Claude examples: 77 real use cases with prompts

Narrow 350 direct-admission nursing programs to a college list of 18 with Claude and ChatGPT

Melissa Danielli's daughter wants to be a nurse and get direct admission to a nursing program. Danielli paid $85 to the organizer of a Facebook moms' group for a spreadsheet of 350 schools with their requirements, and the family cut it to 50 by region. Working on two computers, one with Claude and one with ChatGPT, they built spreadsheets, ruled out schools that didn't fit (including ones the AI judged a poor fit) and compiled a final list of 18 schools in a couple of hours one evening.

Redline a vendor's standard OEM agreement with Claude for the first three rounds, then have a lawyer do the final check

jedberg regularly negotiates OEM agreements with vendors that mostly use the same template and draw the same objections. They tried Claude first, and their lawyer was impressed that it found things the lawyer had missed. jedberg then used Claude to redline that type of contract, and the other side remarked that the lawyer had been surprisingly thorough. The lawyer did the final check and by then basically said it looked good, and jedberg saved a lot of money by doing the first three rounds with Claude.

Sort a year of mixed Amazon business purchases into QuickBooks categories with Claude, including the fiddly split transactions

badlibrarian runs a business and sometimes buys things on Amazon. At tax time they used to search for the big business items and categorise them in QuickBooks Online until they gave up, using a janky browser plugin and two monitors full of Excel windows. Now Claude does it and doesn't give up, despite QuickBooks being slow. It will even click 19 times to split a transaction because they'd put a router and shampoo in the same Amazon cart one night in February 2025.

Send four AI agents to get real car insurance quotes: Gemini and ChatGPT got none, Claude and Muse got five each

Thy Toeung needed to review their car insurance before their son turned 16. They made a data sheet listing every driver, vehicle and the cover they wanted, and asked Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Muse to act as their insurance-shopping agent and get real quotes from six reputable insurers. Gemini's auto-browse explained it couldn't use the websites and handed back a comparison table to fill in. ChatGPT took 2 hours and 279 messages across 12 attempts and got no quotes; Toeung believes sites such as Allstate, Nationwide and Liberty Mutual block AI agents. Claude ran for 3.3 hours and got 5 real quotes. Muse, on its free tier, used several sub-agents and got 5 quotes in about 20 minutes. Toeung switched insurer and got about twice the cover for around 40% of the previous price.

Track 186 applications, find missing keywords and review interview notes with Claude to land an offer

Margareth Felicia Gono, an international student who needed a visa, started job hunting scattershot. Gono built an application tracker with Claude, had it pull the main skills and keywords from each job description and compare them with the résumé, and used it as a career coach, which led to three résumés for analytics, sales and marketing, and consulting. Where interviewers allowed recording, Gono ran sentiment analysis on the notes to see where Gono hesitated or used filler words. The tracker showed 186 applications, 44 cold outreaches, 19 interviews, six take-home assignments, three final rounds and one offer, as a senior associate at DoorDash.

Push the vet to run a test for FIP after Claude kept flagging it from a sick rescue cat's results

thobes and their spouse took in a scared stray cat found in Elysian Park on July 4th. Weeks later the cat stopped eating and declined fast; after-hours ER care in LA cost $7,500 for two days of life support before any diagnosis, and treatment moved to a clinic in Tijuana. thobes ran each batch of test results through Claude, which kept saying to look into FIP and to push the vet to test the stomach fluid for it, though the first vet waved it off. When the Tijuana clinic was asked for the extra FIP test they first refused ('AI is not a vet'), then agreed. It came back positive, the cat got a prescription and is expected to live. thobes says not to trust medical decisions to AI entirely.

Find out which astrophotography gear you actually need before spending a budget, with Claude

tonyarkles was curious about astrophotography and had a budget to fill any gaps in their existing photography kit. Claude's conclusion was to get a $20 intervalometer and a battery adapter that runs off the wall: the lenses and tripod they already had were fine. It also pointed out that Jupiter and Venus were near conjunction, so a dark spot facing west would give a good timelapse that weekend, and later gave rough guidelines for a partial lunar eclipse that produced some amazing photos. tonyarkles now plans to spend the budget on a proper mount, but only after confirming they enjoy the hobby.

Have Claude draft replies to a small brand's customer messages, warranty claims included, with a human approving each one

idopmstuff runs several small consumer brands. For the most recent one they acquired, customers got in touch through Facebook and Instagram comments and messages as well as email, so they had Claude build an app that pulls those messages in as they arrive and drafts a reply, including any actions needed, for them to edit or send. Their edits feed back into its playbook, and it has got pretty good. It handles warranty claims (ask for a photo of the damage and the order number, create a replacement order, email a confirmation) and most common questions. Every reply is still approved by a human, though they plan to let it handle common cases on its own soon.

