For months, I couldn't trust a single number our Metabase MCP gave me. Ask it for a campaign's real performance and you'd get a plausible-looking answer that was just wrong. I tried to fix it the way I fix most things now: I built a skill for it, then another one, and another one. Every time I thought I'd finally taught it how our data actually worked, it found a new way to be confidently incorrect.
Finally, enough was enough, I did the crazy thing and started doing calculations by hand.
I've been the person willing to try the new tool since before that was a normal thing to admit.
ChatGPT went into my work and my life early. It wasn’t great, but it did an okay job at saving me the time from having to do pivot tables in Excel.
Then, Claude came in for the same reason and ended up taking over more of the actual thinking.
Somewhere in there I spent days hand-building a campaign tracker that still needed me to manually upload every file before it would do anything. Nothing about it was smart or streamlined. It just sat at the edge of a problem I'd been solving by hand for years, which was enough to keep me going.
In the last year or so it's stopped being a side project. Claude is just woven into how I work now, and so is most of the company.
The Metabase problem didn't move for any of that, though. It took some of our backend engineers building a tool just to help Claude understand our Metabase setup in the first place.
Then, more specifically, it took our PM on the ad network putting together a definitions table. Twenty, maybe thirty rows. Nothing more than what each metric actually means in our system. I turned that table into a skill.
All of a sudden. Everything was fixed. Every hallucination, every delay, every number I'd stopped trusting for months. All solved, by one simple table. (S/o Brett).
That was a genuine ego moment. Not because I built the thing that fixed it. I didn't, really. It's because it confirmed something I'd been circling without landing on:
The leverage was never going to come from the model getting smarter. It was going to come from giving it something boring and correct to stand on.
I still have the old campaign tracker saved somewhere. Haven't opened it in months. Don’t ever plan to open it.