A simple garage door seal replacement turned into a $1,000 invoice for stuff I never planned on. And it taught me something about how I use AI at work.

When I hit trouble, I called a professional. At work, that means opening Claude.

Here’s the thing — it always adds complexity. The technician fixed my seal, but flagged five other issues I never asked about. One was major. Hence the $1k.

Claude Cowork does the same thing. All I asked for was a simple team project tracker. What I got was a dense spreadsheet loaded with priorities, percent complete, and a dozen columns I didn’t need.

But it made me question myself — “do I actually need those fields?”

So I went down a rabbit hole for hours. I was nearly convinced I needed to make this “masterpiece” work for me — instead of making AI work for me.

At the end of it all, a simple Kanban board with bullet points was all I needed. No percent complete fields or RAG statuses. Just a board I can drag things around on.

It’s a reminder that AI helps you get to the answer, even when it doesn’t answer directly. But there has to be a human in the loop — at least for now. I do think AGI and fully autonomous workflows are coming. We’re just not there yet.

Someday, AI will understand why complexity isn’t the answer. For now, I’ll keep telling Claude to “make it stupid simple.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​