I make a school digest email

Lightly edited for readability: mis-heard words fixed and filler words trimmed. Words in [brackets] were unclear in the recording.

Welcome to episode three of Grant Builds With AI. The last two episodes were about my process of deciding that I wanted to take another run at building things and try my hand at coding. The first two episodes covered me making a DM bot on Discord and playing a D&D campaign, and getting used to using Claude, and then Cowork, and then Claude Code.

So, episode three. I built a family newsletter describing the goings-on at my kids' school. The end product from this one is that every day to me, and once a week to the family, we get a little email. It's called the School Digest. It highlights important things going on with the school, and breaks it down into events for my daughter and events for my son, upcoming events, links to a calendar of just school events, and of course to the family calendar, and some little musings on how each child is doing and any important updates.

So, how did this happen? I'd been working with Claude for a couple of weeks, and I just started thinking, okay, I want to build things. What do I want to build? And of course, the first thing it always recommends is "organize your inbox." So I linked it to my Gmail, and we started flagging emails and trying to clean up the inbox and organize it better, maybe make some different labels, and we created some filters. And just let me cut to the chase: I've been doing this for a while, and I have not found it useful to me yet.

Except, I created a label for every email that was coming in regarding the school. So it was creating a group, or a folder, of everybody that was emailing me with a school email address, or that had something in the subject line about the kids' after-school activities. And as I started looking through that, it occurred to me that one of the problems I have in my life is, yeah, I am that dad who can't remember. When's that band concert? Oh, that started at 4:30, not 6:30. That's me. Oh, tomorrow [my son] needs to be sure to take his gear for a soccer tryout. Hey, when's that school trip coming up? Yeah, that's me.

I mean, we have our family command center, and things go up there. And yeah, my wife handles most of it, like in a pure, stereotypical family setup. I'm included on all the emails, and I try to read them, but there have been a number of examples that could be pointed to where I didn't.

So I talked to Claude. I said, "Hey, here's my problem. I get a lot of communication from the school via email. I don't think I read them all." And this is where Claude recommended Cowork. So I set up a project within Cowork and started talking to it there.

The Cowork experience for me was very interesting, very different than Claude Code. Cowork, I mean, it's in the title. It's not doing it for you. It's working alongside you. In the last episodes, I talked about how Claude Code was me standing behind Claude while Claude sat down at my laptop and just did things. Cowork is more like somebody sitting next to me on their own laptop. You're working together, and Claude, sitting at its separate laptop, goes, "Hey, I can make that Word document for you. Let me send that over to you." Or, "Yeah, I'll put that in that shared folder we made." Or, "Oh, let me take a look at those emails. Let me see if I can summarize that for you and send it back."

And that was kind of the end product of that. So, what Cowork does for me is, it has created a scheduled task where it goes in and reads every email that's coming in, and then it updates the School Digest, and then emails it to me every morning. So instead of me trying to keep track of the five or six emails that came in from the school, and no joke, this happens a lot, I'm reading an email from Claude that summarizes the new emails. It's looking for updates from the old emails, and it's updating the calendars. I put in some things for it to look out for.

And it's working. Just the other day, my daughter had to go to the school nurse for a headache, and that was at the top of the digest: "Yesterday, your daughter went to the nurse for a headache." I knew that, but it was right there. It highlighted it for me. And then there was another one where it highlighted something I didn't know. I had gotten an email saying that my son hadn't been taking his ID, and it had now been three times. I didn't notice that in the emails from before. The digest highlighted it for me, and I talked to my son about it. I would like to say that he's gonna remember his ID more now, but at least I know it's an issue. At least I'm not totally blind to it. So I would say this was a success.

What was not a success is my inbox. I still feel it's completely disorganized. I have no idea what to do with my inbox overall. This is my Gmail. Work in progress on that one. I've pointed some other models at it. I've connected it to ChatGPT. I recently had Muse take a look. I should do an episode on Muse. I've been playing with Muse lately. It just came out. Muse has a neat user interface. I haven't found Muse to be that powerful compared to Codex or Claude or the OpenAI systems at this time, but I think the user interface is a lot better. I can see why there's a lot of excitement about it, and it sparks a lot of thoughts.

Yeah, I'll do an episode just on my general musings on the state of AI. I know everybody needs more of that. It pretty much dominates most headlines these days. As I record this, there's the existential-threat-of-AI-to-humanity debate, and lots of stuff going on there. But I think that's enough for this episode.

Episode three, that's a wrap. I should end them all on a cliffhanger. What am I going to talk about next time? I don't know. Maybe I'll make a listener poll. The listener will be me. It might be a yes-or-no vote on what my next episode should be about. Top of mind, maybe I could just do my musings on the state of AI and my interactions with it. That'd be interesting to me.

You might notice that I'm recording this while out on a walk. It's fun. I set up the infrastructure for this podcast. That's been my most recent project that I've been building with AI, and it's kind of fun, although every time I run into something, there's a part that's not fun. The not-fun part of this was actually setting aside the time to sit down and record the content. I spent a lot of time trying to set up an environment for it. I had Claude write up all these notes, write up a script, write bullet points, and I was just getting tired of that. I'm having fun setting up, I'm learning a lot, but I don't want to spend my time setting up my bathroom to record, and I'm not gonna buy recording equipment for this. So this is all being recorded on my Pixel 10 as I'm out for a walk, which is really fun, and I'm really enjoying it. And that's what this is supposed to be. It's Grant Builds With AI for fun. There might be some times when Grant has to build with AI out of necessity, but not today. It's gonna be a good day. All right. Like and subscribe.