My ‘Head Start’ routine ran on Monday morning and let me know ‘Hadley turns 4 in three weeks. Start party planning now.’
I opened Cowork and told it to help me. I set the budget at $400 and mentioned I don’t have time to make everything myself, and we needed all-up - venue, food, cake, party bags, entertainment, invites.
It came back with a plan.
Party planned in under 5 minutes
My mate Claude:
Shortlisted parks within 15 minutes of our address, ranked by shade, toilets and whether the council requires a permit.
Found cake options that don't require me to pretend I can pipe icing - a local who delivers or a supermarket cake with a hack.
Sourced party bags (filled!) at around the $5-per-kid mark.
Suggested easy food options for the day.
Found three entertainers in our area with prices, the kid-age fit, and drafted messages to reach out to them.
Created an invite I could send on WhatsApp and print
The damage
$405. Five dollars over.
She's cute. She can have it.
The bit that didn't work
The first invite Claude generated was tragic. I asked for a unicorn. What I got was…
I sent it back with one instruction: use the Canva connector.
Two clicks to download. Sent it to the WhatsApp group and to the printer - they’re in Hadley’s bag for tomorrow. I chose option 4 in case you were wondering.
Don't have a 4-year-old's birthday to plan?
I wrote up 100 ways AI can help parents. Pick a couple and build your Family OS starter kit.
What's worth knowing in AI this week
Three things.
Microsoft Copilot's Agent Mode is now live in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Not a preview anymore. The agent can do multi-step things inside the doc - draft, format, pull from another sheet, build slides from a brief. If you live in Microsoft 365 for work this is the day it started being helpful. Worth twenty minutes of testing on something annoying you've been putting off. (Source)
Anthropic told the Department of Defense no. The DoD wanted unrestricted use of Claude. Anthropic said no - they want guardrails on domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. Google said yes and stepped in. Two different companies. Two different sets of lines. One brownie point for Anthropic! (Source)
However, Google plans to put $40 billion into Anthropic. Not sure how that impacts the brownie point allocation. Maths isn’t my strong suit. (Source)
Quote of the week - dedicated to our tragic unicorn
"The first draft of anything is shit."
Launching next week 🥁 The Meal Manager Challenge!
I caught Ben (my husband) cleaning out the pantry. It had me worried.
Turns out he was excited… about next week's shop?! He wanted to show Claude exactly what we already have so we can build the meal plan around it. The man has been converted. And he’s speaking my love language.
I'm currently building this system out for you. I'm just working out how I can deliver it in a way that's equally personalised, but won't take you as long as it did me to set up.
My goal: 15 minutes a day for 7 days and you'll never think about meal planning or food shopping again.
I can't promise anyone will clean out your pantry.
Stay tuned anyway, it’ll be worth it.
Sarah x
P.S. If you’re free and want your face painted, see invite above.