My AI Agent Sent a Fax

Earlier this year, I had to file paperwork with the Texas Workforce Commission. The process involved faxing documents to their office, which, yes, is still a thing in 2026. When I first received that message in my pre-historic TWC inbox, I was filled with dread. "Another annoying task."

BUT, with all the experimenting I've been doing, I suddenly thought, "what if I hand this to Claude..? Will it succeed?" I went to my terminal, opened Claude Code and watched what happened.

It started by reading the TWC instructions directly from their website using Playwright, pulling the page content via Google DevTools and screenshotting the original filing instructions. From there, it navigated the relevant pages and took screenshots at each step to document the process and populate the documents it was building.

It created the PDFs from scratch, collated them, and upscaled the images it had generated. Then it went looking for a free fax service, web-fetching options until it found one that worked. It staged all the files and opened a Chrome tab with the fax page loaded and ready to send. The fax cost nothing.

I stepped in once. I'd asked it to upscale some images because the original output it gave was a low-quality, barely legible version. That's the only time it needed a judgment call from me.

That was it.

Everything else (reading the instructions, building the documents, finding the service, staging the files) ran without me touching the keyboard. I remember I was making breakfast while all this was happening in the background on my MacBook, and in total, it took about 20 minutes.

What I kept thinking about afterward wasn't the fax part. It was that the task required understanding multiple systems it had never interacted with before: a government website, PDF tooling, image processing, a third-party fax service. And chaining them together without supervision. Each step depended on the last. None of it was pre-configured.

The hardest part about all of this was giving it the proper instructions and a success metric.

I'll probably have to start another section devoted purely to how AI completes mundane, but important tasks, LOL.