Last year a vineyard near Montreal sold out an event where people paid $30 to pick grapes off the vine. On a Saturday, people were paying to do manual labor, in the sun, for fun and they couldn’t even take home the grapes.

I laughed when I saw this, and sent it to my father who grew up in the south of Italy surrounded by olive groves and vineyards. What has this world come to he asked. Then this week I read an article that really got me thinking: that vineyard wasn’t a weird Saturday, it’s a preview to a shift that is happening. And part of that shift is because of AI.

This week: the tool I use to hand off the work I dread, plus why your most boring tasks will eventually become a luxury.

You already AIfy’d your life. You just didn’t call it that.

Picture a farmworker in the 1800s. Fourteen-hour days, sunrise to sunset, all of it physical. Tell that person we’d one day pay $100 a month to lift heavy things in a room and set them right back down, and they’d think we’d lost it. Today we call this going to the gym.

There's a pattern to how this always goes:

We automated cooking with Uber Eats. Now we pay for cooking classes. We automated walking with cars. Now we buy step counters. When we stop doing something because we have to, we start doing it again because we want to.

We're in the uncomfortable in-between right now. AI is good at some things and not others. The gap is real, and it could last a while. But that's exactly the opportunity. Start with the things you dread. Hand those off first and then see what's left.

The emails you dread. The meeting recap that eats your Tuesday morning. The client reply that means digging through three documents before you can type one sentence. Those are things you can AIfy. Hand them off, and what’s left is the part you’d actually choose: making something, thinking out loud, getting your hands dirty on the work that’s yours.

I chose to write. To figure out this whole newsletter and brand thing. Because to me, that part is the fun part.

Inspired by Kriti Agarwal’s essay “The World in 2100” on Code Like a Girl. Worth a read.

So let me show you the tool I reach for when I want to AIfy a task, not just ask about it: Claude Cowork

But first, the difference: regular Claude is the chat window, you ask, it answers but you still do the work. Cowork is the same Claude, except you point it at a folder on your computer and it does the work inside your real files. Picture asking a friend how to cook dinner, versus handing them your kitchen and letting them make it.

The task I AIfy’d first? Meeting notes. I used to lose half an hour after every client call turning my scribbles into something my team could actually read. Now Cowork does it while I refill my coffee.

Want to feel that tonight? You need one folder and one set of notes, nothing fancy. Open Cowork, point it at the folder on your computer, and paste this:

Read what it drafts. Fix the one line that's off. Send it wherever your team lives.

Once that clicks, it goes a lot further. I run a separate Project per client and have the summaries land straight in the right Slack channel. But that's for later. Tonight, just the notes.

Two important things before you start. Cowork lives in the Claude desktop app for Mac or Windows, and it needs a paid plan. If you're not on one, I don't want you to miss this, so I've got 3 free Cowork passes to give away. Reply and tell me the task you'd most love to hand off. First three get a pass.

Want the full setup, the folder structure, the little tricks that make it sing? Ruben Hassid wrote the clearest step-by-step I've found. Start here: Set up Cowork in 20 minutes

Want to actually understand the words everyone throws around? Here's your cheat sheet. Transformers, embeddings, RAG, agents, RLHF. People toss these around like everyone already knows what they mean. Someone put together 20 of the most common AI concepts, each explained with a simple mental model. Bookmark it -> Read it here

Klarna replaced 700 customer service jobs with AI. Then it hired the humans back. A big finance company went all in, let AI handle millions of customer chats, and froze hiring for a year. The AI was fast and cheap and it worked, on paper. But customers could tell they were talking to a wall, and they started leaving. So Klarna brought people back. Read it here

A startup will clean your apartment for free, if you let it film the whole thing. Remember the people paying to pick grapes? This is the flip side. A startup called Shift sends a cleaner to your home wearing a head camera that records the job from their point of view. You get a free clean. They get two hours of first-person footage, which they sell to companies teaching robots how to do housework.. Read it here

Since reading Kriti Agarwal's essay "The World in 2100”, this is what I’ve been thinking about. When AI takes the painful parts off your plate, what's the one thing you'd never hand over? I for one am looking forward to the day a robot cleans the dishes, does laundry, picks up the toys. But it does have me thinking, what would I want to do with this free time?

Tell me. What would you happily let AI handle forever, and the one you'd pay to keep doing yourself?

Hit reply.

Cinz.AI

Your unfair advantage, one week at a time.

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