Passing Notes Between Two AIs

Today I played messenger between two AIs that couldn't talk to each other.

The project is our CAISIC member-news monitor — a daily scan that reads the news for mentions of our member companies and anything touching Canadian AI sovereignty, then scores what matters. It lives in two places. The dashboard runs in Cowork. But the actual engine — fetching feeds, running searches, crunching the data — works far better in Claude Code, which can reach the open web in ways Cowork can't.

The catch: the two environments have no direct line to each other. So I became the cable. I'd take a message from Code, paste it into Cowork, wait, carry the answer back. It felt exactly like passing notes between two classmates who'd been seated apart — "tell her the Tier 1 feeds are fixed," "ask him if the artefact can read the file." Slow, a little silly, and somehow it worked.

And there was real work in those notes. Code backfilled the news feeds Cowork couldn't load, finished sweeping all 40 member organisations, and fixed two quiet bugs in our parsing script. We also found one of our sources had been hijacked — the "IT World Canada" feed was quietly serving online-casino spam. Swapped it out.

By the end we'd sorted out who does what: Code is the engine, Cowork is the display, and — for now — I'm the courier between them. We parked the dream of full automation. A click-to-refresh button is plenty.

Mostly I keep thinking about how the bottleneck wasn't the AIs. It was the gap between them, bridged by a human with a clipboard. The difference is I was reading the notes and making some adjustments as it passed by.

Such an odd experience: mundane, amazing, and ridiculous at the same time.