Plan an international family move in three weeks with a Claude project, and have it build the Notion tracker and calendar reminders

Iliyana Stareva had three weeks to move a family of four from Spain back to the Netherlands. They opened a Claude project called "Move Back to the Netherlands", gave it their history, details about their kids and what was already sorted (they still had Dutch bank accounts and a phone number), and asked for a full plan covering housing, schools and childcare, moving both cars, taxes and municipality paperwork. In five minutes the plan surfaced a few things they had forgotten. Claude then built a tracker in Notion with owner, deadline and category for each task plus a "this week" view, and put key dates into Google Calendar, including a call to the municipality. Some items didn't apply and some deadlines moved once checked against their work calendar, so they spent ten more minutes adjusting it.

Get a pet insurer's $359 'earned premium' collections threat settled at $118 by escalating to the state regulator with Claude

After two pet insurance policies lapsed, Dimitri Sudomoin was billed $359 in 'earned premium' and spent two months being threatened with collections. Weeks of emails with the insurer's customer team got nowhere and a supervisor closed the thread saying they had gone as far as they could. With Claude planning the campaign, Sudomoin filed a complaint with the insurer's home-state regulator in New York and emailed two of its executives. The insurer folded in three and a half hours: the bill was settled at $118 as a 'special exception', with a written promise that nothing ever went to a credit bureau.

Get a refused warranty exchange offered after Claude found the company's own arbitration clause (partial)

Dimitri Sudomoin's $1,166 robot mop failed under warranty. After eleven weeks of 'forwarding this to our technical team', the company refused to honour the warranty and offered a final 46% partial refund. Claude's first idea, a federal warranty law angle, looked weak, but reading the terms of service it found the company's own arbitration clause: under the rules of the forum the company picked, Sudomoin's filing cost was capped at $250 and the company would bear the rest of the fees. Three days after Sudomoin filed, the company offered the exchange it had previously refused. Sudomoin describes this one as still in play.

Run your side of a burst-pipe home insurance claim with Claude: receipts, logs, policy checks and pushing back on delays (partial)

Two months after a water pipe burst in their house, wellpast is using Claude to run their side of the claim with a large insurer. It reads the policy, organises and files scans of receipts for additional living expenses (ALE), reads and flags messages from the agents, logs all correspondence, work estimates and invoices, points out when the insurer is delaying or not keeping promises, and challenges coverage decisions based on the policy. The adjuster gets very tidy, documented receipts and logs. The delays have been bad enough that Claude now insists they should file a complaint with the state insurance department. Without Claude, they say, they'd probably have given up from fatigue.

Catch a passport-validity problem five days before a Europe trip by asking Claude what else to do pre-trip

Sarah Silbert was using Claude to choose checked luggage for a trip to Germany and asked, almost as an afterthought, what else needed doing before the trip. Among the obvious items, Claude said to check the passport had three months of validity past the return date. It didn't: it expired about two months after the return flight, one month short, five days before departure. Inside the 14-day window for an urgent passport agency appointment, Silbert got a slot the next day, paid the $60 expedite fee and picked up a new passport the following day, using the State Department website as the official source.

Compare five homeowner's insurance quotes with ChatGPT and Claude, and learn to check insurers' financial ratings, not BBB

Natasha Hsi got five homeowner's insurance quotes for a complicated house. They differed on exclusions, wind and named-storm deductibles, and admitted versus surplus-lines insurers, and Hsi found them hard to follow. They fed all five plus their current renewal into ChatGPT and Claude and ran scenarios such as a hurricane loss and a total loss. When Hsi suggested starting with BBB ratings, both pushed back: BBB tracks complaints, while financial strength ratings show whether an insurer can pay after a storm. Hsi took the questions back to their original agent, who returned a better-structured quote at a more reasonable cost with none of the weakly rated insurers.

Ask Claude whether to convert an LLC to an S Corp, and miss that NYC taxes make it cost more

mikeocool asked Claude about converting their LLC to an S Corp. Claude said it was a great idea and estimated how much they would save in taxes. Their accountant said it would actually cost more, because of how New York City taxes S Corps. They hadn't told Claude they lived in NYC, because it didn't occur to them that it mattered. Their takeaway: tax questions are full of details like this, often subtler than where you live.

Rebuild a delayed-bag claim with Claude: the full email history for a new agent, and a receipts spreadsheet

Manuel Dominguez's suitcase never left Canada on a WestJet trip to Mexico City and Puerto Vallarta, and it took 10 days to get it back. When the case moved from one WestJet person to another, they asked Claude to pull the full history of emails with the first person so they could pass it on. To claim expenses, they photographed the receipts for clothes bought during those 10 days and asked Claude to build an Excel sheet from them to attach to the claim. It saved a lot of time, but WestJet paid only 60% of the original claim.

Add a whole school year's calendar to the family calendar with Claude and catch clashes with work trips months ahead

Hally Peck, a chief marketing officer in New York with two kids and a husband who also works full-time, used to schedule life only days or a week ahead. Peck gave Claude the kids' school calendars for the year, with holidays, vacations and parent-teacher conference dates, and had it add them to the family calendar and cross-check school events against existing plans. It flagged a few conflicts with work trips already booked. Catching them months in advance rather than days or weeks means the family can resolve or plan around them.

Get to the ER in time for suspected testicular torsion after Claude flagged it as an emergency

DANN's pain started out of nowhere on a Friday night and within twenty minutes they could barely walk; the plan was to take painkillers and sleep it off. They asked Claude first, and it said this could be testicular torsion, that there's a 4- to 6-hour window, to go to the ER now, not to eat or drink in case of surgery and not to drive themselves. They went. The first ER untwisted it and sent them home; at 3am the pain came back and after a second visit they were taken by ambulance to a bigger hospital, staying three days. Torsion was never confirmed because it was untwisted before an ultrasound, but DANN is home, healing and kept everything.

Recreate and resend an urgent client invoice from a phone in a roller coaster queue with Claude

A client called Alper Ortac on a family holiday at Europa Park needing an invoice urgently for their end-of-year accounts. With no laptop, Ortac opened Claude on their phone in a roller coaster queue, attached the last invoice and asked it to recreate it. Claude wrote and ran a Python script that produced a replica of the PDF, then changed the invoice number, billing period and costs as asked. Ortac drafted the email, attached the new invoice and sent it in roughly 20 minutes, right before boarding.

Turn a spare ESP32 box into a baby monitor that only wakes parents after 10 minutes of fussing, built with Claude

pugio and their spouse were sleep-training their baby, who wakes a few times a night and either babbles back to sleep or fusses for 10 minutes before a parent needs to go in. With a spare esp32-box-3 and a few rounds with Claude, they built a baby monitor that tracks how long the baby cries or fusses, streams audio only after 10 minutes, and sends notifications at 30 seconds and at 10 minutes. The log shows the baby often wakes 1–2 times a night and resettles almost immediately, and the parents only wake when the audio comes through. During the day it tells them when naps end.

Get a commercial cooler that kept cutting out working again for about $30 in parts, troubleshooting with Claude

Jassy's homestead relies on a commercial glass-door cooler for garden harvest, eggs and bacon mid-cure, but it had sat broken for 8 months because a repair call would cost $600 or more. Jassy described the symptoms to Claude: it cooled for 24–48 hours, then cut out while the fan kept running, with no icing. Claude came back with six things to check, saying which were reasonable DIY jobs. It suggested cleaning the coils. After that, Jassy reported that the fan ran and they could hear it calling for the condenser but the condenser did nothing. Claude was then fairly confident it was a bad start relay or overload protector, about $15 each. Jassy replaced both themselves, the cooler cooled almost immediately and had held steady for a month. Parts were about $30 with shipping.

Reset a front-load washer stuck with the door locked and the pump running nonstop, with Claude and a photo of the control panel

Jassy's Whirlpool Duet washer had been run without the water turned on, and got stuck in a door-fault loop: pump running, door locked, lights flashing, and no way to reset it or turn it off. Local technicians charge a $300 minimum just to show up. The first couple of reset sequences Claude suggested didn't work, but Jassy kept describing what was happening and then shared a photo of the control panel. Claude then recommended holding the cancel button for a full 3 seconds (which, Jassy notes, is printed on the panel), and the washer reset and finished its cycle. The fix cost nothing.

Turn rambling notes into a one-page pet-sitter guide for two dogs and a cat with Claude

Before a trip, Chris Ivey usually stayed up the night before writing instructions for the pet sitter. This time Ivey gave Claude rambling notes about the two dogs and the cat, and Claude turned them into a clean one-page house-sitting guide covering the feeding schedule, medications, the door code and the vet's details. After a couple of tweaks it was done, and Claude also blurred the personal details so Ivey could share the finished guide publicly.

Turn a PTA's bank exports into year-end charity accounts in four minutes with Claude

Pete Hickerton, chair of their school's PTA, wanted to save the treasurer an evening on the year-end accounts. The job meant exporting bank transactions, categorising everything, reconciling and formatting it for the Charity Commission. They gave the bank exports to Claude, and four minutes later had a set of accounts ready to upload. Claude explained what it had done, flagged where it had checked the formulas and showed the reconciliation. Hickerton and the treasurer went through it looking for errors and found none.