Learning to cowork with AI

This is me and my new AI coworker.

If you haven’t already, you need to try either OpenAI Codex or Claude Cowork asap, and prepare to have your mind expanded (maybe exploded). I have been using them daily for the past few weeks, and if you thought web-based AI chatbots were powerful - these take it up a notch.

Over these weeks, I have been teaching myself to cowork with AI. As downloadable desktop software that has access to local files and local tools, the capabilities of Codex and Cowork are much higher, but they also feel very different from using ChatGPT in a browser. This is what Matt Shumer wrote about in his viral post Something Big is Happening.

If you’re like I was, and are unsure how you might cowork instead of Chat, here are some examples from my personal experience:

🤖 My coworker sped up a video file on my computer by 2x (I used to do this in After Effects)

🤖 It compressed a video file to a smaller file size (I used to do this in Quicktime)

🤖 It unpackaged and compressed 20 videos in a large PPT file, reducing the file size from 1.5Gb to 150Mb (I never used to do this at all, that’s how it ended up being 1.5Gb!)

🤖 It transcribed and converted 22 photos of worksheets into a design templated PPT file (this truly It blew my socks off)

🤖 It had a discussion with me about a Word Doc legal agreement, helped me decide on how to reply, then marked up the changes in the Word Doc complete with comments. And then wrote the email to send to our clients legal team.

🤖 It helped me to reason through and revise an R&D TI draft submission (a Word Doc + Excel file)

Tomorrow is a new day, and I am sure I will think of something else to cowork on.

p.s. full disclosure, this is an AI generated image, not my real house or robot :)