Claude can now watch you work, then take the chore over

A Stanford AI founder named Ben Gussberg posted a 30-second video last week worth your attention. He showed Claude how to pull a list of names out of a confusing PDF. No column labels, and some entries had parentheses underneath that shouldn't be included. He just did the task once while narrating out loud, the way you'd train a new hire. His words: "I spoke and told Claude explicitly, do not take the parentheses." Claude watched, turned that single demonstration into a reusable skill, and the next time he needed it, he typed a slash command and Claude did the whole thing itself. His result: 100% correct.

No prompt writing. No instructions to type. You show Claude once, and it takes the task over from then on. Anthropic calls it Record a skill, and for a newsroom that re-keys the same things every week, it's the most practical AI feature in a while.

One catch, and it's a real one. Record a skill runs only in Claude for Mac. I clicked through to check it on my own Windows machine this week, and the button simply isn't in the menu. If your newsroom is a Windows shop, and most of ours are, read this as a heads up about where the work is headed rather than something to try on Monday. I'll come back to it the day it ships wider.

What actually changed

Until now, getting AI to do a specific task your way meant describing it. Writing out step-by-step instructions and hoping you didn't leave anything out. Record a skill flips that: the demonstration is the instruction. You perform the task on your screen while talking through what you're doing and, this is the key part, what not to do. Claude turns that recording into a saved skill you trigger by typing / and its name.

The narrated exception is the whole trick. "Don't take the parentheses." "Skip anything marked sealed." "Ignore the ad rep's initials in column C." That one spoken sentence is the difference between a skill that works and a dumb copy-paste macro, and it's the kind of thing you'd struggle to capture in written instructions.

The one that'll change your Mondays

Let's build the exact skill from the video, pointed at the chore every paper knows: turning a messy public-record PDF (the police blotter, court filings, real-estate transfers) into clean copy.

1 Open Cowork and start recording

In the Claude desktop app for Mac, open a Cowork session, click the + button, and choose Record a skill. Claude begins recording your screen and your voice.

2 Do the task once, out loud

Open this week's blotter PDF and do exactly what you always do: pull each name, the charge, and the date into your copy. But talk while you work, like you're training a new clerk: "I'm taking the name and the charge, but skip the case number in parentheses. If it says 'sealed,' leave it out entirely. Format the name last-name-first."

3 Let Claude turn it into a skill

Stop the recording. Claude studies what you did and what you said, then turns it into a named skill. Call it blotter.

4 Run it forever after

Next week, open the new blotter PDF, type /blotter, and Claude does the whole extraction itself. Same rules, same format, no re-keying. What took 40 minutes takes one command and a quick proofread.

Five places a paper can point it

The blotter is just the start. Anything repetitive, rule-based, and done the same way every time is a candidate. Notice that in all five, the narrated exception is what makes it work.

• Publishers: public records into clean copy. The blotter, court filings, real estate transfers, marriage licenses. Record yourself pulling one week's worth the way you always do, and say the rules out loud: "last name first, take the charge but skip the case number, and if it says sealed, leave it out." Then /blotter every Monday after that.
• Publishers: obituaries and legal notices into house style. Record reformatting one obit. Name treatment, date format, order of service, the funeral home's boilerplate stripped out. Narrate the calls a new clerk would get wrong: "we run age, not birth year," "survivors in this order," "we don't print the online guestbook link." Then /obit on every submission that comes in.
• Sales managers: rate card to insertion order. Record building one proposal from your template and talk through the pricing rules as you go: "10% off at six or more insertions, nonprofits get the community rate, agency commission comes off the top." Then /proposal for the next advertiser, priced right every time. No more rebuilding the same spreadsheet from memory on a Friday afternoon.
• Sales managers: the Monday pipeline recap. Record pulling the same numbers out of your CRM and your spreadsheet into your weekly report, narrating the judgment calls: "only signed insertion orders, not verbals," "house ads don't count," "anything past 60 days rolls into collections." Then /recap gives you the report before your coffee is cold.
• Design staff: intake and prep, not the design itself. This one has an honest limit worth naming. Claude isn't going to lay out your page in InDesign, and you wouldn't want it to. What it can do is everything before that: record yourself cleaning one submitted press release into AP style, fixing the byline, stripping the sender's formatting, renaming photos to your file convention, matching cutlines to images. Narrate what gets bounced back: "anything under 300 dpi goes back to the advertiser." Then /prep hands your designer copy that's already clean.

What makes a good skill (and what doesn't)

The winners share a shape: you do it repeatedly, the steps are the same each time, the rules are clear, and it's something Claude can actually do on a computer. Pulling data, cleaning text, filling templates, organizing files, clicking through a web tool: yes. Manual design work in InDesign, writing an editorial, anything that needs a human's judgment or a creative eye: no. A quick test. If you couldn't explain the rules to a new hire in a sentence or two, it's not a skill yet.

The fine print (so you're not surprised)

• Mac only, and a paid plan. It runs in Cowork in Claude for Mac, on the Pro, Max, or Team plans. Not Windows, not the web, not your phone, and not on Free or Enterprise accounts. For most of us, this is the one that matters.
• About ten minutes. Each recording is capped around ten minutes. That's plenty for a focused chore, and a healthy nudge to keep the task small.
• One take isn't gospel. A single demonstration is a strong start, not a finished robot. Run the new skill on a fresh example and check it before you trust it on deadline, especially anywhere a wrong name or number matters, which in a newspaper is everywhere.
• Nothing leaves as video. Claude keeps screenshots of your demonstration, not the recording itself.

Why this one matters

Most AI features ask you to become a "prompt engineer." This one asks nothing except that you do your job once while it watches. That's the real deal for a small paper. The value was never a cleverer chatbot. It's your specific, repetitive workflow, captured once and handed back as a button. The court report, the obituaries, the insertion orders, the work that quietly eats a day a week, is exactly what this was built to take off your desk.

Mac newsrooms: record your worst chore this week. The rest of us: make the list now, so it's ready the day this lands on Windows.