Ask HN: What do you ask AI to do with your files?

2 points by simquat 42 days ago | 1 comment

I'm researching how people who don't code use AI tools for multi-step work on their actual files – renaming/organizing documents, filling forms on PDFs, cleaning up spreadsheets, turning notes into a report, and so on –.

What was the last multi-step task you gave AI involving your files? Did you get what you wanted?

Thanks.

Festro 42 days ago |

Run an AI audit on a website, compile tests run and actions derived into spreadsheet tabs, write a word doc report, use a template provided for styling. Skill used in Claude to ensure filename is shorter than 260 characters (Windows limitation).

All gets stored locally, Skill runs to always write a new version when amending, keeping old versions in temp folder.

Then when I open and run throguh to make edits I save to a client folder. Claude can access that folder too but I tend not to make edits in that structure.

Claude has a folder named after it in each client folder, if needed for a sandbox on ongoing client work. Rarely used, mainly rely on temp folder and project specific client folders.

On that last task Claude got most things right:

Styling was overly dramatic - it had used our brand palette but over-used a bright orange. It also missed the template file on first run, it had to be manually attached despite being instructed to find the template file in the client folder before doc creation (it did not ask for it after failing to find it either). It also added page breaks where none were needed, making the document full of whitespace.

I asked for diagrams to be added to visualise concepts. They were fine, one seemed excessive where it split actions into a punnet table of effort X impact.

It missed the safe naming skill on first pass for the spreadsheet, so it couldn't be opened on first try.

In the end it was 1 prompt, 3 corrections. End result was client ready in a fraction of the time for a normal manual pass on this task.