Claude Routines: My Honest First Impressions

Hey, this is Isaac from Upset.co, an AI and automation consultancy that helps accounting firms support more revenue without adding headcount. And in this video, I want to show my first impressions of Claude Routines. For those of you unfamiliar, Claude launched Routines a day ago as of this recording, and it is a version of Claude Code that would allow you to run an automation Fundamentally, so I want to test it and compare it with you know more the more traditional model that over the last several years have been the model of like we're going to use Appy or Make or find automations within the tools that we use on a day-to-day basis to automate work and see how this works and where it fits. So the first thing is worth noting: if you go, I have happened to have the desktop application, so I happen to. have here the newest interface from Claude where I can go between Claude Chat, Claude Cowork, and Claude Code. And this is where I'll be able to see the code routines. In many ways, these code routines resemble what is the scheduled tasks from both Chat and Cowork, because it effectively represents something that can start to run on a regular schedule on a particular event. If you're using the chat, it's worth knowing that if you go to Claude AI, I believe there is a way for you to use this within your browser. So if you go to Claude AI, if you go Claude AI slash code slash code slash routines, continue on the web. There you go. I knew that was somewhere. Oh, this requires some sort of GitHub setup to get it done. But there's a way in which you can see that, see this within the browser if you're more comfortable there. That said, let's get into the demo and see, get a sense of how this works, what it looks like, and whether it's worth using on a regular basis. So new routine, I'm able to do it both locally and remotely. I kind of gravitate towards remotely to ensure that this can run even when I'm not in the computer. At least that would be my assumption that this would. Let's think about a use case. I have several apps already connected. The use case that comes to mind for me, we have our Notion where all of our SOPs are and we have our Slack where our team communicates. Perhaps I can dig into our Notion on a regular basis, our knowledge base, and propose or send a message On a daily basis of a tip of something that it's on our knowledge base and I want to remind the team of. Let's use that as the use case. All right. So let's say that that's what we want, daily knowledge base. I want you to go to our Notion knowledge base, pick up a random document and a random tip to then go into our random channel on Slack, post it to the team, And that to be to serve as a reminder of a something within our knowledge base that they should be reminded of. I'd love to make sure that you pick different things and make sure you also link to the source document you picked to get the tip from. It's probably not the best prompt in the world, but let's just say that's what we run with. I could do this daily. Today it's it's currently eight five. 55. Let's do 9 AM. And I'll leave Notion and Slack as connectors because it's going to need it. Giving me a warning here that you can use tools from all these connectors without asking for permission. So that's probably another thing worth noting, that there's some additional risk associated with a Claude routine from the perspective of you letting this run and it will do as much as it can without you actually being able to kind of step, step in or Allow it to do a particular step. This is fairly low stakes, low risk. So I'm going to go ahead and test it. Here it's suggesting run manually, but within 5 minutes we should be able to see it run properly. And I suspect I may have to adjust this prompt, but we'll wait and see what happens. Okay. So this happened yesterday as well, which is funny because it's telling me that it doesn't have access to a Notion integration, but actually I know it does. So perhaps I should have been clearer that I am expecting it to use its current connector. Let's just say you actually do. You have a Notion connector, and I suspect that this is how you'll actually go ahead and build a routine on Claude. Like, you'll test it manually, you'll see whether it works, you'll see what additional things it might actually need you to say in the prompt. Because now it's saying, oh yeah, tools all loaded. You're right. Duh. So I know I might have to incorporate into that initial prompt to make sure that this can run without me later. The fact that, hey, you do have an Ocean connector. You do have Slack connector. Make sure to use that accordingly. Let's wait a couple more minutes and see what comes up. All right. So here you are. Knowledge base spotlight. Today, a random tip. Little things that get you promoted. Communicate with the speed and intent. Reel the full document here. These are 5 tips in the document worth a read if you haven't checked it out. Gonna have to delete that. Make sure My team doesn't have to see that just yet. I'm just testing at the moment, but it actually worked. So the only thing that I would adjust here is to make sure that I'm going to say, you have a connector available, make sure to use that as part of the original routine prompt to allow it to run in 1 minute, which is going to be 9:00 AM, and see if it actually is able to run on the background without me. Let's wait a couple of minutes and see. All right. So funny enough, it's 9:02. And it hasn't run yet. It seems to have skipped it, possibly because I ran this manually today. But I'm curious to get a sense of what other features it has. And actually, something I'm noticing here and something I'll be worried about, especially we coming from an automation background, will I be able to see what has run and it's scheduled? So here you can see the run history. It has a couple additional features. It has a plan. Unfortunately, it's saying here there's no plan yet. But it looks like you'll be able to have some traceability as to What plan it put in place from the prompt, what are some of the tasks that it did as a result, and be able to see how many times this has run in the past and see what that looks like. So I like that. The one challenge I have right now, and at least my perspective of when and how this would be used— oh, check that out. The scheduled version is running now. Finally. I think this will be useful primarily if the actions that you want to take are supported by the cloud-native connectors, or if you have the capabilities and a dev team to build them within cloud code. I don't think that this is still like a business user-friendly option for a random accounting firm operator to just get their hands dirty and start like replacing automations with it necessarily. I see that is— this is really directly competing with like the Sapiers and Makes of the world, but it would take some time for them to support and have as many actions and triggers and apps available as those apps do today. So at least my perspective is that this, at least for us, will now be more of a complement, because as you can see, you can trigger it from an API. You can trigger it from a webhook. And what that means is that I can still, for example, get something to run from Claude Co, but then trigger an automation in Zapier or Make, or the other way around. At least that's my verdict today, just from kind of like giving it a shot initially. It does show promise, but I don't see it, at least at this point in time, being something that's neither as, you know, business user friendly for anyone to just get something done. And at least right now, not supporting enough actions natively to really compete as, compete as well with the Zapier makes of the world. I hope that helps. Just the first look at Claude routines, and I hope to see you on the next one.