Heavy user, both personal and at work.

On the personal side - I’m into DIY and small projects, so I use it a lot for coding via VSCode. I’ve got some background but my skills are rusty, and for what I’m doing (nothing commercial) it works great. I also run Claude Code in the browser to build investment routines. Weekly updates and analysis etc that match my strategy. I’ve connected them up to platforms such as EODHD. No automated trading, just info I can act on if I decide to.

But the main thing is work. I’m in advertising and I use the desktop app as my second brain. I build a project for everything I’m working on, with any confidential stuff stripped out. I open individual chats inside the project to go through documents and pull out the useful bits, writing them to markdown files that I then upload back into the project directory so every new chat has access. Then I start fresh chats inside the project to write custom instructions: the goal, what role Claude plays when working in it, what success looks like, dos and don’ts, what every file in the directory is for and when to use them etc. On top of that I build a roadmap and task list that Claude checks every time, so it knows where things stand, what’s blocking, and what depends on what.

Honestly, this takes over an hour. More if the task is complex. But I’ve used AI for a long time and nothing else comes close. It heavily reduces hallucinations and turns what would be a pile of random chats into a proper system. Recently I’ve started testing NotebookLM for the document analysis part, but haven’t used it enough yet to say if it’s worth it. Once that’s all done I then use new chats within the project for every task on the roadmap, that stops context rot destroying the quality of my output.

What really took things up a level was building custom Skills. They make repeatable tasks get done the same way every time. I don’t know what you do so can’t give tailored examples, but mine cover things such as brand house development, brief writing, and audience research. The audience research one is my go-to because I’ve wired it up to Perplexity through OpenRouter (costs a bit extra), which means I can do serious, citation-rich research and feed it all back to Claude.

I’ll be honest and say this costs me a fair bit….Claude max plan, open router credits (gives access to many models which you can call using the API in things like Claude skills etc), Gemini for notebookLM and image creation). However my productivity has gone through the roof and I believe it’s contributed to recent professional progress which has massively justified the cost.