I Made Claude Do My Parenting Homework

After 37 years in business, 2025 was a record-breaking year for Intrepid Travel. Revenue grew nearly 30%, with the company on track to hit $1bn in bookings in 2026.

But behind the numbers, the year pushed the leadership team to rethink priorities and make some hard calls — including a major reset to its climate strategy.

How they navigated that, what changed, and what they learned is all in the newly released Integrated Annual Report.

Take a look inside Intrepid

She and he sister wanted to make an Octonauts flag and needed me to print out all the characters.

If you don't have young kids, Octonauts is a cartoon about a crew of animals who go on underwater rescue missions. Think Star Trek, but with a polar bear captain and cute, talking sea vegetables.

They didn’t just want three or four characters. Tney wanted all of them.

And there are a lot.

(I promise this applies to your work. Stick with me.)

I knew what that meant. Finding each character image online, one at a time. Downloading them. Removing backgrounds where needed. Dropping them into a Word doc, resizing, labeling, making sure they'd actually print well.

For dozens of characters.

That's easily an hour or two of tedious work. The kind of task that isn't hard, just annoying enough that you keep pushing it to later (which does not sit well with an impatient 7-year-old).

Then I thought of my friend Claude.

I opened Claude Code and typed:

Claude went to work.

It figured out that the Fandom wiki has a public API, queried it directly to get character names and image URLs, downloaded the images, and dropped them into a Word doc.

No scraping, no broken links, no guesswork.

The first batch came back with the core crew. Fine for a start, but my kids know way more about Octonauts than I do, and they wanted more.

"Get all the recurring characters." Claude pulled in more.

Then my kids started naming characters from a spin-off series. I don't know any of these characters. I just typed in whatever my kids told me.

Here's the thing. I misspelled every single one.

Cashi. Minh. Rylah. Pawnee. Doctor Neckwick. Not one of those is correct.

Claude didn't care. It searched the wiki, cross-referenced the character categories, and came back with the right names:

Matched every one to the correct character and downloaded the images.

A few of the images had solid backgrounds instead of transparent ones. I told Claude to remove them.

It installed an open-source background removal library called rembg, ran the images through it, and got clean transparent results in seconds. No Photoshop. No manual work.

Then I asked Claude: "Are there any other characters we should add?"

It came back with six more my kids had missed. Bud, Haraka, Selva, Squirt, Boris, Orson and Ursa. I just said "yes."

The last fix was the layout. 32 characters at one per section was going to eat a whole ream of paper. One prompt to fix it. Claude rebuilt the entire document as a 4-column grid, no borders, neatly labeled. Print ready.

Total: 32 characters. One conversation. My kids are ecstatic.

And I'm pretty pleased with myself.

When I sat down to do this, my first instinct was to open Google and start hunting for character images one by one.

That's what I would have done a year ago. That's what most people would still do right now.

Instead, I stopped and asked a question I'm training myself to ask before starting any task:

"Can AI do this for me?"

Not "can AI help me do this." Can AI just do this.

The answer was yes. And the result was better than what I would have produced manually. More characters, cleaner images, transparent backgrounds, properly formatted. In a fraction of the time.

This wasn't a business task. It was a dad task.

But it's the same habit I'm developing for work. Before I open a spreadsheet, before I start formatting a document, before I spend 30 minutes on something tedious, I'm learning to ask that question first.

Sometimes the answer is no. Some things still need a human.

But the number of things that need a human is shrinking fast, and if you're not asking the question, you're spending hours on work that could take minutes.

Thanks for reading!

Nathan Rodgers

👋 Say hello on Substack and LinkedIn

Were you forwarded this email? Click here to subscribe.