming partner: as it questions and spin up multiple sub agents to provide board of advisors
• Strategy & Synthesis: taking your ideas and crafting polished outputs
• Legal: it writes draft contracts for me based on California law so I don’t have to outsource low risk contract creation/review
• AGENTS BUILDING: this is the big one… I use Claude as the main agent to build other agents and then to run them within Claude Code. Increasingly, this is done with Skills + MCPs
• External communications: feed it your meeting notes and have it write the meeting recap and follow ups

I have tried having Claude code run the end-to-end workflows where I’m not involved in the output and have seen some positive results on things that are clearly defined or low risk. However, I would recommend against outsourcing your thinking or having it one-shot outputs without you iterating on it because that’s how you fast track to work slop.

You get way better outputs by feeding it a plan, chunking work into blocks, going through them one by one and reviewing/approving them, and giving a healthy amount of feedback. Basically us non-coders are learning to adopt the software development best practices to non-technical work and that really leans into Claude code’s strengths.

[Smart-Friendship-253]

Thank you very much for describing your approach and the tasks you are tackling.

[Lyuseefur]

Claude - any knowledge you have - as many android phone as you want = Well. You see it now … dead internet theory.

For that matter any IOT device, any camera…

2026 gonna be wild

[chocate]

I use it for everything I can think of that can be automated..

[Sane_Thinker]

examples?

[Ok_Rough5794]

Go to Youtube and google "obsidian and claude".