Small life questions

These are the questions I would once have typed into a search engine and then given up on after the third ad.

Is this term or whole life insurance?

I had a document about life insurance through work and could not tell what kind it was. I uploaded it and asked.

The answer was group term life, and the useful part was why:

• Coverage ends when you leave the job.
• The benefit goes down as you get older.
• There is an option to convert it, with a 30-day window.
• There is no cash value.

It then told me to ask HR or the insurer for the certificate of coverage if I wanted it confirmed officially. This is information, not financial advice.

Can I fix this bumper myself?

Someone hit my car in a parking lot and left. I wanted the cheapest repair I could do myself.

Claude's first guess was wrong. It thought the black mark was paint from the other car and suggested polishing it off. I told it the black was the bare plastic of the bumper showing through.

That changed the whole answer. The new one was a proper sequence: clean, sand, a special primer that makes paint stick to plastic, color, then clear coat. It included how to spray metallic paint so the flakes lie flat, and a warning about weather.

The lesson is that it could not see my car. I could. When I corrected it, the advice got good.

What does "three dots and a dash" mean?

I saw the phrase and asked. Three dots and a dash is Morse code for the letter V, which stood for victory in the Second World War.

Then I mentioned I had seen it as the name of a place in Chicago. It is a tiki bar, named for a cocktail invented to celebrate the end of the war. The drink's garnish is three cherries and a piece of pineapple: three dots and a dash.

What I take from this

You can ask a follow-up. That is the whole difference from a search engine. The second question is usually where the good answer is.

Where it falls short

It guesses when it cannot see. Describe the thing carefully, and correct it when it is wrong.

---

Part of the series 27 ways I actually use AI. Claude drafted this post from the record of our work together.