(1) Watching it do log file analysis in seconds that would have taken me hours (edit: days really), and which I would therefore never have done in the first place.
(2) Helping me with optimizations that I had been putting off for years because they involved learning curves that I never had time to take on.
(3) Tracking down bugs in code, especially race conditions and other concurrency issues, that were otherwise baffling.
(4) Finding information that I had been unable to find using Google searches (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42653136).
There have been others, but those are what come to mind - perhaps because, in each of these cases, it made something happen that would otherwise never have happened - not because it was impossible, but because the time and effort required was prohibitive.
I made a personal project game 20 years ago that I knew had a bad bug in it and so I never did a final release but at the same time I never returned to it to debug but yesterday I noticed it at the top of my Github, it started with A, so I described the issue and Claude found the bug instantly and after a few back and forth discussion we came up with a good fix that I'm satisfied with. So I guess I can do a final release now. :D Sweet - feels good to put that to bed.
> Watching it do log file analysis in seconds that would have taken me hours (edit: days really), and which I would therefore never have done in the first place.
Just today I had my agent diff two logs to find a very nitpicky difference that was the cause of a problem, I pointed it at a ADO extension that was having issues, it downloaded the VSIX and decompiled the .NET binary to verify. Based on that information it suggested a workaround which I was very skeptical of, but well it worked.
All of this I technically could have done but I probably wouldn't because it would have taken too long without a clear payoff.