Claude Has Arrived at My Wife's Company

The other day, my wife came home from work and announced, with more than a little excitement:

“We can use Claude at work now.”

It is only a trial, and access has been given to a limited number of employees.

I use Claude for work every day, so my reaction was, “Finally.”

When I asked for her first impression, she summed it up in one sentence:

“It’s incredibly smart.”

Her company had been using Copilot, and she said she noticed the difference immediately.

When I asked what felt so different, her answer was:

“It remembers what I told it before.”

That was the key.

This may sound surprising to people who do not use AI at work, but the difference is significant. Productivity changes completely when you move from explaining everything from scratch each time to working with something that carries context from one task to the next.

As soon as I heard that, I gave my wife one piece of advice:

“Document everything you do.”

Do not let each interaction with AI disappear when the conversation ends. Record what you did and why you made certain decisions. Then, when you begin the next task, have Claude read those notes first.

That alone can turn AI into a remarkably capable working partner.

In fact, that is how I use it myself.

Another interesting part was my wife’s reaction.

When she used Copilot, she seemed to think of it simply as “a tool provided by the company.”

But when she talked about Claude, her excitement was unmistakable.

“It feels like I’ve made a new friend,” she even said.

That made me wonder about something.

Copilot also has large language models running behind it. So what created such a dramatic difference?

Honestly, I do not know.

Copilot works somewhat like an orchestrator that uses different AI systems for different purposes, so perhaps the model available to her at the time was not capable enough. Or perhaps the difference had less to do with the underlying model and more to do with an interface and conversational design that suited her better.

I have never used Copilot for my own work, so this is only speculation.

What I do know is that one ordinary user went from seeing AI as a work tool to seeing it as a partner. The quality of the model matters, but usability and conversational design may matter more than we realize.

Still, I gave her one final warning:

“That thing can make spectacular mistakes sometimes.”

AI is smart, but it is not perfect. It can be confidently wrong. It may also try to carry out an action that a human would pause to verify first.

I use AI in software development every day, so I have learned these lessons more times than I care to remember.

You can trust AI—but do not forget your backups. And before letting it modify an important file, take a breath and check what it is about to do.

In the world of AI, “Sorry” takes a second. Restoring from a backup takes considerably longer.