Claude on a Schedule: My First Week with Claude Duet

Ben Jones: Hi everyone, Ben Jones here with the Powered by Data Show. And really, I wanted to take the opportunity today to give you a walkthrough of Claude Duet. So, what is Claude Duet? This is Anthropic's Claude scheduling platform. It's in research preview. You have to get on a waitlist today. I've had it for about a week. I've been using it quite a lot and getting some value out of it. So I wanted to give you a walkthrough.

Keep in mind this is November 2026. So all of these features and platforms change very quickly. My guess is this will be available to everyone fairly soon, and it may look a little different than what I'm about to show you. But I'm not being paid by Anthropic for this. These are just my own thoughts. I thought I would share them with you to give you an idea of what a scheduling platform for Claude could look like and what you might want to use it for. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

I got access to it, like I said, about a week ago. I can see on the left-hand side this Claude Duet link. You can see that it says "preview" over here. And so when you click on that, this opens up Claude Duet for you. Now let me give you a quick little rundown of the UI itself. So here we are in Claude Duet. You can see we've got a left-hand panel here, which gives me my channels, and they're grouped together into a few different groupings. You can see I've got this Everything channel. You can see if I scroll down, I've got a Website Management group. I'll show you all these one by one. I've got a Learning and Development group I created. I've got a Content and Instruction group over here. And lastly, a Finance and Accounting group. You can create a new channel, and you can group them. And so that's what I've got here: about a dozen or so channels that have helped me get some things done.

Now in the middle, you've got a chat session. This chat is connected to the channel. You can see on the right-hand side that I've also got a list of tasks in different tabs here. Active tasks are ones that are being worked on right now. We may have some that are queued up. We may have some that are scheduled. In this case, you can see that I have a daily brief scheduled daily at 6:41 a.m. It's next going to run tomorrow. And you can see ones that have already been resolved in the past. So that's a quick high-level overview.

Within this channel here, I've actually customized them. You can rename them. You can give specific instructions for how you want Claude to work in the channel. I don't have anything in any of these channels yet, so I'm a little curious about how I might want to use this instructions feature. I haven't done it yet. You can see that you can give it a different icon and color and such. So I've done a little bit of that to give them some channel feeling, group feeling here. So that's at a high level what Claude Duet looks like.

So with that, just real quick, let me run you through each of my channels, what I'm doing with it and what it's used for. So in the daily brief channel, if you look in the settings, Claude Duet automatically conducts a morning brief for you. So it's already doing that. And what it's doing is taking a look at what it thinks you should pay attention to and what it finds. In my case, I've connected it to all of these platforms, including Gmail and my Google Calendar. So a lot of what it's doing is saying, hey, Ben, you need to reply to so-and-so, or you need to prepare for a certain meeting coming up, things like that, right? So you can take a look at the settings here and what else you can do.

But in the daily brief, I wanted to go a bit beyond a heads-up for your email and calendar. And I said, hey, why don't you give me a short summary of major news in my industry, AI and business intelligence. And also give me an inspirational quote. Also, maybe some kind of a puzzle or a riddle or mind game. And so it's adding those. And you can see in the chat, Claude Duet and I are interacting, figuring out whether it's weekends or weekdays, what time it's going to run. And so we worked that all out right here.

And then eventually you can see it ran its first daily brief, where it gave me some news here about my industry. And it gave me a nice quote here. It gave me a brain teaser here and asked me to reflect on something. And it gave me a little "today in history," which I actually shared on LinkedIn because it's kind of neat. I went to UCLA. It turns out that was the anniversary of the very first message sent over ARPANET, from UCLA to Stanford. And it actually happened right in a building where I spent a lot of my years in UCLA's engineering school. So I'm already getting some value out of that.

And so the next channel here is video ideas. Well, guess what? That's a channel where I asked Claude Duet to take a look at my usage of this very platform and create a video walkthrough document that helps me do exactly what I'm doing right now, which is describe to you what it is and how I've gotten value out of it.

All right, website management. This channel right here is super valuable for me, because, you know, I've been spending a lot of my time this year building websites and platforms and applications, and it's been really exciting. Building is one way of doing things, and it's important. But when you build something, you also need to maintain it, or it gets cluttered and actually very risky very quickly.

So for example, here I have my Data Literacy site. What is it doing? Well, you can see that every Tuesday it's scanning and looking for security vulnerabilities. Today's Tuesday, so earlier today it ran this exact scan, and it advised me to update Next.js to a newer version because of some known vulnerabilities there. Now, I prefer to take these findings and pass them manually over to Claude Code, just because that's where I'm used to building those sites. But since Claude Duet is connected to the GitHub repos and the Supabase backend databases, it can actually make those changes and push those PRs to GitHub as well, all on its own. It's just my preference to put it over there into Claude Code, because again, that's where I have all that development work grouped. But it's not necessary. I could just use Claude Duet for that if I wanted to.

We also have a home staging company in my family, and so I've been building an inventory management system. And again, same thing here. I've got a weekly scan where I'm taking a look and making sure that this application is running properly and that there are no issues with it, and certainly any security vulnerabilities, we close those up. So it's been really great. It's been finding edge cases. It's been finding possibilities for people to use the site in ways that might not be intended, that might result in some gaps and problems. So it's a real good cleanup. You know, keep those closets clean. Don't let them get so cluttered that you have to spend forever just going through them.

I also have a little learning and development grouping over here. You can see I asked Claude Duet to teach me Python. So I'm going through a daily set of lessons to copy and paste into VS Code, and that allows me to learn some Python.

