A Tedious Task for Claude in Chrome

by Josh Branchaud

Here is an example of using the Claude in Chrome extension. I hand it a highly tedious task I've been meaning to do for a while now. I wanted to track down every blog post I wrote for the Hashrocket blog while I worked there. Active employees have a "Rocketeer" page which include a filtered listing of your blog posts. Since I'm I former Rocketeer I was going to have to manually click back through all the years of pagination. Sounds like a good job for a computer.

Here is the prompt I gave it:

Can you give me a list of every single blogpost on the Hashrocket blog (https://hashrocket.com/blog) that was authored or co-authored by Josh Branchaud? There is no active author page for that person, so it requires manually going back through all the pagination. I do know however, that the oldest post he ever wrote was on October 12, 2015, so no need to look back further than that.

After ~20 minutes of analyzing pages, obeying robots.txt files, script running, etc., it spit out the following listing with dates and links:

  1. 2015-10-12 — Understanding Common Table Expressions with FizzBuzz
  2. 2015-12-24 — A Peek Into The Clojure Community
  3. 2016-01-12 — How to get help with Vim
  4. 2016-01-14 — Upsert Records with PostgreSQL 9.5
  5. 2016-03-02 — Understanding the Buffer List in Vim: Part 1
  6. 2016-06-16 — Introducing PG Casts (co-authored with Jake Worth)
  7. 2016-12-01 — Up, Down, Up with Ecto Migrations
  8. 2016-12-15 — Introducing bdubs.vim
  9. 2017-01-10 — Top Tweets of 2016 with Elixir and Ecto
  10. 2017-02-23 — Ecto Migrations: Simple to Complex
  11. 2017-04-06 — Running Out Of IDs
  12. 2017-04-13 — Embrace the Database with Ecto
  13. 2017-04-18 — A Module By Any Other Name: Aliases in Elixir
  14. 2017-06-29 — Do The Shuffle
  15. 2017-07-13 — Writing Prettier JavaScript in Vim
  16. 2017-07-27 — Get Started with redux-form
  17. 2017-08-03 — Go 0 to 60 with create-react-app
  18. 2017-08-10 — MySQL Has Transactions, Sorta
  19. 2017-08-31 — Customize ActiveAdmin Index Filters
  20. 2017-09-12 — Advanced Queries with ActiveRecord's From Method
  21. 2017-09-19 — Swap Two Column Values in SQL: Part 1
  22. 2017-09-26 — Swap Two Column Values in SQL: Part 2
  23. 2017-10-03 — Generate Dates in PostgreSQL
  24. 2017-10-10 — Create Quick JSON Data Dumps From PostgreSQL
  25. 2018-02-20 — When To Use Redux
  26. 2018-08-23 — Where Am I: URL Assertions with Cypress
  27. 2019-01-10 — Managing React Router Pathnames
  28. 2019-01-22 — 5 JavaScript Object Destructuring Tricks
  29. 2019-01-29 — SQL: Inner Join vs. Outer Join
  30. 2019-02-12 — How To Quit Vim
  31. 2019-02-26 — Write A Reduce Function From Scratch
  32. 2019-03-26 — Evaluating JavaScript Dependencies with CodeSandbox
  33. 2019-04-04 — 6 Tips for Better Communication with a Client

I kept an eye on the tab that Claude opened up to the Hashrocket blog for most of the time that it was running. I was expecting a Selenium style series of interactions where I could see it scrolling, clicking links, etc. However, it appeared to sit on the primary blog index page the whole time. Maybe I would have seen something more interactive if I had given it a form to fill out.

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