A pile of review forms: two hours by hand vs 40 minutes with WorkBuddy—I documented the workflow

Got back from the site a bit after eight, tossed my hard hat on the table, scrolled my phone and saw a WorkBuddy Shenzhen position on Tencent's careers page — CSIG tech line, one year+ experience, updated Nov 3. I stared at it for two seconds. They're still hiring for this thing, which means they don't plan to stop. I've used it for three months, always for the most basic stuff — sorting a pile of submission forms and putting together a summary table I can hand in.

This week happened to be month-end quantity reporting, so I ran it once by hand and once with it, and took notes.

First, by hand. Seventeen PDFs — some signed by the supervisor, some scanned crooked, and two with file names like "New Document (3)." My old process: open each one to check the title, rename by sub-project, drop into the matching folder, then open Excel and type out a summary table by hand. The whole thing takes a bit over two hours, and with two phone calls in between, when I come back I have to find where I was again.

The WorkBuddy run went like this. First create an empty folder, drop all seventeen PDFs in — this step is key, the files must be in the same working directory. The working directory is the area it can see while working; if files are scattered on the desktop and in the Downloads folder, it can't find them. Then open WorkBuddy, create a new task, set that folder as the working directory, and type the instruction in the box: classify these seventeen PDFs by sub-project, rename files to "sub-project-date-unit," and finally output an Excel summary table with columns file name, date, submitting unit, amount. Click run, and it lists each step — which name it's changing, which category it's filing into — you can see it. Check it over when done, and the exported table is right there in the folder. Takes about forty minutes, ten of which is me checking the two it renamed wrong.

A few settings I've fixed in place. Don't write the instruction as one blob — I used to cut corners, stuffing classification, renaming, summarizing, and generating a weekly report into one paragraph, and it would get confused halfway. Now I split it: first classify and rename, confirm it's fine, then send a separate instruction to produce the summary table. One extra click, half an hour less rework. I wrote a post about this last month — at the time I suspected my prompt was just bad, but later realized the task itself shouldn't be given all at once.

The naming rule also has to be hard-coded. My instruction now includes a line: "File name format fixed as sub-project-submission date-submitting unit, do not add other text." Without this line, it sometimes takes it upon itself to add a bracketed note, and you have to change them all back one by one. The summary table columns also need to be named — if you're not clear, it'll give a bunch of useless fields; now I list the column names one by one and it fills them in accordingly. The real convenience of this setup is repeatability — next month for the same job, I pull up last time's instruction, change a couple of words, and run it again without rethinking the process.

I've stepped in pits too. The worst was when files were scattered — I left three of the seventeen in the Downloads folder, and it ran and gave me a fourteen-row table. I thought items were missing and searched for ages before realizing I hadn't put them in. Since then I've made a habit of counting the files in the folder before starting. Another time the scans were too blurry and it got the submitting unit wrong on two, so the summary table had two units that don't exist — that kind you just have to eyeball yourself. It can do the repetitive work for you, but it can't sign for you.

My setup is Windows, WorkBuddy desktop version, folder fixed in a directory on the D drive — may not apply to everyone. I hear path settings on Mac are a bit different; I haven't tried, so I won't guess.

That's it for now — tomorrow I have to go to the site to check quantities.