The handyman couldn’t fix the garage door.
He was stuck on YouTube. None of the videos matched the model. He shook his head and told me to call the manufacturer.
I found the manual and fed it to Claude. His first answer was wrong. I corrected it, then pushed him into debug mode: rule out the obvious causes, narrow the options, find the root cause before touching anything. Back and forth. Twenty minutes later the door worked.
The repairman had more domain knowledge than I had. He had a full toolbox.
I had another tool and knew how to use it. How to provide the right context. How to reject a bad first answer and reframe the problem. He also wouldn’t have thought to use AI. And the language barrier would have cost him several degrees of usefulness if he had tried.
The tool is available to everyone. Knowing how to push past its first answer is a skill.