GTD in the AI Era (I)

I. Why didn’t I let Claude handle this for me sooner?

Despite my Claude ultra subscription, I have been very skeptical of the “use AI to plan your trips” hype. What is so difficult about booking Ryanair and Suncountry? What is so difficult about clicking a few filters on booking.com, then arrange by price low to high?

I completely changed my mind last night on my first hotel booking in months.

We had to find a hotel within 30 minutes walking from conference location with a kitchen or kitchenette. this location would preferrably on the way from train station to conference location to avoid having to drag suitcases across a strange city. Information is split between two sites: room amenities on booking.com, distance to conference site on Google maps. Each website has their own score and sometimes diverge wildly. For someone like me with little to no spatial awareness, i had to copy and paste each possible location into google for walking time because i cannot eyeball it.

As the forced multi-tasking went on, I could feel my brain taken over by tiny snapshots that end up occupying the entire mental RAM.

why am i doing this by hand? I asked myself after 45 minutes of fruitlessness.

So i braindumped the task to Claude:

i’ve run into a problem: i am trying to book an apartment/hotel within 30 mins walking distance to location A and it needs to have a kitchen. I’d like to see the review scores on Google which is more honest than booking.com BUT the google results cannot be filtered by whether or not they have a kitchen and i am getting sick of going back and forth between google and booking. is there anything you can do with booking.com mcp and google maps mcp/CLI (though idk if it exists). i want a list with prices (under xx euros/night) that has kitchen and is within 30mins walking to location A and is on the way from the train station to location A. The eventual list should allow me to use the name of the hotel to further check photos, reviews etc. brainstorm only for now.

It told me it could just do this using the browser and asked for details: dates, budget, and number of people, which I supplied. then it went to work. and I went to make dinner and happily put this frustrating process behind me.

After dinner, I went back to find out that it had generated nearly 30 results and grouped based on how close they passed my criterion. From there, it took an additional 15 minutes to come to a conclusion.

II. Does it Cost A LOT?

I used Fable 5.2 as I was unsure if this process was actually well-defined, and I had extra tokens to spare this week on my subscription. /usage showed me that a pure API cost would’ve been 4.61USD. Out of curiosity, I ran sonnet 5.5 with the same task, the cost was estimated to be 1.5USD for API cost and took 14 minutes. I did not run Opus 5.5 but Fable estimated a hypothetical API cost to be 2.3USD.

So is it worth it to spend 1.5USD to 4.61USD even in pure API cost to find hotels for a trip?

I think it is completely is worth it. For reasons below.

First, against the already occurring expenses of lodging, travel which is running somewhere around 500 euros, it represents a very modest 0.3%-0.9% additional cost to have saved at least an hour of human time. At the time I handed the task to Claude, I had no leads. Even in the most optimistic scenario, I would’ve needed another 30-45 minutes, bringing the total task time to 75-90 minutes. With Claude, I finished well under half an hour.

Secondly, it preserved the peacefulness of my evening and most importantly, my cognitive clarity. As time went on, my patience of managing multiple tabs at 8.30pm was wearing thin and irritation was growing exponentially. What Claude did was not just taking away the endless triage, but also took away the noise. I could forget about this task and wholeheartedly move on to the next one until I chose to return.

If you are as obsessive about getting details right, but find the process of splitting attention between tabs physically painful, you will probably know how I felt. The absence of mental clutter felt like liberty. I know what Claude can do so the source of the impression left on me is not technical cleverness, but the mental contrast of a heinous task and the effortlessness of the results delivered.

I will be braindumping more of my to-do lists to Claude from now on.