A few months ago, I surrendered to the Matrix. I plugged all of my information—bank accounts, email, investments—into Claude Code, a coding assistant run by Anthropic’s Claude AI, and started letting it automate my life.
It almost happened by accident. For context, I’m the founder of NOX, an AI-assisted inbox organizing tool, and I have a very busy schedule. I was making commitments that I couldn’t keep track of and had become so overwhelmed by thousands of notifications that I had put my phone in a perpetual state of Do Not Disturb. I was desperate and Claude promised salvation. All I had to do was give it every bit of data about my life and it began coding “agents”—little AI helpers living in your computer—to accomplish all the tasks I needed to do.
It’s a personal panopticon. This isn’t the first time in history that our every click has been tracked. It’s just the first time that we can use it for our own benefit. Tech companies harvest terabytes of behavioral data from us. They guard it, store it, and analyze it for profit, not people. We are tracked, monitored, and studied by systems we cannot access, much less understand. It is unlikely we will ever be able to delete these tranches of extremely personal data scraped from decades of internet use. But now, we can use the watchtower to make our lives better, freeing up time and mental space. All it takes is a little elbow grease.
The first thing I asked Claude to do was tackle the subscriptions I pay for and never use. Gym memberships, streaming subscriptions, and cell service providers are banking on the fact that you’re too tired, too overworked, and too forgetful to cancel.
