Chapter 10 · Inspiration

Idea gallery

Claude Code isn't only for building software. It reads documents, crunches numbers, researches the web, watches things for you, and turns messy data into clean pages. Steal these prompts and adapt them.

Numbers and data

📈 A stock watchlist dashboard

A single page you open with coffee: your tickers, latest close, day and month change, red/green at a glance.

build a one-page dashboard for the tickers in watchlist.txt — latest close, 1-day and 1-month change, green/red. Pull prices from a free API and add a refresh button.

uses: first session · give it a check

📊 Spreadsheet detective

Point it at any CSV or Excel export and ask the questions you'd normally build pivot tables for.

@transactions.csv where did the fees spike in Q2? Group by counterparty, chart the top five, and flag anything that looks like a duplicate charge.

uses: @ mentions

🧮 A calculator you actually wanted

That thing you re-derive in a spreadsheet every few months: make it a page with sliders.

make a compound growth calculator: starting amount, monthly top-up, rate and years as sliders, with a chart that updates live and a table I can copy into email.

uses: first session

Research and reading

🔍 Compare before you buy

Deep research with citations, so you can check every claim.

/deep-research compare the three largest S&P 500 index funds on fees, tracking difference, and minimums — cite sources, end with a plain-English recommendation

uses: /deep-research

📄 A pile of PDFs into one table

Statements, contracts, fund fact sheets: extract the numbers that matter into one comparable view.

read the 14 PDFs in statements/ and build a table: date, account, closing balance, total fees. Flag any month where fees jumped more than 20%.

uses: feed it anything · subagents

💬 Explain this to me

Paste a screenshot of anything — a chart, a dense paragraph, an error — and ask.

[paste screenshot of a payoff diagram] explain what this chart is showing like I'm smart but new to this. What's the catch?

uses: paste an image

Things that run without you

☕ The morning brief

Wake up to a summary that's already written.

/schedule weekdays 7:30am: summarize overnight news for the tickers in watchlist.txt into MORNING.md — three bullets each, only if something actually happened

uses: routines

📧 The report that writes itself

Teach it your format once (a skill), then month-end is one command.

/monthly-summary

uses: skills · built in chapter 06

📦 Folder janitor

The downloads folder, the reports folder, the "final_v3_FINAL" folder.

organize reports/ by year and client, using each file's date. Plan first, show me the plan, and copy before you move anything.

uses: plan mode

Writing and polish

✍ Numbers into narrative

The two paragraphs that take longer than the analysis did.

@q2-summary.csv draft a short, plain-English update for a client: what moved, why, one sentence on outlook. No jargon, net of fees, under 150 words.

uses: CLAUDE.md to make "my tone" permanent

📑 Meeting notes to action list

Paste raw notes; get owners, deadlines, and a follow-up draft.

here are my raw meeting notes [paste] — extract the action items with owners and dates, then draft the follow-up message for the group.

uses: just ask · MCP to send it via Slack

✳

The pattern in all of these: describe the outcome, point at the data (@file, a link, a screenshot), and say what "done" looks like. That's the whole craft; chapter 09 makes it stick.