MY WORK HAS CHANGED FOREVER

or...how I orchestrate AI to solve problems

I now spend 90% of my time explaining the outcome of what I want given an objective, certain inputs, constraints and outputs vs doing all the work.

Today, for example, based on a thought I had last night in bed, I decided to resurrect an Excel model I used back in my equity research analyst days: Michael Mauboussin’s “Expectations Investing”.

Mauboussin explains that the market price of a stock is the clearest, most reliable signal of the collective expectations about a company’s future cash flows and performance. Rather than starting with your own forecasts of earnings/cash flows and then comparing to price (the standard discounted cash flow approach), expectations investing starts with the known stock price and works backward (reverse-engineers) to derive the exact set of future performance expectations that justify the current price. You then assess whether those implied expectations are realistic, overly optimistic, or too pessimistic based on strategic and financial analysis. Superior returns come from correctly anticipating revisions in those expectations (upward for buys, downward for sells/shorts).

So I asked Claude Cowork:

“Evaluate and give me a plan to build a simple app (local landing page) where I can enter a stock symbol and the app will perform a “price implied expectations” analysis of the stock/company based on Mauboussin’s “Expectations Investing” book and models. This should also include visualizations and potentially interactive functionality (like sensitivity analyses).”

In the past I had to spend 1 - 2 weeks building this in excel or hiring someone code it and hook up APIs for me. In either case, I’d have to work through all the logic, formulas, macros and code…literally — do the work — to make this happen. However, as I type this, Clade Cowork and its army of agents is “Working on it”. It’ll probably be done before I finish this article.

(Yep.) Done! 20 min later and I’m still writing this article 40 min later. (It’s pulling free stock info where it can and some fundamental data needs to updated manually. But it’s 80-90% there in 20min! That is amazing. )

What’s the take away? You need to be able set up Claude Code or Cowork and clearly, concisely, and throughly explain your objective and what you want. The output delivered is all in the set-up and prompting, answering questions, clarifying and possibly writing a skill.

Want to do something similar or have a problem/process you want to apply AI to? We can help. Contact me. @msmilllie or mfsmillie@gmail.com