This other channel in the learning and development group is called flashcards. This is a channel that I set up because we have a lot of courses, and they're growing. And so I have a challenge to keep on top of it all, so that when I'm teaching my clients and my students, I'm fresh on all the material that I need to be teaching. So I asked it to create a flashcard or quiz-type experience for me, with a goal to help me stay on top of the courses that I create and teach. It's going to post a daily drill. And so we've got some recall and hallway questions. It's asking me to spot the error and such, right? Which is really cool.

But what was really interesting about this process is, as it started to build these flashcards, it came up with 243 of them from my 11 courses, which is amazing. But then what it found in the process was that there were a lot of typos in these courses, and little glitches and grammatical errors. And so it said, hey, by the way, would you like me to fix these? And so I said, yeah, absolutely. Let's go ahead and fix those typos that you found across all these lessons. And so it did that.

One of the things you do when you have a business is you need to create a lot of content on various schedules and calendars, right? So of course, the most important thing for us is our courses themselves. So what I asked Claude to do here in this channel is to create a running log for course refreshes. Four of our courses are about AI. And you know as well as I do, this topic is changing so fast. So the challenge for us as a business is to keep our courses fresh and up to date. So what we've done here is we've asked Claude Duet to basically create a list of recommended edits or additions for each course, lesson by lesson.

So let's take a look at this refresh log. You can see we can open up this document, and in this AI course refresh log, we can see how it's operating and scanning. We can see the schedule, or the release plan, for each one. And then we've got, course by course, AI Literacy Fundamentals. We've got some recommended changes and a table here. Our Advancing Responsible AI course, same thing. These things are changing quickly, aren't they? So we need to stay on top of that. This is a way to keep it all in one place, and also to have an agent going out there researching and scouring and finding updates that we can consider and build into the courses on a quarterly or biannual basis.

We also have a newsletter we do every month. So what's great about this is, you know, this is the kind of task where you might forget about it, and you might just all of a sudden realize that the newsletter has to go out tomorrow. And now all of a sudden you're scrambling, trying to figure out what to put in it. Well, in this case, what we've got is a weekly newsletter research task. It looks at whatever we've published on our blog or posted. It looks at other things happening in data and AI literacy. And it's coming up with a recommended content list for our newsletter.

Well, I won't click on the podcast episodes channel, because that's top secret. Otherwise, you'd see who I'm going to be talking to in the coming months. Some pretty exciting episodes coming down the pike here. But suffice it to say, when you create a podcast, wow, there's just a lot of work, even if it's monthly. You have to be reaching out and securing interview candidates. You have to be creating draft briefs. You have to be recording the show and scheduling it and editing it and publishing it, making artwork to go along with it. There's a lot of work associated with maintaining a podcast. I have a lot of admiration for people who do this on a regular basis. With everything else going on, the best we can do is monthly. But even then, we've already had a couple of months this year that we missed.

And so with Claude Duet, it knows the overall schedule for every episode. And in any given week, we're dealing with a few episodes: maybe socializing one, editing another, and planning for another. So this is a place for us to keep on top of all of what we need to do to manage and run that podcast. So again, I love this kind of thing, because for me, I tend to lose sight of this. It's just who I am. I'm kind of an ideas person, head in the clouds. I need to be grounded. I need to have something reminding me when I need to be doing some of these tasks, because I can lose sight of them pretty quickly and easily.

I won't bore you with the finance and accounting group of channels, but suffice it to say, when you run a business, you've got to close your books every month. This is a pretty cool channel. It's connected to our QuickBooks, but I also have to manually upload credit card statement PDFs from our bank. And then Claude is helping us make sure that everything is accounted for as we reconcile and close out our books every month. That happens on the 11th of every month.

We also have to pay quarterly excise and sales taxes to the state of Washington. What's great about this channel is we've given it some CSV templates that we obtained from the state. Claude is going in and not just reminding us, hey, it's time to pay your taxes. It goes beyond that. It actually takes a look at what's in QuickBooks. It prepares a draft CSV for us to go in and review. And then we upload that document directly to the state website and go ahead and pay our taxes.

So it isn't just reminders. It isn't just a scheduling system. It's that the agent is actually doing work for you and with you, according to this schedule and according to these different channels. Well, so there you have it. We've got some daily, some weekly, some monthly, and even quarterly channels and tasks that are being carried out.

And again, I think this is a really useful platform. I expect that at some point soon, they're just going to incorporate this into the way Claude works. But for now, it's in Claude Duet, and it's about scheduling things you want Claude to do for you, so you don't have to go in and tell it to do everything all the time with a prompt. It isn't based on triggers, in terms of, let's say, an email coming in. It won't know right away that the email came in. In other words, it doesn't get triggered by the receipt of the email. Instead, the way it works as of today is you can set it up to look for a certain email multiple times a day. And so the next time it goes and looks, if that email came in, it'll see it and it'll tell you. And so it's about scheduling reviews and tasks that way.

So, super useful. It isn't perfect. There were already some times where it missed a task, and even some times where it was a little bit late, or not quite at the exact time we agreed upon. I'm not quite sure why. I was able to fill out some forms to notify Anthropic about some of those glitches, so we'll see how that goes. I'm sure, again, they're in research preview. So, early days, and they're still trying to iron out a lot of the kinks. But it does mean that I have to keep a close eye on it and not assume that it's necessarily going to do everything exactly when it says it will. So I have to stay in the loop and be careful and make sure the channels are operating the way I want them to. But even with that, I would say it's a useful platform, and one I'm finding myself using multiple times a day now.

So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for watching. Let me know if you have any questions or comments in the chat below. And I wish you all the best. Look for my next episode; it should be coming in a few weeks. I think you're going to like it. It's about, well, a new chart-making platform from a data engineering tool that a lot of people use. So, more exciting shows coming around the corner. All right, everyone, that's it for now. Take care. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.