I Secretly Used AI at Work. 8 Hours of PDFs Took 5 Minutes.
What used to eat about eight hours takes about five minutes now. Nobody at work knew anything.
“The bills are in the folder.”
That’s all my manager had to say.
Six words, and I wanted to stick needles in my eyes and rush myself to the hospital.
Here’s what those six words meant.
Not my bills. Work bills. A batch of PDFs, waiting on me.
Every one had to be broken apart. Then every piece had to be renamed. Then saved. Then emailed out, one after another.
It took hours. Not hard hours. The kind where your brain leaves the building and your hands keep going.
So I got behind. A month behind. Sometimes three.
And I’d come home like someone had taken a Shop-Vac to my skull.
Around then, everybody was saying AI was coming for our jobs.
I had the same thoughts everybody has.
If my boss sees a machine do this, they’ll cut my hours.
If a machine can do my job, what does that say about me.
And the one that sounds like loyalty. Am I training my own replacement.
All three were mine. I thought about every one of them.
Then another batch would land in the folder.
And no amount of fear about AI was worse than the weight of that job.
I want this on the record. I didn’t know what I was doing.
I had an AI I talked to. That’s all it was to me, a thing you talk to. But I always asked the same question. Can you do things?
At first the answer was always no.
Then I stumbled on one called Manus. It was the first time I heard the word agent. An AI that could do.
So I handed it the batch.
It screwed the sorting up royally.
A month later, I tried again. And damn if it didn’t sort the batch and name the batch perfectly.
It felt like Christmas. I had been feeling my brain cells fry one by one, sorting those things by hand. And then I wasn’t.
What used to eat about eight hours takes about five minutes now. I check them. I move on.
I didn’t stay with Manus.
I found Claude Code. We’ve been the dream team ever since.
That’s how I found my Work Twin.
Nobody at work knew anything.
There was no announcement. Nobody clapped.
I just noticed I felt a little bit lighter.
I wasn’t going home with a headache. I wasn’t going home with the whole day still sitting on me.
That was it. That was the whole miracle.
It was nice.
I’m still at my 9-5. The batches still land in the folder. My manager still says it the same way.
I just don’t reach for the needles anymore.
Me, Claude, and the work I don’t do anymore. That’s the whole blog.