Every once in awhile, I get a “whoa, that was cool” moment from AI, and I got one of those while enlisting help from Claude to address a minor speed bump at work. I also got a surprise when checking my Claude usage meter after the excitement was over.
Let’s start with the cool moment.
Each morning, I have Claude generate a daily AI news briefing, with Claude sending a small team of agents to scour Reddit, social media, and competing websites to tell me what’s generating buzz in the wide world of AI, while also cross-referencing my latest PCWorld stories to avoid repetition.
This daily news report is triggered by an automation I created in Claude Cowork, the Claude feature that can perform duties on your desktop, and Claude saves the daily brief as a text file on my Mac mini at home, which I can access remotely via iCloud.
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Now, this Claude news digest isn’t mission-critical for me; I’m used to gathering the news on my own, and there are plenty of times when the Claude briefing doesn’t pick up anything that I don’t already know. Still, it’s a handy supplement to my own daily scan of the AI sector, and occasionally it comes up with story ideas I otherwise might have missed. (That “People are prompting Claude to talk like a caveman” idea, for example, came, fittingly, from Claude, which spotted the chatter on an obscure subreddit.)
Anyway, I’m working in PCWorld’s Times Square office, away from my home Mac mini, and I notice that the morning Claude news brief that should be sitting in iCloud is missing, probably because the local Claude Cowork on my Mac failed to fire. (It happens every so often, perhaps due to a glitch in the Matrix.) And since I’m away from home and the Claude Cowork automation is local on my home system, I can’t fire it manually.
No big, I thought, as I began my usual news checks on my office PC. But then I remembered: Could I use Claude Dispatch, the Claude feature that lets you control local Claude Cowork sessions remotely from the Claude mobile app, to reach out and trigger that automation for me? Let’s find out.
I fired up the Claude app for iPhone, tapped the Dispatch tab, and sent a prompt: “Can you access the daily news brief automation in the AI story ideas project?” (“Projects” are individual workspaces in Cowork with their own Claude instructions, automations, and collection of associated files for reference.)
Ben Patterson/Foundry
Claude thought for a minute or so and then reported back. “Found it,” Claude said, giving me the details of the automation. “Is that the right one? And what do you want to do with the news brief automation—check it, modify it, or something else?”
I then asked Claude to trigger the automation manually. “Done,” Claude replied, “I’ve triggered a manual run for the daily news briefing, firing in about 1 minute.”
A minute or so later, boom—the daily news digest popped up in iCloud, complete with my morning briefing. That, I thought, was pretty cool, even if this particular briefing itself didn’t unearth anything out of the ordinary.
Then came the surprise. Out of curiosity, I checked my Claude usage meter to see how much of my Claude allowance had been consumed by my brief Dispatch session. (I’m on the $20-a-month Claude Pro plan, by the way.)
The answer? My Dispatch exchange plus the manual automation run had gobbled up 66 percent of my five-hour Claude usage window, all in a matter of minutes. Whoa.
Again, I shouldn’t have been too surprised by Claude’s appetite; I’ve been writing about how Claude’s agentic Cowork and coding abilities consume AI tokens like no tomorrow, and I recently described how I blew through a week’s usage allotment for Claude’s new Design tool in roughly 30 minutes.
It’s not clear exactly what Claude did to eat through all that usage. Perhaps the failed morning automation gobbled up some tokens right there (although my five-hour usage window had refreshed hours after the regular automation schedule, which casts doubt on that theory), and then maybe the second automation run plus the Dispatch dialog sent Claude’s team of agents into overdrive. Still, I hadn’t done any work or had any exchanges with Claude that morning outside the Dispatch interaction.
In any event, Claude’s Dispatch abilities certainly came in clutch during this morning’s automation snafu. But my Dispatch adventure also proved that affordable flat-rate plans like Claude Pro barely have enough gas in the tank for “that was cool” moments like these.
