There’s a lot of talk about writing entire SaaS products with LLMs… but sometimes it’s just so pleasant to simply get an AI to do a simple, repetitive and annoying task. If you’re not sure how AI could help you, I’ll share a simple example.
After a recent shoot for my boxing app, I had hundreds of small video files showcasing a few seconds of a given fitness exercise. I don’t have a very complex video setup, so I just use flash cards that I show to the camera at the very beginning of each video.
In the past, I would go through each file, find the identification code associated with the card, and update the file name.
Instead, today I asked Claude Code:
For each video in [Folder], read the text on the card held up in the first frame, look it up in [Google Sheet URL] to find the corresponding code, then rename the file to that code.
I first ran it on a few test files and it worked perfectly. I ran it again on the actual videos, and in 1 minute, everything was done! Hundreds of files reviewed and renamed correctly. Not only did I save time, but the task itself was incredibly boring, so it doubly feels like a win.
So if you’re about to get into an annoying task, maybe give it to AI first. Double check what’s it doing, but it’s way less stressful to manage when it’s not dealing with production code!
As for this process, I’ll probably turn this into a small script instead of a prompt so that it can have more predictable outcomes for the next shooting. I’ll also display the code directly on the flash card to make the whole thing simpler to automate.
Since you scrolled this far, you might be interested in some other things I wrote: