04/16/2026
Why Is AI So Hard (or Wrong)?
Recently, I've been using Claude Cowork to create an event list for my website and email marketing. My goal isn’t to become an event resource guide, but rather to offer in my emails something that goes beyond real estate. I wanted to automate this process so that, each week, I could ask Claude to generate a list, then curate and share it with my audience.
Other agents send emails featuring “Things to do” or local events, but I often find these lists irrelevant because they’re either too general or cover too wide a geographic area. We’re all trying to offer “value” in hopes of sparking more engagement than a typical market report or set of statistics.
Claude Cowork can search my Gmail (Google, take note—Gemini can’t do this very well) and categorize event emails. I also watched a YouTube tutorial on setting up a connector to scrape the web for additional events. In one evening, I designed a logo and basic layout in Figma, then had Claude code and build a webpage from that design. I collected the data, built a webpage, and published it for free on Netlify—all in just a few hours. Pretty amazing!
I shared the site with a friend, and he texted me that the “Submit Event” button didn’t work. I realized I hadn’t added a form, so I asked Claude to code one. It said it did, but it still didn’t work. I explained it wasn’t working, and it responded, “Here’s why it didn’t work—now it’s fixed.” But it still didn’t work. This cycle repeated several times: “Now it works!” But it didn’t. You get the picture.
I also noticed that the first event list included outdated events and mislabeled locations. The same thing happened when I asked for a restaurant list—Claude mislabeled neighborhoods. At one point, I created a new project folder for my lists and wanted to update the website, but Claude made a completely new page with a different design. I had to return to the original design and add the events manually.
In the end, what AI can do is genuinely impressive. There’s no way I could have compiled a list, built a webpage, and published it in just a few hours on my own. But what it gets wrong is often surprisingly simple—things I can thankfully verify, like incorrect locations or non-working buttons (despite the AI claiming it’s fixed... three times).
I have high hopes for the ability to do things I have ideas for, but not the technical ability. However, the small, frustrating things I have to clean up rob it of the truly time-saving hype it’s touted as. Your thoughts…
